Trade Unions and Citizenship at Work: Why Union Experimentation Matters | 2025 Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture (Hybrid Event)

Register Now for our 2025 Sefton-Williams Memorial Lecture, Trade Unions and Citizenship at Work: Why Union Experimentation Matters, delivered by Professor Gregor Murray. We will also present the Sefton-Williams Award for Contributions to Labour Relations to David Fairey, Labour Economist, as well as the co-founder and  co-chair of the BC Employment Standards Coalition. A reception will immediately follow the lecture.

This is a free event and all are welcome. Seating is limited, so please ensure you RSVP to attend in-person. Alternatively, you can live-stream the event via Zoom at: https://harthouse-ca.zoom.us/j/86059202150 

Abstract | Citizenship at work once offered a historical meta-narrative for understanding the progress of workers’ rights and democracy through collective bargaining in large private sector firms. Is this ideal now an illusion? Trade unions across the globe face a range of disruptions that are destabilizing traditional structures, practices and strategies. The most optimistic versions of this vision have faltered over recent decades, and the counter thesis is now that of inevitable decline and the weakening of such citizenship.

Drawing on his work with colleagues at the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT), Gregor Murray considers this argument through the lens of a local union in a multinational firm in Canada’s metal working industry. This was the heartland of highly unionized, largely male, manufacturing. What are the ramifications of multiple disruptions to its traditional modes of action and strategy? To assess the state of citizenship at work in this firm, and the role of its union over recent decades, Murray looks at the efforts of this union to experiment. He also examines what this experimentation reveals about this union’s possible future and the lessons for union renewal more generally.

Despite considerable pressures on this citizenship, there are multiple signs of renewal through enlarged union repertoires and the need for managers, workers, and unions to meet digital and ecological challenges. Meeting these challenges will require enhanced skills and social dialogue mechanisms, and this lecture will unpack the ways in which experimentation can continue to stimulate renewal, while also highlighting that proactive policies to promote workplace democracy in Canada are largely missing in action.

Bio | Gregor Murray has long worked with the labour movement in Canada and beyond. He is author or co-author of multiple studies on different aspects of trade union action, strategy, democracy and power, which can be encapsulated under the broad heading of pathways to union renewal. He is co-editor, with his colleague Mélanie Laroche, of a recent collection (2024) entitled, Experimenting for Union Renewal: Challenges, illustrations and lessons, published by the European Trade Union Institute, and freely downloadable. This volume mobilizes 19 case studies in a dozen countries around the theme of union experimentation and the lessons to be drawn from these cases for union renewal. He is also co-editor and co-author of a special issue of the Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal (2025) on the large firm in Canada as a vector of citizenship at work.

Gregor holds a PhD in industrial and business studies from Warwick University in the United Kingdom and has worked successively at the Industrial Relations Research Unit (Warwick University), the Faculty of Management at McGill University, the Department of Industrial Relations at Université Laval in Quebec City and in the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montréal. Gregor is also co-founder of the Interuniversity Research Centre on Globalization and Work (CRIMT) and was its director from 2002 to 2024. He has served as the principal researcher and co-coordinator of a series of international and interdisciplinary projects on the regulation of work and employment. From 2007 to 2021, he held the Canada Research Chair on Globalization and Work in the School of Industrial Relations at Université de Montreal where he continues to be an associated professor. Gregor is also a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has served as President of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association. 

His current work centres on the implications of climate change for workers and their unions, on the impact of technological change for work organization and skills, on worker representation and social dialogue in multinational firms, and on union renewal.