Solidarity Forever? An Analysis of Changes in Union Density
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Originally prepared to provide background information and analysis for a Canadian Labour Congress conference on rebuilding unions in the Fall of 2003, this article maps trends in union density i.e., the proportion of workers covered by a collective agreement. It provides a short overview of the period since the mid 1980s, and a much more detailed analysis of the period from 1997 to 2002 for which detailed data from Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey are available. Union density has trended down in the private sector to below 20% more because of a density decline among male blue collar workers than because of deindustrialization per se. Union density has remained high in public and social services, including outside the direct public sector, and this mainly explains why union density has held up much better among women than men. Union density is low, but relatively stable, in private consumer and business services. Density has fallen proportionately less in the higher union density provinces, particularly Quebec, and has fallen to well below average levels among private sector workers in the fastest growing provinces of Ontario and Alberta.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".