Many Canadians on the left and right agree big is bad when it comes to business. So shouldn’t we be equally concerned that bloated labour unions will give the business to the working people who are their members? What, then, to make of the upcoming merger of the Canadian Auto Workers and the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada? The big event in labour for 2013, according to a fine article produced by The Canadian Press, will see two of Canada’s largest private sector unions combine. We knew it was coming, but will it be a good thing for Canadian labour? The CAW-CEP merger will further consolidate a Canadian union movement that is increasingly cannibalizing itself. Smaller unions are being gobbled up by larger unions, and the labour landscape is increasingly dominated by a few big unions. According to a recent government of Canada report on union coverage, “almost 50% of ... workers belong to just nine unions, each covering at least 100,000 workers.” As of this Labour Day, nine unions drops to eight unions. The report also notes that “at the other end of the spectrum, 162 unions having fewer than 10,000 members represent just eight per cent of workers.” Necessity is the mother of consolidation, apparently. The Conference Board of Canada’s State of the Unions in 2012 notes that “between 1997 and 2011, union density (the percentage of the total eligible workforce that is unionized) in Canada fell approximately 1.7 percentage points, from 30.9 per cent of the labour force to about 29.2 per cent. And union density in the private sector now sits at an all-time low of 15.9 per cent.” If you look further back in time, you’ll note that this is not a recent trend. Union density in the private sector is a leading indicator of the health of unions because it provides a glimpse into whether unions are successful in communicating their worth to the majority of the Canadian workforce. Who’s to blame for the long-term downward trend of union density in the private sector? The answer to this is twofold: There are both internal and external factors at play. The traditional narrative, of course, dwells on those external factors. The left blames union decline on big, bad corporations and (as the Canadian Union of Postal Workers’ constitution puts it) “their agent,” the government. Ken Lewenza, the national president of the Canadian Auto Workers, pays due homage to this line when he says, “This is a battle and I don’t see that changing in the near future because public policy mechanisms are being put in place to force workers to feel the uncertainty driven by the economy.” The right blames union decline on obsolescence: Changes in government policy (for example, minimum wage laws and maternity leave laws) and enlightened employers responding to market conditions make unions superfluous. There is some validity to both points, of course, but both also represent a failure to do what any institution facing long-term decline should do. That is, examine the internal factors at play. A look inward might reveal that a leading cause for union decline in Canada is embedded within the structures and philosophy of Canada’s labour movement. The class-struggle-based approach to labour sees politics rather than shop floor representation or industry issues as primary. Big unions, says Lewenza, “(give) us the tools to be more active politically.” This obsession prevents them from developing relationships with employers and industry associations that could lead to the innovative approaches to labour and capital that happen in, say, Germany, or even within small unions in Canada. The “tools” require unions to be bigger, so they can exert more political pressure. And they need to have a political party to use them. As a result, big unions act like big companies — just from a different side of the spectrum. In order to achieve this leverage, large unions adopt a monopolistic “one big union” approach to labour. Yet why would big unions be immune from the institutional results of all monopolies? Monopolies in the business world achieve groupthink rather than dissent, stagnation rather than innovation, and graft rather than accountability. How’s this for a revolutionary idea for union revival: Take a page off our own picket signs, and embrace small as beautiful.