One Big Union – Again

One big union in Canada | BCBusiness
Canada’s new union would include students, retirees, the unemployed and people “that have been swallowed up by this economic system.”

The movement to create a giant union in Canada that would not only represent workers, but also the unemployed, students and generally disadvantaged sounds great, but is completely unworkable.

In my working life, I’ve belonged to several Canadian unions; it was often a requirement for the job. Like most union members, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with them.

On the one hand, I appreciated the protection they provided from abusive and/or capricious employers, as well as the generally higher wages and pensions they engendered. On the other hand, I resented their homogenization and standardization of the workplace as well as the protection they gave the slackers, incompetents and generally nasty people that burrow into all unionized workplaces.

So I’m having mixed emotions about the movement launched in August by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) and the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) – both of which I’ve been a member – to essentially create a giant union that would take in not only trade workers, but also just about everybody else in Canada that isn’t an executive.

This merged union will have more than 300,000 members across about 20 sectors of the economy, but expects to grow quickly, says CEP president Dave Coles.

That’s because the new union wants to allow students, retirees, the unemployed and the “99 per cent of people that have been swallowed up by this economic system,” according to Coles, to join.

“We want to have everyone in society have the right for a collective voice,” Coles said.

But this is all pretty vague. It seems to me the plan is up there with last year’s Occupy movement, which had nice-sounding aims, but was so amorphous that just about anyone could belong and advance just about any agenda. I mean, how do you decide who’s eligible? Is there an arbitrary cut-off based on income, which would make it a kind of reverse welfare system (and could affect many highly paid union members)?

Of course, then there’s the matter of how these disadvantaged will pay union dues when they barely make enough as it is. Also, with whom would this union bargain to reach what seem like very vague goals? The government? The Canadian Employers Council? The chambers of commerce? None of them seems to cover all the bases the union would.  

So, really, this revived concept of the One Big Union that existed in the early part of the 20th century but eventually faded, is a concept that sounds great in theory but a little wingy in practice.