Fred Hahn’s tweets tell a tale about the transformation of Canada’s union movement. The president of CUPE Ontario – the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, with 280,000 members – is a very active user of the platform now known as X. To advance his members’ interests, he gets his message out there, multiple times a day.
But if you arrived in a time machine, fresh from reading Das Kapital, you’d be surprised by what he’s using his digital soapbox for.
He is mostly not calling for higher wages, shorter hours or better working conditions. His feed in recent weeks has been devoted mostly to other issues, notably 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and, above all, the war in Gaza.
If your sense of what a union is for comes from watching Norma Rae, this is very puzzling. But the union movement of the past isn’t the union movement of the present. Society has changed, and so has the roster of who’s in a union, and who isn’t.
Almost 29 per cent of Canadian workers are unionized, according to Statistics Canada. That’s down from 37.6 per cent in 1981, but it’s still a sizeable share of the population. In contrast, just 10 per cent of Americans are in a union.
Canada’s level of unionization may have declined only slightly in the last couple of generations, but the membership has changed dramatically.
The public sector has long been highly unionized, and that’s more true than ever. In 2021, 74 per cent of public-sector workers were in a union, up more than four percentage points from 1997.
In the private sector, however, the rate of union membership has collapsed. The share of unionized employees has been cut in half since 1981, falling from 29.7 per cent to just 15.2 per cent.
When you hear the term “union worker,” don’t picture a bunch of guys in grease-stained overalls and hardhats, having beers after another brutal day at the factory. The typical Canadian union member is now a woman – the unionized work force is slightly more female than male – in the public sector, with decent benefits, pension and job security, and who earns more than the average person in the private sector.
Like the progressive movement as a whole, the union movement increasingly represents people who are university- or college-educated and white-collar, as opposed to blue-collar and working class. It’s views, and its sense of priorities, reflect that.
If Mr. Hahn were a union leader in The Pajama Game, the 1954 musical about garment workers fighting for a 7½ cent raise, he wouldn’t be tweeting non-stop about divesting from Israel. But that’s not the world he and his union operate in.
My point is not to begrudge public-sector workers their working conditions, or their collective bargaining. On the contrary, I’m troubled that Canadians with the least bargaining power – in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security – tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them.
The Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton recently wrote about a number of issues where his views have evolved in the face of time and evidence. (As Lord Keynes said: “When the facts change, I change my mind – what do you do?”) One of them is unions.
“I long regarded unions as a nuisance that interfered with economic (and often personal) efficiency and welcomed their slow demise,” wrote Mr. Deaton. “But today large corporations have too much power over working conditions, wages, and decisions in Washington, where unions currently have little say compared with corporate lobbyists. Unions once raised wages for members and nonmembers, they were an important part of social capital in many places, and they brought political power to working people in the workplace and in local, state, and federal governments. Their decline is contributing to the falling wage share, to the widening gap between executives and workers, to community destruction, and to rising populism.”
Though the influence of corporate money over politicians is far less of an issue in Canada, thanks to our campaign finance rules, I agree with his broader point. If people at the bottom of the labour market had more protections – from collective bargaining to higher minimum wages – it would be good for them. It would also lower inequality.
But I can’t help but notice that the union movement, and the progressive movement as a whole, is less interested than ever in issues of class – the subjects of Norma Rae, The Pajama Game and Das Kapital – and more and more focused on seeing its mission, and the world, through lenses of race, gender and anti-colonialism.