British Columbia Just Gave Us More Proof: Card Check Helps Union Efforts
Card-check unionization, reinstated by British Columbia last year, proved highly effective, with a 59% surge in union certification applications and a vast majority resulting in new bargaining units. It’s indisputable: card check is a huge boon to labor.
Municipal workers from Unifor Local 2300 stand on strike in downtown Kitimat, British Columbia, Canada, on June 5, 2015. (Ben Nelms / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Last month, the British Columbia Labour Relations Board (BCLRB) released its annual report for 2022. Such dispatches are usually dry reading, of interest only to experts and a small number of interested parties. But this year is different. With the rules recently changed to make it easier for workers to join unions, 2022’s report provides an opportunity to assess the impact of labor-law reform. As the board’s report shows, under the new “card check” model, workers are indeed unionizing at higher rates.
Union Decline and the Case for Card Check
In both the United States and Canada, union density has been on a downward trend for decades. The latest figures from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that union density has fallen by half between 1983 and 2022. In the early 1980s, over 20 percent of American workers belonged to a union. Last year, despite unions adding 273,000 new members, density continued its precipitous fall, dropping from 10.3 to 10.1 percent.
Canadian union density, on the other hand, has fallen from 38 percent in 1981 to 29 percent last year. Canada’s relatively higher density is maintained by employees in the public sector, where 77 percent are union members. In the private sector, just 15 percent of workers belong to a union. In fact, when only full-time employees are included in the sample, Canadian union density shows a larger decline than in the United States (over eleven percentage points).
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