Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the united States and Canada Dan Zuberi Cornell University Press 230 pages ISBN 9780801444074, hardcover ISBN 9780801473128, softcover

Poverty, it turns out, is a problem that can be solved by throwing money at it. When collective

action and labour unions are strong enough to increase wages and to push governments to enact appropriate social policy, such as health insurance, community planning, transit, welfare, unemployment insurance and environmental controls, the lives of the majority of citizens improve drastically. The dinning by corporate leaders, the think-tanks they fund and the policy makers they influence obscure that simple fact. Constantly told that only "the market" can be trusted to distribute wealth, we tend to forget that "the market" exists to distribute wealth in only one direction--from working people to bosses. Dan Zuberi, in a rigorous comparison in Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada, demonstrates that without the countervailing power of collective action, labour unions and government intervention, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is to Zuberi's credit that he has taken on this work; it is to our collective shame that his work is necessary.

His comparative analysis starts with a simple, fundamental question. Are the working poor better off in Canada with its interventionist social policy or in the U.S. where the market reigns with a freer hand? Subsequent questions provide the relevant measurements. Who has better access to education, functioning communities and health care? Who is better able to endure the irregularities of the labour market, that is, the constant threat of unemployment and underemployment? In which country are the working poor more likely to survive? Few Canadians will be surprised to find that the lives of the working poor are much better here. It may surprise many Americans, however, and Zuberi's work is a powerful refutation to those in Canada who claim it is necessary to destroy our social policy in order to save it.

Zuberi's methodology is straightforward. Unlike many comparative studies, he does not focus on data at the national level, for comparisons there blur the very real differences within each country. He concentrates on the working poor, because most poor people work, and work hard. They are not unemployed or on welfare, and so their poverty cannot be blamed on a moral failing. Nor are national averages useful. Countries with great disparities between the rich and poor will, on average, appear to be much more equal than they are. The most useful comparisons across borders are those among similar people in similar jobs in similar areas, and for these reasons, Zuberi, a sociologist at the University of British Columbia, compares workers in four hotels in Vancouver and Seattle, two cities that are geographically, historically, economically and socially similar. The workers are employed in the same two chains in both cities and, in each city, one hotel is unionized and one is not. While this scale of comparison falls short of the scope implied by the title, it is a strength--not a weakness--of the study, for it allows Zuberi to control as many variables as possible so he can determine the effect of different social policies.

It is also a strength because while poverty is a systemic problem, it is not experienced in the abstract. It is experienced by individuals and so it is at the level of the individual that the most compelling comparisons may be made. Zuberi's approach lets him speak directly with the working poor, and this is crucial, for without understanding their experience, we cannot hope to craft meaningful social policy. For example, market critics of Canada's healthcare system are quick to point out that only 15 percent of Americans--about 40 million people--do not have health insurance, and that many U.S. workers receive insurance as a job benefit. But, as Zuberi demonstrates, the issue of health insurance goes beyond having it or not having it. For many American workers, it is tied to the hours they work--a cut in hours means a cut in coverage. Often there is a waiting period of three to six months before the insurance starts, and often spouses and children are not covered. Many plans are limited in coverage, with ceilings on total allowable amounts and restrictions on what services and treatments will be covered. Thus 25 percent of the American workers Zuberi surveyed had no health insurance while those with coverage had significant out-of-pocket expenses, faced financial instability due to medical costs and had worse healthcare outcomes, as they could not afford treatment and preventive care. As a result, if Americans make higher wages than Canadians, that wage differential is wiped out by healthcare costs even if the U.S. workers have health insurance.

Similarly, Vancouver workers received more benefits than their Seattle counterparts, including increased unemployment insurance coverage, paid maternity leave, better workers' compensation, mandatory vacations, daycare subsidies and cheaper post-secondary education. These benefits do not create the fabled "welfare queens" or sap people's initiative. Vancouver workers are more likely to save money for retirement and less likely to have to work several jobs at once, which means they have more time for education--their own and their children's--and they are better able to contribute to the community. Canada's social policy provides workers and their children the resilience to weather the worst economic storms, the resources to plan ahead with some confidence and the ability to participate and function more fully in society.

Social policy affects community resources as well. As Zuberi puts it, "differences in public maintenance and bread and butter infrastructure investment contribute to a higher quality of life for the residents of Vancouver than for those of Seattle." Vancouver workers have greater access to libraries, public transit, community centres, waterfront parks, public swimming pools and museums, and they use them more than Seattle workers do. This translates into stronger communities: Vancouver workers are much more likely to consider their neighbourhoods safe, pleasant and relatively free of racial tension and crime. As a result, Vancouver's working poor are much more confident and optimistic about the future. In short, social policy in Canada provides better lives for individuals, families, communities and society.

What accounts for the differences in social policy in Canada and the United States? It is not, as some (such as Seymour Martin Lipset) have argued, because Canada has a tradition of Tory noblesse oblige that nudged politicians to alleviate the worst ravages of the market while Americans had an individualist outlook that emphasized the freedom of the capitalist. Zuberi's argument is that different social policies in the U.S. and Canada are largely attributable to the differences in union density in the two countries. This cannot be traced to a Tory tradition. In 1935, U.S. labour legislation was much more progressive; Canada would not have the same legal protections and the union density until the 1940s. By the 1950s, both countries had similar union density rates, with about 30 percent of non-agricultural workers in unions. Since the 1970s, however, the unionization rate in the United States has plummeted; today it is around 12 percent, while in Canada it remains above 30 percent.

Why unionization rates have fallen so dramatically in the U.S. is an ongoing debate. The common assumption, that American workers reject unions on ideological grounds, is not tenable. Surveys consistently show that they are more likely than Canadians to want to join unions. Instead, Zuberi argues, the Canadian and U.S. labour movements have gone in different directions because changes in U.S. law have made it much harder to organize workers. With the decline of the labour movement, social policy in the U.S. has also declined as employers have dominated the debates and politics. This is seen directly in wages and benefits, and in less direct ways. Unions shield workers from the arbitrary actions of the boss; as one worker put it, without a union, "make a little mistake, no protection." Unions provide stability: regular, scheduled shifts, for example, let people arrange their lives, while the "don't call us, we'll call you" practice of many non-union jobs makes it impossible to plan finances or time. Unions give people the confidence, skills and tools necessary for collective action on the job, at the polling booth and in the streets, and so shape social policies beyond the shop floor. Declines in union strength lead to declines in social policy as well as wages. Thus Zuberi suggests changes that would bring U.S. social policy up to the current levels of those in Canada.

Before American workers form Venceremos Brigades to help us bring in the wheat crop, it is necessary to point out that Canada is far from a workers' paradise. Vancouver's Stanley Park may be a jewel, but its seawall was largely built by relief camp workers paid 20 cents a day during the Great Depression. The SkyTrain is a substantial public investment in public transit, but its huge cost has dragged down the rest of the system. Zuberi holds up B.C.'s anti-scab legislation as a useful protection that Washington workers do not have, but the former NDP government refused to pass sectoral bargaining legislation that would make it possible to organize the unorganized in service industries. When the Liberals replaced the NDP in 2001, they eliminated automatic union certification based on a majority of workers signing union cards, a measure that, as Zuberi notes, made it much easier to organize unions. It has been replaced with mandatory secret ballots. This sounds vaguely democratic, but is actually a gift to employers. The first rule for defeating unions is "delay, delay, delay," and the government-supervised vote allows employers to stall for time and interfere with the union drive.

Zuberi is also aware that Canadian social policy has declined over the last 30 years as well. Unionization rates have dropped, especially in the private sector. Real wages have declined and the working day has gotten longer; infrastructure investment, from municipal water to libraries, has shrunk; welfare and unemployment benefits have been cut. Despite national health care, income is still the greatest predictor of health: For each additional $10,000 in income, we see a considerable jump in health outcomes. Specific policy recommendations for Canada--increase the minimum wage, re-establish previous employment insurance coverage, extend universal health care to include vision and dental care and home care, expand day care, reverse tax cuts to the rich to fund social programs and reduce post-secondary education tuition--are important and well within our capacity to carry out.

Zuberi is less helpful when he reflects on who will fight for these measures. His suggestion that the middle class is "the foundation of democracy" is baffling. While workers, including some of those Zuberi interviews, may consider themselves "middle class," so too do the same employers who pay them such terrible wages. Thought of in terms of income, class is not very useful in figuring out what side you are on and who is there with you. But when defined as power in the workplace, a gulf separates workers from the middle and employing classes. And there is considerable evidence that workers in Canada and the United States understand that. Twenty years ago, at the height of the Reagan assault on labour, a book entitled The American Perception of Class by Reeve Vanneman and Lynn Weber Cannon demonstrated that American workers thought of themselves as part of the working class and understood that their interests were opposed to those of their employers. They differed from British workers, usually considered very class conscious, only in thinking nothing could be done to change things. It is a terrible irony that citizens of the world's greatest democracy were convinced that they were powerless against their employers, and it is a harsh reminder that without economic equality, political liberty is largely meaningless. Recently Michael Zweig, in The Working Class Majority: America's Best Kept Secret, and the authors in What's Class Got to Do with It: American Society in the Twenty-First Century, a collection edited by Zweig, have confirmed that American workers have not become "middle class" in circumstance or consciousness. The furor over Walter Benn Michaels's recent book, The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, shows how important the renewed discussion over class has become, but Zuberi does not pursue it with the clarity and creativity that characterize the rest of his book.

Who should fight is directly related to how the fight should be taken up. Zuberi is right to insist that change to social policy from the top is important, and such changes are worth a trip to the ballot box. At the same time, groups such as the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty are surely right to insist that electoral action is often too removed, too slow and too fraught with opportunism. Direct action by workers, poor and otherwise, such as strikes, sit-ins, mass protests and the like, must accompany--and sometimes take precedence over--political parties and election campaigns. Progressive legislation ends in the legislature, but the battle for it begins outside. That is not just a prescription; it is a lesson from our own history. Furthermore, once elected, governments of all stripes need to be pushed to do the right thing, and that push must come from the streets as well as the corridors of power.

Differences That Matter is a necessary tool for contemporary politics that matter. Can we share the optimism of the intellect that informs the author's optimism of the will? In 1850, only the wildest-eyed utopian would have predicted that serfdom in Tsarist Russia and slavery in the United States would be formally abolished within 15 years. The tear-gassed and beaten men and women of Vancouver's 1938 post office sit-in would have found it hard to believe that their demands for employment insurance and welfare would soon be met. We have been in worse places; we can build a better place.

Mark Leier teaches at Simon Fraser University. His book, Bakunin: The Creative Passion (St. Martin's Press, 2006), was recently reviewed in the LRC.