American and Canadian Labor Regimes and the Reflexive Law Approach

Abstract

Our thesis is that a "new unionism" must be the center piece of contemporary North American trade union strategy, a unionism that reconciles the movement's historical social objectives with emerging conditions of production by winning for itself a constructive role in industrial restructuring, conditional on a renewed capacity to promote industrial justice (Brody 1992). This conclusion implies an extension of the labor regime beyond the boundaries of industrial relations or social policy: the labor market can no longer be managed to safeguard the interests of employees without a labor voice in economic policy. If management now subsumes industrial relations policy to business strategy, then unions cannot serve an important function without the ability to influence that wider field. The labor regime project pursued by "new unionism" goes beyond the Wagner Act design, although it continues to depend far more on North American practices in bargaining and managing collective agreements than existing neo-corporatist regimes. Corresponding efforts among European movements to expand, in turn, the uses of collective agreement also condition our interest in the strategy. Our emphasis on labor's designs scarcely means that we consider labor the dominant power in contests over the labor regime. Labor has neither predetermined mission nor destiny. It has interests, values, and institutional effects; it has fallible organizations variously capable of collective learning and acting; and it has some power resources that bear on the complex social operations of economic life and the political system.