Posted: Wednesday, 26 April 2006

Canada is one of very few advanced industrial countries in which union density is not in sharp decline, and in which union membership is still growing in terms of absolute numbers. Canadian unions continue to make gains for their members and for all workers, and remain an important force in the workplace, in society and in politics. Set against the background of sharp union decline in the United States, Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand and many other broadly comparable countries, this performance by Canadian unions is quite impressive (Fairbrother and Yates, 2003).

Despite continental economic integration, one in every three Canadian workers is still covered by a collective agreement, more than double the proportion in the US, and union membership as a share of the workforce is now not far below the level of many continental European countries and exceeds that in the United Kingdom. As shown in Table 1, union membership as a proportion of all wage and salary earners has held up relatively much better than in most other advanced industrial countries since 1980, with the exception of Sweden. However, the proportion of workers covered by collective bargaining arrangements is still much higher in most of the larger European countries because of the formal and informal extension of union-negotiated agreements to non-union workers.

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