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In response to a sense of crisis precipitated by the 1995 election of the provincial Conservative government in Ontario and more anti-union employers, unions in Ontario have increased resources invested in and priority attached to organizing the unorganized. This article examines how unions have reoriented their organizing strategies to increase organizing effort in the private service sector and amongst women while at the same time experimenting with certain innovative rank-and-file intensive strategies that have significant positive effects on the outcome of organizing drives. The paper concludes that if unions follow through with this renewed commitment to organizing, they are likely to prevent a more serious membership crisis from erupting.
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Do low strike rates suggest that the ‘age of strikes’ has come to an end? Have we reached a time when unions can and should give up the right to strike as a weapon more suited to the ‘old’ economy, or ‘old’ unions who are themselves better suited for the industrial than the post-industrial age? Or should unions continue to defend the right to strike and if so why? This research note explores some answers to these questions that underline the critical importance of defending the right to strike. --From introduction
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How can unions arrest membership decline in an increasingly chilly climate? Unions across Canada have arrived at a common answer to this question; unions need to organize the unorganized, in particular reaching out to women, youth and people of colour. After a brief discussion of who is being organized by unions, this article turns to a discussion of innovations in union organizing strategies, including the virtue of rank and file activists and the B.C. Organizing Institute. The next challenge for unions is to keep newly organized workers as members. This depends on adequate representation of these members’ interests and opportunities for their participation in union affairs. The paper critically evaluates union efforts at reform of internal structures and collective bargaining practices. While organizing alone cannot secure the future of unions, it is a critical part of the process of the renewal of labour power.
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The paper examines the impact of lean production on indicators of the quality of life at work in the automotive industry and finds that it varies across companies and to a lesser extent between countries. The paper explains this by arguing that lean production seeks to impose new employment standards. This is a contested process where management's capacity to shift to new standards and labour's ability to protect its interests vary across workplaces.
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While new models of work organization (lean production) in the automobile industry have been portrayed as a 'democratic' break with Fordism, we find considerable parallels with those traditional patterns of labour control they were intended to supplant. Far from understanding these as exemplars of 'democratic Taylorism', the article identifies specific company responses to problems associated with declining productivity and competitiveness. Moreover, the article argues that new models of work organization associated with lean production, far from heralding empowerment, are more conerned with asserting management control in varying ways in different companies.