When Push Comes to Shove: Competitiveness, Job Insecurity and Labour- Management Cooperation in Canada

In: Economic and industrial democracy, Volume 18, Issue 2, p. 167-200

Abstract

This article questions the widespread view that the Canadian and US labour movements are diverging with respect to their strategic orientations (militant vs cooperativist) towards labour-management relations. Focusing on the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW), the leading example of militant, social unionism in Canada, the article analyses the CAW's movement away from a more militant, rejectionist orientation in the 1980s towards a more complex, cooperativist orientation to labour-management relations at the local level in the 1990s. The CAW's changing orientation may exemplify broader workplace-centred cooperativist trends in Canada that are similar to those in the US. Union strategies in both countries are strongly conditioned by growing job insecurity and other competitiveness constraints in the context of highly decentralized union structures. In the case of the CAW, such cooperation with management reflects a more defensive unionism that is distinguished from a competitive unionism embracing 'high trust' managerial and 'progressive competitive' social democratic agendas. However, both kinds of unionism are considered to be inadequate, disorganized, microeconomic responses to increasing macroeconomic coercion.