A long time ago our forefathers and mothers set about constructing democratic societies. Their goal was not only political democracy but also industrial or economic democracy. After all, many of the most momentous decisions affecting our lives occur at our place of employment and democracy means that everyone affected by such decisions has a role in making them.

In the 19th century there were great debates about the appropriate method for establishing industrial democracy. Socialists wanted public ownership of industry; syndicalists wanted workers’ control. With the founding of the International Labour Organization in 1919, achieving industrial democracy through collective bargaining attracted widespread support.

Progress toward democracy was slow with setbacks but generally in the right direction on both the political and industrial fronts up until the early 1980s when a deep recession led to neoliberalism and a general reversal of labour’s fortunes. In many countries labour was strong enough to defend the democratic structures it had fought so hard to establish but in Canada and the U.S. we did an about-face and began marching in the oppositie direction — away from our goal of industrial democracy.

In Canada the percentage of working people in the private sector covered by collectively negotiated terms and conditions of work has fallen from a high of over 30 per cent to a current low of less than 20 per cent. In short, about a third fewer people today work under collectively negotiated terms than did a quarter of a century ago.

In the public sector although union density has remained high, since the advent of neoliberalism unions have been stripped of their fundamental right to negotiate terms and conditions by frequently having contracts imposed and by having legal strikes overturned by ad hoc legislation, in both cases contrary to international norms Canadian governments have promised to respect.

The weakening of labour has made it difficult for workers to maintain working conditions. It has also meant a serious weakening of our social support systems. Welfare payments have been rolled back, unemployment insurance has been made more restrictive and more difficult to access, and minimum wages have fallen behind general wages and light years behind executive compensation to name just a few areas of deterioration.

International trade union movement fights back

From the early 1990s, the international trade union movement began to fight back. It insisted that globalization must stop favouring the interests of corporations over those of working people. Towards that end it began insisting that corporations abide by international standards with respect to issues such as employment equity, child and forced labour, health and safety, a living wage and, most critically for Canada, the right to organize and bargain collectively.

Under pressure from the trade union movement, the International Labour Organization in 1998 adopted its Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work which reaffirmed the human rights character of freedom of association and secured promises from its governmental members to “protect and promote collective bargaining as a human right.”

In 2000 the UN, with its Global Compact challenged multi-national enterprise to conform to those standards and well over 2000 have now promised to do so.

However, crafty, management-side lawyers counseled their corporate clients that these initiatives created no new legal obligations. They were merely statements of good intentions to which corporations could voluntarily abide by or not.

But in 2003 a UN Sub-commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights composed of global human rights experts issued a report declaring loudly that, indeed, corporations were responsible for ensuring respect for human rights wherever they operated. Corporations are still fighting against this new norm but their protests that they shouldn’t be expected to be the world’s police force are being drowned out by a rising crescendo of union and NGO voices insisting that they must do their part to ensure decent, and humane working conditions.

And earlier this year the World Bank and international finance institutions adopted a sustainability standard under which corporations desiring development loans must promise to refrain from discouraging workers from organizing and promising to recognize and bargain with independent worker representatives.

These international developments have barely penetrated into Canada. A few unions, notably the UFCW, NUPGE, the Canadian Teachers Federation and the Canadian Police Association have endorsed the notion of workers’ rights as human rights but the job of developing a coherent and well-resourced strategy to make these international standards into a reality on the ground has hardly begun.

What needs to be done

Here are three suggestions — two conceptual, one practical.

First, we need to change the way we think and talk about workers’ human rights. We need to move from the goal of securing the right to organize or not to insisting on universal collective representation. The right to organize or not suggests that or not is a legitimate choice but, on reflection, it isn’t.

Common sense as well as survey research I report in my book Labour Left Out indicates that Canadian workers don’t want to leave it up to their bosses to establish unilaterally their conditions of work. They want to be consulted; they want representation; they want to negotiate. A large percentage of the unorganized (by some estimates about 40 per cent) want representation by traditional certified bargaining agents; nearly all the rest want some less formal, non-statutory form of representation which our Supreme Court says is their constitutional right.

Second, we need to shift the onus for engaging in collective bargaining away from workers to employers. Since collective bargaining is a human right that cannot be exercised except in cooperation with a willing partner, employers who engage in union avoidance (and governments who stand by and benignly tolerate it) violate the human rights of their employees no less than do those who engage in overt discrimination.

We should not tolerate that behaviour. Any standard that is inferior to that required by the World Bank and other global financial institutions of their clients is not good enough for Canadians.

And finally, we need to put in place a vehicle for getting worker rights onto the public policy agenda. We need to get people talking about worker rights, getting concerned about worker rights, getting angry about the denial of worker rights.

To move in that direction, I believe that we need to establish an independent Workers’ Rights Institute dedicated to getting out the word. U.S. labour established such an organization three years ago (American Rights at Work) and it has done good work in putting labour issues on the public agenda, getting them talked about in the media, getting politicians to speak up about their denial. There is also such an organization (The Institute of Employment Rights) in the UK. We need one here in Canada.

Since our collective bargaining participation rate has never exceeded about 40 per cent, the goal of universal representation may seem farfetched. Since our employers consider it to be their god given right to oppose unionization and collective bargaining, employer cooperation may also seem pie in the sky. But they are not.

Universal collective bargaining (and employer acceptance of it) is the norm throughout much of Continental Europe and it works well. Every year the World Economic Forum ranks the world’s most competitive economies. In the most recent ranking, three of the top five most competitive countries — Finland, Sweden and Demark — have in place nearly universal collective bargaining. In short, nearly all workers in those countries are covered by terms and conditions of employment that have been negotiated by independent worker representatives. Why should we accept less for Canadian workers?

In short, Workplace Representation for All is a worker’s human right, an employer’s ethical duty and it is also good public policy. We need to get back on the road to industrial democracy because it is the right thing to do ethically and politically but it, incidentally, also makes good sense economically.