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Sam Gindin, The Canadian Auto Workers: The Birth and Transformation of a Union (Toronto: James Lorimer and Company 1995).
IN STYLE, Sam Gindin's The Canadian Auto Workers is a textbook, designed to introduce union members to the history of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW). In content, it is, as the author claims, an "essay" on the CAW's history, intended "not to be comprehensive ... but to address and develop questions and themes that are relevant to the union in the present." (vii) In particular, Gindin wants to explore the reasons for the CAW's 1985 decision to break away from the United Automobile Workers (UAW) and to examine the demands that historic event placed on the Canadian union. Writing a textbook and a synthetic essay are decidedly different tasks, and Gindin does an admirable job pulling them together. The book is engagingly written, well illustrated, and effectively supplemented by a number of informational boxes, precisely the attributes of a first-rate textbook. His interpretative framework is thoughtful and provocative. Perhaps because he sees his primary goal as speaking to present CAW concerns, however, Gindin overstates the degree to which UAW and CAW leaders and activists determined their unions' paths. As a result, he downplays the pivotal political contexts within which union leaders made their decisions.
Gindin, a high-level CAW staff member, follows the gradual divergence of the Canadian and American auto workers from the pre-union era to the present. He recognizes that broad social forces--economic change, corporate policy making -- helped to shape the two groups' experiences. In Gindin's view, though, the American and Canadian UAWs were driven apart primarily because they developed difference union...