Symposium on Promising Practices in Scholar-Union Collaboration: Lessons for Building Effective Research Partnerships

The symposium is published open-access in the leading Canadian journal Relations Industrielles / Industrial Relations. It contains 2 parts:

1. The 2025 JD Woods lecture presented by Centre for Future Work Director Jim Stanford at the 2025 meetings of the Canadian Industrial Relations Association.
2. Three case studies of excellent union-scholar collaboration, presented at a panel organized at the 2025 conference of the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies.

The symposium explores ingredients of sustained, productive, respectful scholar-union collaborations: including transparency, ethics, respect for constraints each side faces, and recognition that workers and their unions are a vulnerable community (not ‘lab rats’ to be studied).

The productive and mutual collaborations covered in the case studies are:

1. Pat Armstrong (York University) and Michael Hurley (Ontario Council of Hospital Unions/CUPE): years of joint research on conditions for health workers.
2. Sean Tucker (University of Regina) and Kevin Bittman (Unifor Local 594) on sustained research on the struggles of refinery workers.
3. Johanna Weststar (Western University) and Jakin Vela, PhD (International Game Developers Association, IGDA) on union organizing in non-standard employment.

These three collaborations all embody the mutual, respectful trust- and relationship-building that is vital to successful, productive, ethical joint research.

This symposium will be a lasting resource for both grad students & young scholars seeking to build experience and contacts in the field of trade union studies, and for trade unionists wondering how evidence-based research from IR scholars could strengthen their campaigns.

Many thanks to all those scholars for using their resources & knowledge to help empower the unions they study. Many thanks to all those unionists for making space for this important joint research. And many thanks to Fred Wilson for co-sponsoring the whole project.

Please see the full symposium here.