Gerald Hunt & David Rayside, eds., Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour.(Book review)

Gerald Hunt & David Rayside, eds., Equity, Diversity, and Canadian Labour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2007)

THIS PAST LABOUR Day the annual festivities in Saskatoon sought to highlight the ongoing differential in pay between female and male workers. The traditional speeches were given and press releases were issued but this year organizers utilized a bit of activist theatre and gave all attendees a cookie. Men received an entire cookie but women merely received seventy percent of a cookie, graphically representing women's lower wages and their diminished purchasing power. At a time when food and energy costs are rising dramatically, this message of basic injustice resonated with participants. Quoted in the local paper, organizers said their goals were twofold, to publicize this ongoing wage discrepancy and, naturally, to provide some stimulus to change. Well, one hates to offer a grim dose of reality, but if those organizers avail themselves of the new book on this topic, Equity, Diversity and Canadian Labour, they won't be so optimistic about achieving their goals anytime soon, nor about any hard and fast link between educational campaigns to raise awareness about inequities in the workplace and tangible policies to ameliorate them.

In this volume, editors Gerald Hunt and David Rayside have compiled an impressive collection of scholars (Julie White, Anne Forrest, Judy Haiven, Karen Bentham, Hunt and Jonathon Eaton, Rayside and Fraser Valentine, Tania Das Gupta, and Linda Briskin) whose concise articles focus specifically upon employment equity pertaining to wages, gender, disability, sexual orientation, and race within the unionized workforce. All essays offer useful, albeit short historical commentaries about each equity group's participation in unions and an evaluation of the trajectory involved in union leaders beginning to champion these causes and workers. While these overviews will strike historians as too slim, the true strength of this volume lies in the contemporary commentary and analytical material.

Hunt and Rayside are very transparent about their goals for this volume, intending the book to offer an updated primer for those interested in these issues, to critically assess the blanket notions that unions have made considerable progress in these areas, and to offer suggestions for where unions, their executives, and their bargaining committees might go in the future. Clearly envisaged as a useful text for students, as well as union administrators and, perhaps, some unionized workers, it enumerates the challenges unions face in addressing diversity issues. While all of the articles do offer the tacit conclusion that we've come a considerable distance from the darker days of the immediate post-war years, and certainly from the beginning of the 20th century, many readers will despair that none of unions, workers, employers nor various levels of the Canadian government have made significant progress at addressing these systemic concerns. If there is a flaw with the work it is the tendency to rely on top-down appraisals of union policies and documents, collective agreements, and bargaining processes. From these essays, we might more properly conclude that unions and their leadership aspire to transform themselves into more equitable and diverse organizations and seemingly believe strongly in those goals for the Canadian labour force. However, they face tremendous challenges in translating these ideals into practice.

Two of the most compelling articles, by Judy Haiven and Karen Bentham, stand out by virtue of their micro-analytical, bottom-up assessments of the tremendous difficulties of implementing changes, and how, in many cases, tensions amongst workers undercut the larger message of diversity and support in the workplace. Haiven's article, appropriately entitled "Union Response to Pay Equity: A Cautionary Tale," offers a blunt assessment of how one change agent, CUPE leader and activist "Tim Reiner"(a pseudonym), found himself marginalized and ultimately blacklisted for championing pay-equity within his union--the Saskatoon Catholic School Board. There the primarily male elementary school custodians balked at the notion that their rates of pay should be equitable with the school administrative support staff, who were almost all female. At stake were the male employees' job status, their familial roles as breadwinners, and their notions of workplace culture that prioritized the hardships of labouring work (often outside) against the seemingly easier work and responsibilities of.those who merely sat inside, at desks, utilizing keyboards, typewriters, and telephones as the major tools of their trade. The male workers successfully mobilized to defend their positions, going so far as to divorce themselves from the administrative staff, forming their own union local, and thus removing themselves from the threat of the implementation of pay equity.

Assessing this outcome years later, Haiven reported that the administrative staff were more unified and happy with this arrangement, though they were still paid less than their cope brethren. This finding was supported by the next essay, Karen Bentham's critical re-evaluation of the tangible progress (as opposed to the policy statements) on the so-called women's and family issues. Ultimately, Bentham writes, such assessments "call into question Canadian unions' genuine commitment to bargaining collective agreement provisions that promote gender equity." Furthermore, she adds, "overall the collective bargaining gains of the last two decades are unimpressive." (127)

Those familiar with the literature on unions and diversity know that the majority of published works focus upon race and gender issues. Thus, in branching out to summarize recent changes for disabled, transgendered, and gay, lesbian, and bisexual workers, this volume offers readers some innovative and less well known evaluations of 'diversity' politics within unions. According to Gerald Hunt and Ion Eaton, gays and lesbians have been at the forefront of recent workplace gains, but, as they are at pains to illustrate, this accrual of workplace victories is part of a larger framework of support provided by Charter of Rights and Freedoms decisions, and provincial human rights extensions. What might not be well known outside a small community of gay activists and/or sexuality historians is the significant role that Canadian unions have played, since the 1970s, both in advocating for gay and lesbian workers, but also, more generally, in lending their institutional support, and leadership, to gay and lesbian activism. This is an aspect of the recent history of modern gay and lesbian activism that deserves to be better known and thus Hunt and Eaton are to be commended for bringing this to a wider audience. Having said that, this article, entitled "We are family," rather perfunctorily observes that gay and lesbian union activists were assisted by strong feminist and women's caucuses within the union movement, contradicting the other articles on women's issues that point to their failure to achieve tangible goals. Equally, it does not comprehensively explain why gay and lesbian issues achieved greater traction precisely when feminist and women's issues seemed to falter. Or what motivations, other than equity, employers might have had for supporting those goals.

This very thought-provoking volume concludes with two chapters that seek to offer a broader framework for analysis, and ultimately, for dialogue. In the first, David Rayside argues that Canadian unions are more advanced in their support for workplace diversity and equity than is the case in many other countries. This counters the tendency to view recent gains as meager, rather than to see that the Canadian labour movement is in the forefront on many matters of diversity and equity (in particular, with gay and lesbian issues). By contrast, Linda Briskin's forward-looking essay about where the movement needs to go next is less exuberant than Rayside's piece, offering a trenchant critique of the glacial pace of changes on many fronts (most notably, on gender issues). Still, Briskin is not without optimism for future advocacy, and in a relatively short article she lays out a persuasive plan of attack for the ways in which union leaders, activists, and members can begin to make change happen in their own unions.

In conclusion, this beneficial publication bridges historical and contemporary assessments of diversity and equity policies, broadly construed, to offer students, union activists, and workers a quick overview of this field. While readers of this anthology will quickly realize that female workers will not be munching on an entire cookie anytime soon, still the volume manages to end on a strikingly hopeful note. By concluding with Briskin's essay, with its blueprint for change, it offers readers--students and activists alike--a blueprint for discussion, and one ultimately hopes, for action.

VALERIE J. KORINEK

University of Saskatchewan

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