Question

we share a common border with Canada, its labor relations system is affected by a number of variables that do not greatly affect the United States. Enumerate and explain these variables

Answer 1

Labor Relations refers to the relations between employers and employees. They are affected by a number of factors, including labor organizations, collective bargaining, labor market, government policy, the structure of the economy, labor law and technological change. Because labor relations are commonly associated with unions, it is significant that in Canada, until the 1970s, a majority of unions and union members belonged to American-based craft and industrial unions.

American employers are also influential - more than 4000 branch plants and subsidiaries of American corporations exist in Canada. In December 1987, Statistics Canada estimated that US-based unions acquired $56.5 million more from their members in Canada than they spent in Canada in 1985. During this century, labor relations in Canada and the US have been remarkably similar.

The relative strength of organized labor in Canada was also affected by cultural and ethnic divisions among workers, particularly the formidable gap between Francophones and Anglophones, which was exemplified by the formation of the separate francophone Confederation of National Trade Unions in Québec. Pronounced geographic and political divisions also precluded effective unionization and often set the interests of the workers in one region against those in another.

Labor relations have also been affected by the structure of the Canadian economy. During the 1960s and 1970s Canada's labor force grew more rapidly than that of any other industrial country and was accompanied by and dependent upon an unusually high rate of capital investment, particularly by American corporations. Postwar economic expansion, however, produced an economy heavily reliant upon primary-resource extraction and export, susceptible to "boom-and-bust" cycles.

The problem of unequal growth during the 1960s and early 1970s particularly affected the public sector, partly because of growing intervention of government at all levels in disputes and strike-settlement procedures in other industries under the aegis of postwar labor legislation. The implied responsibility of governments for the gains in wages and benefits in the private sector and the wage lag in various public and publicly controlled sectors has resulted in the formation of militant unions, the enactment of new legislation providing for union certification and collective bargaining, and numerous large and protracted strikes among public-service workers.