Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada

Barry Eidlin is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at McGill University, Montréal. He is a comparative historical sociologist interested in the study of class, politics, social movements, and social change. His research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Politics & Society, Sociology Compass, and Labor History, among other venues, and has won awards from the American Sociological Association, the Labor and Employment Relations Association, and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States. He also comments regularly in various media outlets on labor politics and policy.

'Labor must act increasingly as a class or working women and men are unlikely to be noticed at all. Reviewing class in a comparative frame between the US and Canada, Barry Eidlin's Labor and the Class Idea in the United States and Canada provides a start to understanding the very different results for workers in the two nations, and particularly variations in political organizing and party building. Organizers and academics can benefit from this research and build on it.' Larry Cohen, Chair, Our Revolution and Past President, Communications Workers of America

• Part I. Explaining Union Density Divergence: 1. Structural and individual explanations; 2. Policy explanations; 3. Working class power in the United States and Canada; Part II. Political Articulation and the Class Idea: 4. Party–class alliances in the United States and Canada, 1932–1948; 5. Repression and rebirth: red scares and labor's postwar identity, 1946–1972; 6. Class versus special interest: labor regimes and density divergence, 1911–2016; Appendix A: data; Appendix B: archival sources; Appendix C: permissions.