Shifting Gears: Canadian Autoworkers and the Changing Landscape of Labour Politics, by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, UBC Press, 2024

There is great worldwide interest in the phenomenon of so-called “dealignment.” Working-class identification with left-wing ideas and political parties is weakening, and more workers are supporting right-wing movements (including populist and even quasi-fascist parties). Efforts by right-populists in Canada (notably Pierre Poilievre) to cultivate working-class support make this challenge highly relevant here, too. Unions and progressive parties around the world are struggling to respond to this historic and worrisome trend. In this context, scholarly research on trade union approaches to politics in Canada should hold much promise. Unfortunately, this new book by Stephanie Ross and Larry Savage, supported by a recent SSHRC research grant on “Union Politics in the 21^st Century,” does not fulfil that promise. Their book provides a sustained critique of electoral strategy in just one union, the former Canadian Auto Workers (and the successor, Unifor, it co-founded in 2013), focused narrowly on its relationship to the NDP. The book sheds little light on the broader quandaries facing trade unionists trying to propagate progressive political attitudes among members. Instead, it rehashes old debates about whether the CAW should have maintained its formal affiliation to, and automatic electoral support of, the NDP. Its central thesis is that by distancing itself from the NDP, the CAW (and Unifor after it) abandoned a previous commitment to broader working-class goals in favour of a loosely defined “transactional” politics. This conclusion is stridently repeated, but not adequately supported with evidence. The book combines external documentary evidence of policies and internal debates with extensive excerpts from secondary sources and original interviews, liberally supplemented with the authors’ own points of view. Its denunciation of one union’s purported failings is one-sided and ultimately unsuccessful. Full disclosure: we once worked for Unifor and its predecessor unions and participated in interviews through the authors’ SSHRC project. So our hopes for a broader, and badly needed, inquiry into the labour movement’s existential political challenges were doubly disappointed. Most of the book consists of a detailed chronological history of debates over electoral politics within the CAW, from the 1950s until 2013 (when Unifor was founded). The chronology draws on official union statements and documents, media reports, and original interviews. For readers who can step back from the authors’ editorializing (like a bizarre claim on p. 13 about the union’s “sordid legacy of racism and sexism,” advanced without any supporting evidence whatsoever), the book provides a detailed chronicle of the evolution of the CAW’s approach to electoral strategy. In contrast, the book gives short shrift to the formation of Unifor, largely ignoring important milestones in the new union’s approach to politics (including a defining commitment to “independent labour political action” in its foundational 2014 paper on working-class politics). Instead, it implies Unifor is simply the reincarnation of the CAW under a new name, with the CEP “more or less absorbed into the CAW’s basic structure and culture” (p. 6). This dismissal of the CEP’s distinct history and influence is factually false, and offensive to the legacy and continued activism of 120,000 unionists across several critical sectors. And in their rush to paint the new union with the same brush with which they disparage the CAW, the authors miss important changes and nuances in Unifor’s political strategy. The book claims to be more than just a historical account of one union’s internal debates. It claims to uncover insights into the bigger problems of trade union political engagement, and on this score it fails. Its single-minded focus on CAW debates over whether and how to support the NDP in elections is not just retrospective (these debates having been settled years ago). It …