Union donations to community organisations and the dampening effect of government legislation: the case of Bill 32 in Alberta, Canada

ABSTRACT

Unions in North America have a long history of financial support for charities, non-profits and other community-based organisations. However, very little research has been conducted into how much, to whom and why this financial support is provided. This article reports on a survey examining the financial donation patterns of unions in the Canadian province of Alberta. Alberta is chosen as the jurisdiction for the study as the provincial government recently enacted legislation (commonly referred to as Bill 32) that may force unions to reduce community-based donations, which would negatively impact those organisations and interfere with a core union function. The survey also examines how union financial support changes due to the implementation of this legislation. The study finds that a small but not insignificant percentage of union expenditures are devoted to community giving and that unions tend to donate to a narrow range of causes and organisations. It also finds that union responses to donation-dampening legislation were mixed, in part due to the politically controversial nature of the legislation.

KEYWORDS:

• Trade unions
• union finances
• community organisation donations
• government legislation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Prior to these analyses, we made three specific predictions about which types of unions would give more to which types of charities. We predicted that construction unions would give more to registered charities, that health care unions would give more to political causes, and that education unions would be less likely to donate to political causes. Since we made predictions, we used a one-tailed test. The rest were two-tailed.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Parkland Institute.

Notes on contributors

Jason Foster

Jason Foster is Associate Professor of Human Resources and Labour Relations at Athabasca University. He is also Director of Parkland Institute, a public interest research institute at the University of Alberta. His research interests include union renewal, labour and employment policy, occupational health and safety, migrant workers in Canada, and labour history.

David Simpson

David Simpson is a PhD student at the University of Alberta, where he is currently doing research in Kyle Nash’s Social Neuroscience Lab. He finished a BA in psychology at Douglas College, and an MA in philosophy at Georgia State University. His areas of research are moral psychology, confirmation bias, and psychology of religion.