Seven Oaks Magazine.

Roy J. Adams. Labour Left Out: Canada’s Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2005).

The Canadian government has received many failing grades on a number of issues that fall under international scrutiny recently. It has prevaricated on commitments to reduce pollution levels and ranks among the worst industrial polluters in the world. While clinging desperately to the image of a “peace-keeping” nation that supposedly innovated the enterprise during the 1950s, it has largely charted an incompetent (and often belligerent) course of foreign interventions that has culminated in its recent role as a patronizing colonial overseer in Afghanistan and Haiti.

Roy J. Adams, professor emeritus from the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University recently published a convincing book that adds yet another tarnished nail into the coffin of Canada’s “angelic” international image. His book, Labour Left Out: Canada’s Failure to Protect and Promote Collective Bargaining as Human Right outlines (in very quantifiable and qualitative detail) how the Canadian government has increasingly violated the internationally recognized rights of workers from the last half of the 20th Century to the present. In particular, Adams critiques the erosion of collective bargaining rights in Canada, citing statistics that show how 30 percent of private sector workers once had the right to collective bargaining (where now only 18 percent do) and how general union membership and organizing drives in both public and private sectors have steadily declined.

While the background for declining union activity in Canada can be explained by the dramatic shifts within North America and Europe away from an industrial economy, Adams maintains that the fundamental reason for organized labour’s decline in Canada is that governments (both provincial and federal) have refused to recognize collective bargaining as a fundamental human right recognized under international law. Canada’s record compared to countries in Europe (who have undergone similar shifts in their economies) simply does not measure up. In his book, Adams shows that in fact, a “large majority of employers in most Western European countries work under rules collectively negotiated by representatives independent of employers and the state.” In Canada, employers and governments alike have not accepted labour’s inclusion into any form of democratic decision making and more often than not employers (who don’t have organized workers) also assume, erroneously, that their workers cannot seek representation without an official government certified agent.

In fact, the International Labour Organization adopted a set of fundamental principles in 1998 that enabled workers to seek some form of collective representation (whether it was officially certified or not) as a basic human right. As Adams indicates in his book, such laws in Canada have received neutral attention from government officials, and even less attention from employers, despite statistics showing that the majority of Canadian workers desire some form of collective representation. Moreover, the prevailing discourse among employers has alarmingly followed the arguments used by major U.S. multinationals such as Wal-Mart who promote the idea that unions are simply other forms of business offering workers one set of benefits. In their view, the goal of employers should be to show their workers that unions provide “services” that they don’t need because they work for “well-managed” companies. As Adams indicates, “this position is “tantamount to saying that slaves owned by a caring and benevolent patron don’t need freedom.” If governments don’t start to drop their neutrality on international laws recognizing worker’s rights to organize and bargain collectively, the positions of employers such as Wal-Mart will prevail, and workers rights will become mythical anachronisms just like Canadian peace-keeping, and environmental justice.