While we appreciate that our book about the Canadian Auto Workers, Shifting Gears, is generating discussion and debate in labor movement circles, we cannot let Jim Stanford and Fred Wilson’s review of the book go unchallenged, as they misrepresent our key arguments and their implications for labor and working-class politics.

Before addressing the substance of the review, it’s important to point out that Stanford and Wilson’s insider status as architects of Unifor gives them a different perspective, but also a legacy to defend.

The views of union insiders are important — that’s why we interviewed many of them (including Stanford and Wilson) as part of our research. Leaders, staff, and activists provided competing insights that shaped our understanding of the union’s dynamics. However, our goal was of course never simply to echo their perspective. Rather, we put forward a rigorous analysis, based on interviews and archival research that reflected the contested nature of labor politics.

Stanford and Wilson seem to argue in their review (and elsewhere) that Unifor is the most innovative, militant, effective, and politically sophisticated union in Canada. In Shifting Gears, we acknowledge the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) and Unifor’s important achievements, yet we also confront the union’s disappointments and challenges at the bargaining table and the ballot box. Contrary to Stanford and Wilson, significant elements of the union’s history depart from a narrative of singular progress: concessions are not breakthroughs, shifting to the center does not build a left politics, and partnership with employers does not signal increased militancy.

CAW/Unifor’s political history is much longer and more complex than Stanford and Wilson are prepared to acknowledge and certainly does not begin in 2013. In advancing their narrative, they misrepresent our book’s central arguments. For example, we do not argue that the union’s “original sin” was its decision to stop automatically endorsing the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP). Nor do we make the claim that the turn to strategic voting was the moment the union “lost its way,” or that the solution to union political strategy is a simple partisan realignment with the NDP. Readers will find that we subject the NDP to critical analysis as well, examining how its shift to the political center helped to create the political crisis that confronted the union.

In Shifting Gears, we argue that from the 1960s into the 1990s, autoworkers saw politics as class-based, which led their union to forge a partisan relationship with the NDP and to actively participate in broader social justice struggles. Although the union’s philosophical commitment to social unionism remains intact in Unifor, its political strategies have shifted significantly. Given the political weakness of social democratic politics in the 1990s, the union pivoted to place a heavier emphasis on syndicalist-inspired direct action as an alternative to the traditional NDP-union relationship.

This strategic repositioning, however, soon gave way to anti-Conservative strategic voting and tactical alliances with more centrist Liberal politicians as the political-economic context shifted around the turn of the twenty-first century. In the face of a disorganized and ineffective political left, an unprecedented attack on union rights and freedoms, and significant industrial job loss and deunionization, a defensive and transactional labor politics became more prominent in the CAW’s politics. This approach was consolidated in Unifor when it was birthed in 2013 through a merger of the CAW and the much smaller Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union (CEP).

Incidentally, contrary to what Stanford and Wilson assert, the respective membership levels of the CAW and CEP were hardly stable going into the merger. As we document in the book, the CAW’s membership grew from 136,480 to 241,381 between 1986 and 2005. However, by 2012, this number had dwindled to barely 200,000. Meanwhile, the CEP lost 30,000 members in the five years prior to the merger. While the merger may have been an expression of hopefulness and vision, it was also a defensive move — both things can be true at the same time.

Shifting Gears is focused on autoworkers because of the important strategic role these workers have played in Canada’s economy and the politics of the labor movement. We also make the case that autoworkers have played a leading role in the union’s internal life and political strategy, even as it became a more diverse general union. But it is incorrect to say that other segments of Unifor are ignored in the book.

For example, health care workers in Unifor figure in chapter 7, where we describe Unifor’s decision to host Conservative premier Doug Ford at a preelection news conference outside a union hall north of Toronto. Having Unifor’s then president Jerry Dias speak alongside Ford was controversial for several reasons. First, the surprise boost to the minimum wage that was being announced at the news conference came three years after Ford scrapped the previous government’s scheduled minimum-wage increase. Second, Unifor had long actively worked against Conservatives. And third, the labor movement was involved in a legal challenge to the Conservative government’s wage-restraint legislation that affected some Unifor members working in health care. So, the union’s decision to provide Ford with pro-worker political cover in advance of the election was shocking and demonstrated just how dramatically its political strategies had shifted. Importantly, not a single member of the union’s National Executive Board publicly criticized the move.

Stanford and Wilson do not acknowledge the above controversy, nor do they attempt to explain the contradictions in the union’s independent approach to politics, the tensions that exist between different groups within the membership over the kind of political strategy they need, or the gap between the union’s approach to politics as found in policy documents and its actual political practices. Instead, they paint an upbeat and uncritical picture of the union and its politics, much of it referencing events that occurred after the book was written.

Our explanation for CAW/Unifor’s political shifts lies at the intersection of structure and agency. Although unions and their members have a real capacity to shape the political and economic context, they are simultaneously constrained by it. As a result, unions’ strategies and tactics are constantly being reformulated and reassessed in relation to the union’s changing ideas about what is politically possible. However, we cannot understand political shifts as separate from what is happening in the workplace. Labor market restructuring and broader economic factors like deindustrialization and economic crises have an impact on what unions think is achievable — not just in the realm of collective bargaining but also in the political sphere.

This framework helps us to make sense of the union’s past, but also provides a template for understanding how the union may attempt to shift gears in the future.

Advancing a rose-colored account of CAW/Unifor’s political trajectory may provide comfort to some within the union’s ranks and the broader labor movement, but it ultimately limits our understanding of how and why the union has adapted to an ever-shifting political landscape by embracing a more overtly transactional approach to parties and governments. Honestly reckoning with the past better positions unions to confront the future.