Work sucks. Where are the unions?

Front Burner

Nearly a million Canadian workers have taken job action in recent years, with Canada Post employees being the latest to do so. That included work stoppages at airlines, railways and Canadian ports.

You might assume, from the many headlines about strikes, that union power is growing in Canada. But in fact, over the last forty years, the number of workers who are members of a union has decreased by nearly 10 percent.

At the same time, jobs across many sectors have gotten worse, from stagnating wages to reduced benefits.

Barry Eidlin is an associate professor of sociology at McGill University and the author of "Labour and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada".

He'll weigh in on why work sucks, what unions can do about that, and what is and is not being done.

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