Union Responses to Nafta in the US and Canada: Explaining Intra- and International Variation

In this article we ask why some unions in Canada and the United States were more actively opposed to NAFTA than others, and why these "activist" unions differed in the strategies that they adopted for fighting NAFTA and in the alternatives that they offered to it. We ask the same questions about differences between the U.S. and Canadian labor movements as embodied in the rhetoric and behavior of their central federations. We distinguish four union "types" on two dimensions: the inclusiveness of union leaders' collective identity (i.e., the kinds of workers that the union actively seeks to organize), and the radicalness of union leaders' moral economy (i.e., how critical the union is of the status quo political economy). We hypothesize that differences in union type, so defined, explain a significant part of the variation in the levels of union activism against NAFTA in both countries, as well as differences in strategies of opposition. Differences in the relative strength of union types is also hypothesized to be an important factor explaining strategic differences between the two national labor federations. We use statistical analysis of survey data, as well as qualitative analysis of institutional variables, to operationalize and assess these hypotheses. We find considerable support for them.