Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

Why are unions weaker in the US than they are in Canada, despite the countries' many similarities?

Barry Eidlin (Author)

9781107106703, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 May 2018

386 pages, 32 b/w illus. 3 maps
23.5 x 15.6 x 2.6 cm, 0.65 kg

'Spanning nearly a century, Eidlin's book represents the sort of ambitious cross-national comparative historical analysis that has fallen out of favor in political science yet that can offer rich theoretical insights and fresh descriptive facts that can be mined for scores of future studies.' Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, The Journal of Politics

Why are unions weaker in the US than in Canada, two otherwise similar countries? This difference has shaped politics, policy, and levels of inequality. Conventional wisdom points to differences in political cultures, party systems, and labor laws. But Barry Eidlin's systematic analysis of archival and statistical data shows the limits of conventional wisdom, and presents a novel explanation for the cross-border difference. He shows that it resulted from different ruling party responses to worker upsurge during the Great Depression and World War II. Paradoxically, US labor's long-term decline resulted from what was initially a more pro-labor ruling party response, while Canadian labor's relative long-term strength resulted from a more hostile ruling party response. These struggles embedded 'the class idea' more deeply in policies, institutions, and practices than in the US. In an age of growing economic inequality and broken systems of political representation, Eidlin's analysis offers insight for those seeking to understand these trends, as well as those seeking to change them.

Part I. Explaining Union Density Divergence: 1. Structural and individual explanations
2. Policy explanations
3. Working class power in the United States and Canada
Part II. Political Articulation and the Class Idea: 4. Party–class alliances in the United States and Canada, 1932–1948
5. Repression and rebirth: red scares and labor's postwar identity, 1946–1972
6. Class versus special interest: labor regimes and density divergence, 1911–2016
Appendix A: data
Appendix B: archival sources
Appendix C: permissions.

Subject Areas: Trade unions [KNXB2], Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology: work & labour [JHBL]