If you’ve been paying attention to the news over the last few months, you might have noticed that workers across Canada and the U.S. have been striking in greater numbers. Barry Eidlin, an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, has been a regular guest on TV, radio and print outlets writing and talking about the importance of these events, and has helped contextualize what’s behind the current uptick in strikes and protests.
Professor Eidlin’s interest in labour movements predates his turn to academia. As an undergraduate student at Oberlin College, Eidlin got involved in labour solidarity actions in support of custodial workers on campus, who were fighting work reorganization plans and organizing their union at the time.
“After graduating college, I went and joined the labour movement” he says. “I worked in a factory for a while and then got accepted to a training program to become a union organizer.”
Eidlin worked as a union organizer for 7 years, primarily in Detroit, before deciding to pursue his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Working in the labour movement, Eidlin saw first-hand what the historic decline of working-class power has meant for workers and the challenges they face.
“[The experience] attuned me to the complex dynamics that exist within the labour movement, and why there are divisions between different unions, between different groups of workers, and between leaders and members,” he says.
Growing up in Canada and then working and studying in the US also gave him an intuitive sense of the differences between the two countries. He experienced many of the small but significant cross-national differences which would eventually find their way into his academic research.
We spoke to Professor Eidlin about his recent experiences talking to media outlets, the importance of collective action, and why the labour movements is currently having a moment.
Q: What led you to specialize in comparative historical sociology and labour movements in particular?
“Comparative historical sociology was the best way to answer the questions that I wanted to ask, which was understanding the shifting dynamics of working-class power and politics over relatively long stretches of time. My first book was about why unions are weaker in the US than in Canada, but haven’t always been that way. It’s a huge comparison involving millions of workers in hundreds of unions in two countries, made up of 50 states, 10 provinces and 2 territories, with multiple labour policy regimes evolving over more than a century. You can’t use standard qualitative social science methods like ethnography and interviews for that, since you’re dealing with the past, and there are serious data limitations and operationalization problems that make statistical analysis difficult if not impossible. Comparative-historical methods involve blending analysis of primary documents (from archives), secondary sources (i.e. past historical studies), and historical statistics, and then carefully comparing sequences of events over time to try and explain what happened.
The initial idea for my book came from a graph I saw that compared unionization rates in Canada and the U.S. over the course of the 20th century It showed that rates were quite similar in both countries up until the mid-1960s, when they completely diverge. Unionization rates in Canada are now almost three times higher than in the U.S. It was puzzling because we often take for granted today that unions are stronger in Canada than in the U.S., but as is often the case in comparative-historical sociology, when we turn back the clock, we see that we can’t take the present state of affairs for granted. That statistical divergence I saw in the graph provided a quantitative illustration of the lived reality I had experienced as a union organizer, and I wanted to understand what happened to cause that divergence. It became all the more important as I learned more about how that divergence in union strength was linked to other important cross-border differences in terms of the shape of political party systems, economic inequality, and social policies.”
Q: Why do you think headlines about union strikes have dominated news in recent months?
They are happening more, and there’s definitely a shift happening. When you look at the percentage of total workers who go on strike in a given year in the US and Canada, history shows that there have been these waves of strikes over the twentieth century, the most notable first in the 1930s and 40s, then in the 1960s and 70s. The number of strikes drops significantly in both countries after then, but in the US, starting in the mid-1980s strikes basically disappear. We are now seeing an increase in strikes, but it’s starting from an incredibly low bar. It’s nothing compared to the levels that we saw in those previous waves in the 1940s and 1970s. It gets headlines though because we’ve been living in a world where strikes just have not been a thing.
Four combining factors have resulted in the uptick in strikes we are seeing now: firstly, eroding job quality has resulted in pay stagnation and the eroding of decent benefits. Overall decline in job quality has made people’s lives worse, causing stress and economic insecurity. In a world where strikes have been absent and unions have been in decline, the general response has been to pursue individual solutions to these problems, like managing your finances better, quitting and finding a better job, or negotiating with your boss, as opposed to doing something collectively that could change the situation in your workplace.
Secondly, the pandemic crystallized many of these long-standing trends of declining job quality. It exposed the gap between rhetoric and reality, where you had groups of workers being hailed as essential, but being treated as disposable. Some workers were literally putting their lives at risk to provide goods and services to keep society functioning, while their bosses could work from home. It showcased the sharp inequalities that exist in society in a way that hadn’t been so visible before the pandemic.
Thirdly, the post-pandemic economy, which resulted in a tighter job market, has created greater leverage for workers to demand more. And the fourth and final factor is that as strikes have spread, there’s been a demonstration effect. You’ve seen all kinds of workers going on strike, everyone from grocery workers, to longshore workers, to Hollywood actors and writers, to auto workers, to teachers. That has shifted people’s consciousness in the sense that if people see workers like them going on strike and winning things, then that gives them the idea that maybe they can do that too.
Q: Do you think that the increased media attention has led to others better understanding the issues that workers are facing?
I think that the media attention from the strikes has helped other workers see that the situations they are facing are not unique. For example, when Metro grocery workers go on strike in Toronto and they are on the news talking about how they can’t even afford the food and supplies they stock on the shelves, these are sentiments and issues that many Canadians are facing, far beyond grocery workers. Whether it’s workers organizing for better pay because of the cost of living crisis, control over work from home policies, automation and the threat of AI and how that will shape the future of work, these are issues that large swathes of workers are facing. When they see other workers fighting back around these issues, I think that inspires more groups to take action as well.
Q: What has surprised you about the recent interviews you’ve made?
I’ve done more interviews in the past three months than I have in my entire life! It’s gotten to the point that I’ve had to ask reporters to please clarify which strike they are calling me about. My lived experience of the labor movement over the past 25 years has generally been a story of defeat and decline. I have tried my best to keep hope alive, but it's been pretty grim. Seeing all these groups of workers across all these industries getting the same idea and moving into action has been surprising to me, because it wasn’t something I was expecting, and it’s certainly not something I’ve seen on this scale in my adult lifetime.
Q: How do you foresee the momentum of these strikes playing out in the coming months and years?
I’m not comfortable saying that we're in the midst of a new labor upsurge. As surprising and impressive as all this is, it's still nowhere near the scale that would be necessary to qualify as some sort of actual upsurge on the scale of what we saw in the 1930s and 1940s, when the modern labor movement was established, or in the 1960s and 1970s, when we saw this other big wave of expansion which was largely driven by the public sector.
What I will say though is that, if a year, two years from now, we are in more of a genuine upsurge, we will be able to look back to this moment and see many of the critical seeds of that upsurge being planted. The most important of those is the worker-led character of the actions that we’re seeing now. There’s a bottom-up, grassroots energy driving the organizing and strikes now that we haven’t seen in decades. That will have to continue in order for the movement to grow.
Q: How have your students responded to the uptick in news regarding labour movements? How have these discussions developed in the classroom?
I’m teaching SOCI 386: Contemporary Social Movements this semester, and we are currently doing a module on the labour movement. We’re focused primarily on the so-called “Red State Revolt,” the wave of teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona in 2018, which is a precursor to what we’re observing today. I sense a greater awareness of worker and labour issues among my students now compared to when I have taught this class previously. It has often been challenging to teach about the labour movement because the students have seen it assomething that happened a long time ago, like it wasn’t part of their lives. But that’s changing now. I had a student come up to me earlier this semester and ask if he could do his research paper on a strike he participated in as a union member last year. I’ve never had a student ask me something like that before, and it’s left me with a sense that there is a broader awareness of and desire to get more involved with labour issues and labour movements.
Unions are inserting themselves in people's everyday lives in a much bigger way right now. What’s really notable about the waves of organization we’re seeing is the degree they are being led by young people. It’s a very different kind of energy than what we’ve seen from labour movements in the past, and I think that is essential to revitalizing the labour movement for the future.
Q: Historically universities have played important roles in strikes and political movements that shaped the 20th century, and young people are the voice and catalyst for change. What advice would you give to students who are collectively organizing for change?
I think we need to start with the understanding that the campus is part of the world, that there isn’t this separation between the academic universe and the rest of the universe, so the issues that affect the rest of the world affect us on campus as well. The difference is that on campus we have a space provided where we can take time to think through and discuss these issues.
I think it’s imperative for students to take full advantage of that space to try and understand the world around them, not from a dispassionate perspective, but as people who are in the world, who have to make ends meet, who can’t hole themselves up in some campus bubble. Campuses offer this space and opportunity to be able to think through these big issues that are shaping people’s lives, and I think that students should take advantage of that, and act on it.
That’s what a university education is supposed to do. There are some people who just think of university purely as job training, to create a highly skilled workforce of the future, and certainly there are people who are coming to university for that purpose, but there's also a broader sense that we want to create active, informed, involved citizens of the future who are going to try to make the world a better place.