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100 Canadian scholars espouse benefits of collective bargaining, U.S. Employee Free Choice Act
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Providing support from a political and business culture that respects workers, one hundred Canadian university academics have signed an open statement regarding the generally positive impact of collective bargaining on living standards, social conditions, and labor market performance in Canada.
The statement was circulated by the Centre for Research on Work and Society, an interdisciplinary research centre at York University in Toronto, Canada. The full statement and list of signatories (including two past presidents of the Canadian Economics Association and several other prominent Canadian academics) is posted at the CRWS web site.
The academics were motivated to respond by outrageous claims by business lobbyists and other U.S. opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act. Opponents of the Act have invoked Canadian experience to argue that its provisions would destroy U.S. jobs and increase unemployment. In their statement they assert that Canada's labor market has outperformed its U.S. counterpart in recent years.
The Canadian unemployment rate (measured according to the same methodology as U.S. labor statistics) was 5.3 percent in 2008, compared to 5.8 percent in the U.S. Similarly, a larger proportion of Canadians is employed: 63.6 percent of working-age Canadians in 2008, compared to 62.2 percent of Americans. The Canadian economy has produced net new jobs at twice as fast a rate in the past decade (2 percent average growth in employment per year) as the U.S. economy.
Over 30 percent of Canadian employees are covered by collective bargaining arrangements (compared to 14 percent in the U.S.), and several Canadian jurisdictions feature labor laws similar to the Employee Free Choice Act.
The claim that Canada's stronger collective bargaining institutions have destroyed jobs "is not supported by scholarly, peer-reviewed empirical evidence," according to the statement. It notes that collective bargaining has contributed to significantly lower levels of poverty and income inequality in Canada, coincident with strong overall employment performance.
The statement concludes, "Americans will decide whether the changes proposed in the Employee Free Choice Act are sensible and positive for their economy and their labour market. But we wish to express our judgment regarding the impact of unionization and collective bargaining on Canadian labour market and social outcomes. In our view, that impact has been generally positive."
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