Rethinking Unions: Contradiction, Leadership, Narratives and the Case of UFCW Local 401
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past 20 years, the Alberta-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 have revitalized their union through organizing diverse groups of workers in hard-to-organize occupations, increasing involvement in political and community matters and adopting innovative organizing and representation strategies.They have done so with a stable leadership that exhibits autocratic and populist tendencies.The apparent contradictions of autocratic structures and innovative reforms are difficult to explain using existing explanations of union renewal and concepts of union forms.This in-depth study examines Local 401 in an effort to explain the unexpected patterns.Using a variety of methods, including Critical Narrative Analysis, the study reveals that unions may be more fluid and dynamic than the existing literature acknowledges.The study concludes the business union-social union duality common in industrial relations theory needs to be replaced by a more flexible, more multi-layered conceptualization of union behaviour.Unions exhibit elements of both social and business unionism at the same time because they are organizations created at the intersection between structure and action and are always in flux.The study also highlights a possible third path for union renewal, coined "accidental revitalization", where local-initiated renewal can occur without planned intention and within a context of stable local leadership.Third, the study explores the role narratives play in resolving apparent contradictions in union behaviour by constructing internal logics and how narratives contribute to the production and re-production of power dynamics within unions.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.044 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".