Labor Rights In Canada And The United States Eurasia Review

Unionization in the United States has been on the decline since the 1960s. While many reasons have been offered to explain this drop in the rate of unionization, a new report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research highlights the roles that employer opposition to unions and weak labor laws have played in this decline.

The report, “Protecting Fundamental Labor Rights: Lessons from Canada for the United States,” begins with a comparison of the current state of organized labor in the United States and Canada. It notes that, from the 1920s to about 1960, Canada and the United States had roughly the same unionization rates. But in 1960, the two began to diverge. As of 2011, the unionization rate in Canada stood at 29.7 percent, compared to less than half that in the U.S., at 11.8 percent.
A huge suprise in unionizaton rates to me at least. I did not think the difference would be so great

It is worth noting that union decertification in Canada was no more common in periods where card-check certification was in place than at other times. Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have brought card check to the United States, argued that the process would allow unions to bulldoze workers into signing cards, leaving them with union representation even when they didn’t really want it. However, the fact that decertification was no more prevalent under card check than it was under mandatory elections in Canada suggests that this has not been a problem.
I am sure Randel might like to read the above

It truely seems that Unions are not truelly the issue in making the US perform poorly economically if unionization rates are as low as the article suggests, at least compared to Canada