Local Unions and Workplace Restructuring: Introduction

Local unions are receiving renewed research attention as changing regimes of labour regulation in many industries and nations highlight the challenges facing local unions in the context of workplace restructuring. These challenges come from both above and below. A relative decline in pattern bargaining and, in the context of increasing product differentiation and international competition, a weakening of the ability of larger union groupings to impose pattern agreements, have underscored the role of the local union in these changes. Where the national union previously set the trend, there is increased onus on local unions to do as best they can in increasingly heterogeneous circumstances. At the same time, especially in the private sector, local unions have been led by employers from a simple focus on guarantees about employment to discussion of the conditions that might ensure continuing competitiveness and, hopefully at least, a greater degree of employment security. This leads directly to union involvement in continuous negotiations over new production and quality systems and the organization of work therein. The promise of course is one of increased participation and possibly a better life for their members at work. But the demands on the local union in this context can be daunting: in particular, the need for new skills and expertise, for which it is necessary to rethink the relation between local and national union or other intermediary levels of the union restructure, as well as new sources of fragmentation and conflict within the workforce. And, at the same time, there are real pressures towards local isolationism – what is often referred to as micro-corporatism or forms of enterprise unionism. These twin challenges then make the local union a fulcrum of change. In the North American labour relations regime at least, it can be argued that the local union is at the very heart of the debate over union renewal. It’s with this set of changes in mind that we sought to bring together studies that share a focus on the role of the local union. The initial impetus was in linked panels organized by Pradeep Kumar, Christian Lévesque and Gregor Murray at the 2000 Canadian Industrial Relations Association meetings in Edmonton to which RI/IR added other submitted texts. This thematic contribution also picks up on key themes already explored in these pages in recent volumes: in particular, Lévesque and Murray (“La régulation paritaire du changement à l’épreuve de la mondialisation,” Vol. 53, No. 1, 1998) and a special thematic issue of RI/IR (Vol. 54, No. 1, 1999) on industrial relations in the new workplace. The result is four articles featuring studies of local unions in this new context. The first, by Paul-André Lapointe, draws on longitudinal case studies in the pulp and paper industry in Quebec. It looks at different models of worker and union participation in the context of work reorganization in order to highlight the quite different bases of union participation in management. He finds that some of these experiences entail more powerful local unions while others involve weaker local unions and that the degree of local union power makes a tremendous difference in terms of the depth of union participation in management. The second article, by Ann Frost, picks up on this theme of power or what she labels local union “capacity”, particularly as it relates to the role of the national union of which the local union is a part. In seeking to situate a number of locals unions in the U.S. and Canada in the context of three larger national and/or international unions and their policy and service orientations, she advances a number of analytical …