Stanford: Don’t Believe the Spin on Unions in Canada

by Seth Michaels, Dec 22, 2009

In a new column in the Globe and Mail, economist Jim Stanford looks at the way Big Business lobbyists use myths about Canada to block policy changes in the United States. 

While much of this disinformation is aimed at health care reform, Stanford notes, corporate front groups and pundits also are using the same tactics to oppose the Employee Free Choice Act.                    

Stanford notes that one method of attack is via hired-gun “studies” that misrepresent the facts. Speaking about one such “study” that uses Canadian data to try to argue that the Employee Free Choice Act would cost jobs, Stanford says: 

This study’s methodology was bizarre and inconsistent; it wouldn’t pass muster in an elementary statistics course. But its findings are repeated ad nauseam by business lobbyists and anti-union editorialists, pulling out all the stops to keep American unions on the defensive. 

As Stanford notes, even as Canada has a higher rate of union membership than the United States, it also has a “sizable employment advantage”—debunking the shoddy logic underneath the anti-Employee Free Choice campaign. 

For more great scholarship on union membership and employment, visit the York University Center for Research on Work and Society here.

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