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Book Review
| Yonatan Reshef and Sandra Rastin, Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2003. pp. xviii + 279. CA $63.00 cloth.
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| The words 'unions' and 'revolution' in the same phrase have a long lineage in the annals of industrial relations scholarship. They originated with V.I. Lenin's famous 1902 polemic, What is to be Done? In Lenin's hands, unions would be part of the vanguard which would bring about revolutionary change. At a minimum, unions are proactive, aggressive and take the initiative in pursuing their various goals and advancing the rights and interests of members and/or workers more generally. |
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This is not the case with this work by Reshef and Rastin. Unions are on the defensive, if not passive, in responding to decisions taking by the Alberta and Ontario provincial governments to reduce wages and working conditions of public sector workers, and in the case of Ontario eliminate union rights, in trying to balance budgets and reign in debt in the 1990s. This aggressive unilateralism of the two provinces towards workers/unions is 'the revolution' that Reshef and Rastin have in mind. |
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Two things should be noted about this. The first is that unions are not strangers to attempts by employers, in both the private and public sectors, to act unilaterally in reducing workers wages and working conditions and ignoring or challenging the ability of unions to act collectively on behalf of workers. Second, the use of the term 'revolution' by the two authors represents a lack of knowledge concerning its place in industrial relations scholarship. More significantly, it is reflective of a lack of facility with the use of theory per se. |
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Unions in the two provinces reacted differently to the austerity programmes of their respective governments. Other than for some bold rhetoric, unions in Alberta were passive and did virtually nothing. Ralph Klein, Alberta's Governor, correctly surmised their passivity and did not enact any legislation to take on unions in his attempts to balance budgets. Mike Harris, Ontario's Governor, accompanied his budget cuts with anti-union legislation. Ontario public sector unions employed strike action, protest rallies and other forms of political action in unsuccessful attempts to resist such attacks on their ability to operate and reductions to their members' income and entitlements. |
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Reshef and Rastin are mainly concerned with theorising the different responses, of what they describe or denote, as collective action of the unions in the two provinces. They attempt this through a 'social movement' conceptual construct. In essence it is little more than an attempt to discern the factors which may play a part in deciding whether and how to respond, or not, to unilateral decision making by an aggressive opponent. |
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There are a number of problems with their approach. First and foremost, their theorising is limited and amounts to little more than a schema. Second, the insights they derive are of the level that one could obtain from a group of first-year students in asking them to think about what factors would play a part in the decision making of unions in responding to aggressive unilateralism by an employer. Third, the authors devote three chapters and an epilogue to their so called theory. However, this material provides little more than a series of summaries of their empirical work. The volume is over written and suffers from a surfeit of annoying repetition. The material they have assembled is only worthy of a journal article, not a book of some 230 pages. |
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Fourth, and most significantly, if the authors wished to gain insights into unions deciding on whether or how to utilise collective action against a hostile employer in harsh times they should have consulted the extensive research conducted by industrial relations scholars and labour historians since the emergence of unions. A beginning could have been made with labour movement theories and the seminal work of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Selig Perlman, Robert Hoxie and Frank Tannenbaum. In addition, there has been an extensive literature published in the last two decades on how unions could/should respond to these new tough times, especially in North America. If Reshef and Rastin had conducted a review of such literature on union behaviour, many examples of which have been published and reviewed in this and similar journals, they would have been in a better position to understand and explain the response of public sector unions in Alberta and Ontario to the cost cutting policies of their respective governments during the 1990s. |
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| University of Melbourne |
BRAHAM DABSCHECK | |
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