When it comes time to write, try to think, at minimum, of summarizing in a sentence or two the core argument of each essay, and then try to develop a proposition (or thesis, if you prefer) that respon

Assessing the Past and Future of Canada’s Wagner SystemDonald Wells, “Origins of Canada's Wagner Model of Industrial Relations: The United AutoWorkers in Canada and the suppression of ‘rank and file’ unionism, 1936-1953,” TheCanadian Journal of Sociology 20:2 (Spring, 1995): 193-225.Eric Tucker, “Shall Wagnerism Have No Dominion?” Just Labour 21 (Spring 2014), 1-27.While the first set of readings were strictly historical, these readings are both future-oriented. Even though they were written twenty years apart, they align closely, underscoring that thequestions they pose about labour’s future under neoliberalism are longstanding and remainunresolved and up for debate.Both pieces address the question of whether the Wagner model of labour relations, adopted inCanada at the end of the Second World War, remains relevant in a world where the postwarconsensus that high union density is a social and economic good seems to have evaporated. Bothobserve that Canada’s unions increasingly operate in a fraught world of anti-union legislation,hostility from business, deindustrialization, and declining union density and that they arestruggling to mobilize workers.When approaching these pieces, make sure that you read to gain a clear sense of what is meant byCanada’s Wagner Model. Both authors define what they mean by Wagnerism and how theyunderstand Canada’s Wagner system early in their essays, one from the perspective of a legalscholar, the other from that of a political scientist. By reading these together, your ought to beable to piece together a pretty clear understanding of what Wagnerism is, even though we haven’tmuch discussed this in the lectures yet.On Wells:When approaching the Wells piece, don’t let yourself get bogged-down in the details about thestruggles of the UAW at Ford in the 1930s and 1940s. It’s an interesting story, and Wells does agood job of un-picking some of the dynamics of the period, but at the end of the day, the essay ismuch more about explaining why the Wagner model has left unions ill-equipped to respond tothe rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s than it is about the historical case study. Wellsis a political scientist, not an historian, and he is less interested in the history itself than he is intracing the genealogy of what he understands to be a fundamental problem of mobilization facingcontemporary unions. In other words, he is using history to diagnose a problem and map a wayforward, not to come to a better understanding of the past.Wells suggests that the gains workers made between the 1940s and the 1970s masked afundamental weakness in Canada’s Wagner model. What is this flaw, and what problems hasthis created for workers and their unions?The Rand decision is generally held-up as a major gain for labour, but what did the UAW lose inRand’s arbitration? What obligations did Rand impose on unions to contain the militancy of theworkers they represented? What were the consequences for union politics? For control over theterms of work and labour processes? For workplace democracy?Wells suggests that the Wagner model changed Canadian unionism from a movement to aninstitution; what does he mean by this? What is the proper role of militancy in Canadian unionism going forward? Is class struggle anecessary component of effective worker organization?On Tucker:The Tucker pieces, while a bit more theoretically dense, is probably the more straightforward. Like Wells, Tucker feels a certain ambivalence about the Wagner model, seeing it as both anasset and a liability as unions face an increasingly hostile world. Tucker, however, imagines aslightly different way forward and offers slightly different solutions to the problem ofmobilization.What, according to Tucker, are the fundamental weaknesses of the Wagner model? For whomdoes it work and for whom does it not work, and why? Why does Tucker believe that legalstrategies intended to “constitutionalize” the Wagner system are misguided?What does Tucker mean by Wagnerism’s “shrinking dominion?” To what degree is thisattributable to economic change, especially the decline of manufacturing, and to what degreedoes it reflect the rise of neoliberalism? If neoliberalism is best understood as a “classproject”–the abandonment by government and economic elites of the values behind the postwarconsensus–can Wagnerism have a future at all?What is the way out? If there is no foreseeable political or legal solution to the problems facinglabour, ought workers to adopt their own class project? If so, what might this look like? Whatdoes Tucker mean by “alt-labour?” What strategies have workers for whom the Wagner systemoffer little hope of a solution adopted to advance their interests in the workplace? Do thesemodels offer a solution to the problems of Wagnerism? Are they best understood as analternative or a replacement?From Reading to WritingRemember, these questions are intended to frame your reading, not to act as guideposts to yourreview essay. In page space that you have available to you, there is no way that you can evenbegin to address more than one or two questions or argue more than one or two points.What I will be looking for is evidence that you have tried to come to terms with the arguments ofeach of the authors and that you have made some connections between the two articles. I’m lessinterested in a narrative summary (Wells discusses...) than in an analytical one (Lynk argues...).When it comes time to write, try to think, at minimum, of summarizing in a sentence or two thecore argument of each essay, and then try to develop a proposition (or thesis, if you prefer) thatresponds to the question, “What can we learn by reading these two essays together?”