A Larger Role for Unions

Thirty years ago, Sorel boots and Massey Ferguson tractors were union made in Canada. No longer. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared, to be replaced by ones in finance, the service sector or small businesses—parts of the economy less likely to employ union workers.

As union participation in Canada has gone down, income and wealth inequality has gone up. Yet correlation is not causation. Unionization is a double-edged sword. It can improve the ordinary working person’s wages and working conditions, but it can also create disparities between better paid union workers and less well paid non-union workers. In theory, unions’ impact on economic equality is ambiguous.

Some might argue that declining union coverage—along with rising economic inequality—is an unavoidable consequence of globalization, the shift to an...