There’s lots happening in Canada’s union movement: new organizing, favorable legal reforms, big wage gains (5 percent per year since 2022), and a historic wave of strikes.
In this context, it’s surprising Jacobin would feature a scathing denunciation of a union at the forefront of this upsurge: Unifor, Canada’s largest private sector union. In his positive review of an equally scathing recent book by academics Larry Savage and Stephanie Ross, Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics, McGill University professor Barry Eidlin says Unifor has “lost its way,” descending from a “vanguard” of working-class struggle into a “narrow, opportunist, sectionalist” union pursuing “transactional politics.”
No honest observer could deny Unifor’s leading role in Canadian union militancy. Unifor has launched ninety-seven strikes since the current leadership was elected two years ago. It’s won enormous wage gains (25 percent or more in many cases), and big progress on pensions and benefits. It has certified dozens of new units — including North America’s first unionized Walmart warehouse. Unifor’s feminist president Lana Payne is recognized as Canada’s most powerful, effective union leader.
Unifor also faces many challenges and threats including gig work, right-wing populism, and Donald Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on Canadian products. But instead of honestly evaluating the union’s strengths and weaknesses, Savage and Ross (and Eidlin following them) denounce Unifor for abandoning some mythical vanguard role in pursuit of supposed pragmatism and opportunism.
Unifor’s original sin, in Savage and Ross’s telling, was the thirty-year-old decision by one of its founding unions (the Canadian Auto Workers or CAW) to stop automatically endorsing Canada’s often wishy-washy (NDP). In his review, Eidlin admits the NDP’s credibility was “compromised” by its actions when…
Auteur: Jim Stanford
