Thank you.
I'll also keep my remarks brief and obviously my remarks are aimed at the U.S. experience with union financial reporting and with mandatory elections.
To a large extent, the Canadian bills we're discussing were based on the U.S. experience. It's certainly my experience that both the union financial reporting that was introduced during the Bush II administration, which Bill C-377 was based upon, and the experience of mandatory elections in the United States have really been a failure and researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that this has not been good public policy in the United States.
I published a number of articles on union financial reporting in the United States, most recently an article last year comparing the approaches of the Obama and Bush II administrations.
As I've said, the law governing union financial reporting in the United States was past in the late 1950s, but what we got in the early 2000s under the Bush administration was a significant departure from past practice, whereby they imposed far more detailed, far more complex, far more onerous reporting burdens on unions in the name of promoting greater accountability and transparency. They clearly have failed to achieve this.
As I've said before, it was those rules that Bill C-377 was largely based upon.
The Obama administration has reversed the majority of those rules and has adopted voluntary compliance programs with unions whereby it works co-operatively with unions at the national level to uncover cases of fraud and embezzlement. In fact, it has a much better record than the previous Bush administration in this regard. However, if the goal of the Bush financial reporting role was to impose a much more onerous administrative burden on unions, they certainly achieved that much.
Research done by two senior scholars at Cornell University and Penn State University in the United States—and I can talk in more detail about that research—demonstrated that unions were having to divert a great deal of personnel and of financial resources, and adopting new accounting methods, in order to comply with these new rules. It was, in fact, a very onerous burden that was placed upon unions, and in fact, a very costly burden that was placed upon the federal government, but one that had no apparent benefit for ordinary union members. In fact, I would say it was quite the opposite. I would say that ordinary union members were hurt significantly, because, ultimately, they were the ones who had to pay the cost of complying with these new complex reporting regulations. Union officials, whose time would previously have been taken up negotiating contracts, providing services, and doing other things that union members want them to do, were no longer able to do that. They were instead having to make sure that the unions were in compliance with the new reporting rules.
I think it was clear that the only people who really benefited from these new rules were certain organizations who were hostile to unionization and to collective bargaining. In fact, in the article I mentioned, the comparison of financial reporting under the Obama and Bush administrations, I cite several examples of organizations that are hostile to unions that make clear that they benefited tremendously from these new complex regulations, but ordinary union members did not benefit.
As I said, overall I think it is very clear that the reporting regulations that Bill C-377 was based upon were a failure in the United States. They did not bring about greater transparency or accountability. They did not uncover more cases of corruption or embezzlement. However, they did impose a significant administrative burden on unions, and they did prevent unions from providing better services to ordinary union members.
Second, and just briefly, on the mandatory elections.... The United States, of course, has several decades' experience with mandatory certification elections, and it has not been a positive experience. The United States is widely recognized among advanced anglophone countries to have the largest representation gap, i.e., the gap between the percentage of employees who say they would like to have union representation and the percentage of employees who actually have it and who are able to get union representation under the system of mandatory elections.
The person who perhaps has studied this the most is Harvard economist Richard Freeman. I will quote briefly from a study that Freeman did a few years ago. He says, “The gap between what workers want and obtain in representation is greater in the United States than in any other advanced English-speaking country.”
According to Freeman, about one half of non-union workers in the United States desire union representation but don't have it, a figure that is significantly larger than the 25% to 35% gap we see in Canada and in other advanced anglophone countries. Mandatory elections in the United States have not delivered union representation to those workers who want it. In fact, the record in the United States is far worse than it is in Canada or in other advanced anglophone countries.
The other consequence of mandatory elections is that the United States has an appalling record when it comes to unfair management practices during certification campaigns. The organization that has studied this most thoroughly is the Center for Economic and Policy Research, based in Washington, D.C. One of their recent studies estimates that workers were illegally fired in approximately 30% of union certification elections in 2007, and that 96% of U.S. employers engaged in anti-union campaigns of varying levels of aggressiveness and illegality.
Again, these are significantly higher levels than we find in Canada. Anti-union campaigns are not unusual in Canada, but more American employers engage in anti-union campaigns. More American employers engage in illegal actions during anti-union campaigns. In part, this may simply reflect the fact that Canada is a more civilized country, and I am perfectly willing to concede that this is in fact part of the explanation. However, there is also the issue that Canadian employers, because of the mixed system of card-check certification and elections, have far fewer opportunities to engage in illegal practices than do their American counterparts.
I'll finish by quoting from the Centre for Economic and Policy Research study from 2012 I cited earlier, which concludes, “Compared to Canada, many workers in the United States are not able to exercise their right to freely join and form unions and participate in collective bargaining, in large part due to employer opposition, which current labor policy fails to adequately address.”
In conclusion I would say that far from Canada learning from the U.S. experience when it comes to the issues of union financial reporting and union certification, perhaps it's the United States that has much to learn from Canada when it comes to these two critically important public policy issues.
Thank you.