Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies by Yonatan Reshef and Charles Keim

Reviewed by: Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies by Yonatan Reshef and Charles Keim Charles W. Smith Yonatan Reshef and Charles Keim, Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2014) Any casual observations about public sector labour disputes must recognize the dual power that governments maintain as both employer and legislator. This power often sets the stage for bitter labour conflict, as public sector workers and their unions have to contend with the vast resources of the national or sub-national state to legislate workers’ salaries, benefits, or to end a strike if it becomes too politically damaging. As Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz have demonstrated in From Consent to Coersion: The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms (Toronto: Garamond Press, 2003), since the transition to neoliberalism in the early 1970s, governments of all political stripes have utilized this legislative power to end public sector disputes with increasing frequency. Recognizing this power imbalance, public sector unions have a variety of tools at their disposal to challenge the dual power of governments. In most cases, that power exerts itself through the collective withdrawal of labour, but can also include vast public relations campaigns, political organizing, or a combination of all three. In rare cases, however, does union power have the collective capacity to significantly challenge the power of the state. Yet, in their new book, Bad Time Stories: Government-Union Conflicts and the Rhetoric of Legitimation Strategies, Industrial Relations scholars Yonatan Reshef and Charles Keim have jettisoned these long held casual observations of state and union power. Instead, the authors attempt to move the focus of labour conflict “away from labour collective action” (5) and instead craft a story of government-union conflicts that paints the participants as relatively equal participants striving to craft a social narrative about the legitimacy of their respective struggles. In order to do this, the authors have decided to focus on how “public-sector unions and governments mobilize language to legitimate their own, and delegitimate their opponent’s behaviour during conflicts.” (5) In the authors’ minds, language is central to explaining how both sides in industrial disputes attempt to justify their actions in order to win support from the public. The success or failure of either party to garner public success through its public relations strategy ultimately can determine the outcome of the struggle while also “shape future relationships, power structures, [End Page 342] agendas and perhaps even the contours of the next dispute.” (7) In order to map out their study, Reshef and Keim utilize what they describe as Critical Discourse Analysis (cda). The authors argue that cda is designed to “decode relationships between language and ideology, language and power, language and control.” (10) Utilizing cda, the authors seek to pull back what they describe as the “rhetorical trappings” of everyday political discourse and instead “reveal the semantic strategies, or moves, mused by speakers to elicit certain reactions.” (10) In so doing, the book utilizes seven case studies in seven different provinces to examine how language is used by both governments and unions to craft legitimation strategies in order to win their dispute. As a tool, using the concept of “legitimacy” and “legitimation struggles” makes sense for the authors because actors in both institutions seek to preserve their individual power and win supporters to their cause. It is well known in political science, the authors claim, that government actors wish to preserve the legitimacy of their regime (and thus win re-election) regardless of whether their actions in a labour dispute are “legal.” While that point is certainly contested outside of liberal pluralist studies in political science, the authors claim that the concept of legitimacy is equally important, for union leaders (but not necessarily rank-and-file workers) to preserve their legitimacy for three reasons: first, to win re-election as a union leader; second to maintain internal union solidarity; and third, to convince the public at large to support the union struggle. (13) While the authors never address the first two claims, the point of their book is to examine the words that union leaders use to build...

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