Laboring for Rights: Unions and Sexual Diversity Across Nations edited by Gerald Hunt, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999, 302 pp., ISBN 1-56639-717-0 and 1-56639-718-9.

For the majority of industrial relations academics whose training and research keep us focused on the classical problems of labour-management relations, Laboring for Rights, edited by Gerald Hunt, offers a decided, and much-needed, shift in perspective. This book provides readers with information, much of which will be unknown to most readers, about the extent of “bridge-building” between the lesbian/gay and union movements in a wide variety of countries. It is a first attempt to document what organized labour is doing in relation to lesbian/gay issues. Hunt speculates that this silence “may speak to a reluctance on the part of scholars of industrial relations to be associated with issues involving sexuality” (p. 1), and I would agree. In my experience, the industrial relations community has been reluctant to rethink the boundaries of its disciplinary inquiry so that subjects such as gender, race, and sexuality—now mainstream questions elsewhere in the social sciences—remain under-investigated in the study of labour-management relations. Methodologically, Laboring for Rights is a standard industrial relations text. Most of the chapters are case studies using familiar historical and/or institutional analyses of interview, survey, or archival data; one chapter uses discourse analysis. Somewhat less conventional is the remarkably wide range of countries considered. In addition to North America (two chapters about Canada and three about the United States), Europe (two chapters about England, one about Germany, and one covering France, Germany, Britain, and The Netherlands in the context of the European Union), and Australia, there are chapters about Hawaii, the South Pacific, and South Africa—that is, countries at many stages of industrialization with marked differences in the size and importance of the union movement. Certainly, I learned a great deal, but, predictably, much of the detail did not stick. There is so much information, in chapters that vary considerably in the extent to which they provide analysis as well as description, that most readers will be drawn to the countries of particular interest to them. For this reason, I recommend, as well, the very helpful introductory and concluding chapters in which Hunt situates lesbian/gay-union activism in the political economy of the last twenty-five years. The underlying premise of the book is that lesbians, gays and the labour movement are potential allies in the struggle for social justice. This hopeful assumption, which is only partially affirmed by the case studies presented in the book, challenges the union movement to overcome its past. In his introductory chapter, Hunt argues that the workplace became an important site of activism for gays and lesbians in the 1980s and 1990s because of the centrality of paid work in most people’s lives and because lesbian and gay workers continue to experience discrimination on the job in unionized as well as non-union workplaces. Not fully addressed in the book—or anywhere else in the industrial relations literature—but lurking in the background is the history of unions as strongholds of heterosexual male privilege. Created by and for men, one of the root purposes of traditional union policies and practice has been to promote the interests of the working-class “family man.” As champions of the male-led “normal” family, unions rarely spoke up on behalf of lesbian and gay workers when they were demeaned and dismissed/evicted by employers or co-workers. Laboring for Rights tells us that many unions in many countries are no longer satisfied with these out-dated behaviours and are pushing the envelope. Canada is one of the success stories. The chapters by Hunt and Peterson tell us, on the one hand, that many unions—including some of the most conservative—now formally embrace lesbian/gay issues within their human rights initiatives and, …