Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada, By Barry Eidlin (2018) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 362 pages. ISBN: 978-11075-14416.

Barry Eidlin, a comparative historical sociologist at McGill University, has written a painstakingly researched book that seeks to explain how and why the fortunes of the labour movements in the United States and Canada diverged beginning in the mid-1960s. In a nutshell, this book’s “central argument is that understanding US-Canada union density divergence in the 1960s requires understanding the different processes of political articulation that occurred in the United States and Canada in the 1930s and 1940s, as the working class was fully politically incorporated” (p. 157). Professor Eidlin explains how, in response to the crises of the Great Depression and World War II, farmer and labour groups were incorporated “in different ways” in the United States and Canada over the course of the 1930s and 1940s (p. 167). Here, incorporation refers to process “whereby workers and their organizations switched from being a problem for the state to address through ad hoc legal and police repression, to being a constituency for state actors to address and mobilize via formalized channels” (p. 11). In the Introduction and Part I, the author criticizes previous explanations for differences between the American and Canadian labour movements—including “the idea of the United States as a classless society”, which “continues to be a powerful part of the national mythology” even though it “diverges sharply from reality” (p. 18, 19). Eidlin also picks apart the complementary ‘exceptionalist narrative’ to the effect that the two countries have dramatically different national cultures, arguing instead that “what we now recognize as significant differences in US and Canadian class politics are the product of a relatively recent political divergence” (p. 25). Specifically, he argues that the “key difference driving divergence in both countries was that US labor was incorporated as an interest group over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, whereas Canadian labor was incorporated as a class representative” (p. 17). In a mere 99 pages of text, Part II presents a generally robust narrative and theorization of class politics since the 1930s that is deeply grounded, despite its brevity, in two national literatures. In Canada, there was a “coercive response to the upsurge” of farmers and workers during the Great Depression (p. 162), which left these constituencies available for an independent left coalition. Although the Liberal government of William Lyon Mackenzie King “reversed some of Bennett’s most egregious anti-labor policies upon returning to office in 1935”, it “rebuffed calls for a Canadian Wagner Act” (p. 184). The King government only acceded to labour’s demands for legal recognition under duress in the mid-1940s, as “wartime labor unrest and the growing electoral threat of the CCF [Co-operative Commonwealth Federation] forced their hand” (p. 12). This led to P.C. 1003, which remained in force until it was replaced by the ‘Wagnerian’ Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigations Act (IRDIA) in 1948—“the basis of the postwar labor regime and became the template for analogous provincial legislation” (p. 234). Eidlin argues Canadian labour’s class representative identity made addressing labour relations issues part of a ‘tripartite’ bargaining process to enforce industrial peace—leaving the labour regime more legitimate and stable over time (p. 230-232, 238-240). In case of the United States, Eidlin argues that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Democrats “adopted a co-optive response to farmer and labor insurgency”, taking the form of “policy offerings that absorbed some working-class and agrarian fractions” (p. 161). Roosevelt’s election created “the conditions to absorb labor into a broadened liberal Democratic Party coalition” (p. 171). Unfortunately, a focus on Roosevelt as single-handedly crafting a ‘co-optive’ New Deal tends to overlook the contributions of members …