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 in power. Yet Savage, Ross, and Eidlin treat the union’s decision to adopt more independent and flexible strategies in dealing with governments and party politics as leading to a cascade of sellouts.

Both the book, and Eidlin’s review, commit enormous errors of omission. First, they focus narrowly on autoworkers, who now account for barely 10 percent of Unifor’s membership. Other Unifor members — in retail, transportation, health care, energy, and media — are not even mentioned. But those precarious, often low-wage sectors will make or break the future of unionism. Unifor represents members in some twenty-five different industries, each supported with tailored organizing, bargaining, and advocacy. It couldn’t be “sectionalist” if it tried. The authors’ exclusive focus on the auto assembly sector blinds them to the important progress occurring in Unifor’s other twenty-four sectors. (Of course, the autoworkers still play a critical, central role in the union).

Second, Savage and Ross deny Unifor (formed in 2013) was even a new union, but merely the former CAW under a different name, absorbing the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP) in a “survival strategy” to offset falling membership. That is utterly false. The membership and finances of both founding unions were stable, and the new, larger union remains so.

Instead, after a two-year process called the “New Union Project,” with extensive membership consultation, research, and negotiation, the CAW and CEP decided a new union could accomplish more than either could independently. The resulting union’s identity, structure, and politics differ from those of either predecessor. Ignoring that process, rendering over a hundred thousand CEP members incidental to the story, is both insulting and historically inaccurate.

Their core critique of Unifor’s political strategy also omits huge pieces of the story. Unifor’s independent politics was defined as a multidimensional effort to build an authentic union voice in all political and policy debates (not just elections). Eidlin doesn’t mention the landmark  policy paper that describes this vision. Almost no unions in Canada (other than a couple of Canadian branches of US unions) still profess automatic fealty to the NDP. Most unions, and the Canadian Labour Congress, adopt flexible and independent approaches to politics. Even the NDP itself has abandoned automatic union affiliation as an institutional relic no longer helpful in winning the hearts and minds of union members. Meanwhile, Unifor remains one of the NDP’s biggest union backers, offering major financial and organizational support where it makes sense.

In short, the decades-old decision by the CAW to abandon automatic support for the NDP is not even controversial today. Yet it is resuscitated by these authors as the moment Unifor “lost its way.”

Ironically, Unifor works closely with several progressive US unions that also acknowledge the need for more independent politics (rather than rubber-stamping a lackluster Democratic Party). Most  Jacobin readers and writers would surely support that view — and it’s equally valid north of the forty-ninth parallel.

Eidlin makes several other assertions that are flat-out wrong — including false claims the CAW’s Canada Council lost its authority after 1985, that Unifor’s world-leading educational program has been downsized, and that Unifor’s support for community campaigns has withered. None of that is remotely true. These and other claims are contradicted by the principles and policies set out in Unifor’s founding documents, which describe its mission to be a transformational force based on class unionism.

The biggest falsehood is Eidlin’s claim that Canadian labor mobilization is “not producing tangible left policy reforms,” proving that Unifor’s independent strategy failed. The actual record is exactly opposite: since Unifor’s creation in 2013, Canadian unionists have notched historic policy victories (not solely, of course, due to Unifor):

• New national childcare, pharmacare, and dental care programs.
• Pro-union labor law reforms (including anti-scab laws and card-check certification).
• Huge increases in minimum wages (now up to CAD $18 per hour).
• Ambitious climate and industrial policies, including a national carbon price and huge investments in EVs and components.

Some of those victories were extracted from right-wing governments, and Unifor sensibly credits any government when it does something workers fight for. Eidlin, Savage, and Ross belittle this as “transactional” politics, but that attitude is idealistic and sectarian. Are unions striving to win progress for their members and all workers? If so, why should they automatically endorse one particular party — whether or not it has a chance at power, and whether or not it fulfills its promises when it wins?

All of the Canadian labor movement’s recent accomplishments are now at risk if a new generation of hard-right Canadian conservatives recaptures government. This makes unions’ involvement — in their own name — in all forms of politics (electoral, community, and workplace) more important than ever. With their simplistic and partisan instructions for how unions ought to behave, Savage, Ross, and Eidlin do no service to that urgent task.

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