From Consent to Coercion

The new edition of this influential text addresses key issues about the past, present, and future of workers and unions in Canada.

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From Consent to Coercion examines the increasing assault against trade union rights and freedoms in Canada by federal and provincial governments. Centring the struggles of Canadian unionized workers, this book explores the diminution of the welfare state and the impacts that this erosion has had on broader working-class rights and standards of living.

The fourth edition witnesses the passing of an era of free collective bargaining in Canada – an era in which the state and capital relied on obtaining the consent of workers and unions to act as subordinates in Canada’s capitalist democracy. It looks at how the last twenty years have marked a return to a more open reliance of the state and capital on coercion – on force and on fear – to secure that subordination.

From Consent to Coercion considers this conjuncture in the Canadian political economy amid growing precarity, poverty, and polarization in an otherwise indeterminate period of austerity. This important edition calls attention to the urgent task of rebuilding and renewing socialist politics – of thinking ambitiously and meeting new challenges with unique solutions to the left of social democracy.