In the face of relentless attacks on organized labour, there is a clear need and desire for both union renewal and for unions to fight back against the anti-worker austerity agenda.

Within this context, a confrontation looms on the horizon as the Conservative government is poised to eliminate the automatic dues check-off (the “Rand Formula”), which has been a cornerstone of union security for decades. As unions gear up in defence of automatic dues-checkoff, some labour activists are questioning their efforts.

They believe that the Rand formula has created bureaucratic unions that are disconnected from their memberships. Losing Rand could in fact contribute to the process of union renewal, they argue.

University of Toronto Press Publishing presents the Toronto release for Dennis Pilon's latest book 'Wrestling with Democracy: Voting Systems as Politics in the 20th Century West'.

Though sharing broadly similar processes of economic and political development from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onward, western countries have diverged greatly in their choice of voting systems: most of Europe shifted to proportional voting around the First World War, while Anglo-American countries have stuck with relative majority or majority voting rules. Using a comparative historical approach, Wrestling with Democracy examines why voting systems have (or have not) changed in western industrialized countries over the past century.