Hope against Hope: Persistent Canadian Unions in the Interwar Years
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Current forecasts paint a dismal future for unions; observers in the 1920s and 1930s also projected bleak prospects for organized labor. Analysts in the interwar years were off the mark. This paper seeks to investigate whether the revival of the labor movement before WWII was the result of institutional change, in particular the coming of the CIO, or the outcome of an internal dynamic that gave rise to rapid declines and spurts in growth. We test these two views in a war-of-attrition context, using a newly constructed data set on Canadian strikes between 1920 and 1939. Estimation is undertaken in a competing-risks framework. We find that workers did not cave in when employers sought to break their unions, and under certain conditions workers could outlast employers. The increasing proportion of worker wins in the early to mid 1930s led to the rise in union membership observed before the arrival of the CIO in Canada in 1937. We conclude that current predictions regarding the end of unions in the twenty-first century may prove to be premature. Tout comme les analystes contemporains, certains observateurs des années 1920 et 1930 prédisaient un avenir sombre à la syndicalisation. Leurs prévisions étaient fausses. Cet article vise à vérifier si la renaissance des syndicats avant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale est associée à un changement organisationnel, soit l'arrivée du CIO, ou le résultat d'une dynamique interne qui produit des périodes de croissance et de décroissance rapide. En utilisant une nouvelle banque de données sur les grèves au Canada entre 1920 et 1939, dans un modèle de guerre d'usure, cet article teste ces deux propositions. Nous trouvons que les travailleurs n'ont pas reculé face aux menaces des employeurs et dans certains cas ils ont remporté des conflits. Grâce à ces grèves gagnantes, le nombre de travailleurs syndiqués s'est accru même avant le CIO. On conclut que les prévisions courantes vouant les syndicats à la disparition au vingt-et-unième siècle sont prématurées.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".