Public attitudes towards unions: Some Canadian evidence

Despite a growing body of research on attitudes towards unions in the U.S. and, to a lesser extent Britain, surprisingly little is known about this topic in Canada. We attempt to fill this gap by examining data from a survey of 736 randomly selected residents of the western Canadian cities of Winnipeg and Edmonton. We find a high degree of latent unionism among non-unionized labor force members: 40 percent would join a union if one existed in their workplace. Union attitudes are better predictors of willingness to join than are demographic and socioeconomic variables, although we can predict instrumental beliefs about unions with some accuracy using such objective measures. This article is based on a paper presented at the Canadian Industrial Relations Association annual meeting, June 1983, in Vancouver, British Columbia. We gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the Population Research Laboratory at the University of Alberta and its Director, Professor L. W. Kennedy, in making available results of the 1981 Edmonton and Winnipeg Area Studies. We also thank Val Caskey for typing services. Helpful comments on an earlier draft were provided by an anonymous reviewer.