Even in labor-friendly Canada, unions have a tough time with U.S. companies.

In the land of socialized medicine where unions represent 18 percent of the private work force—twice the unionization rate in the U.S.—why can't labor beat these U.S. Goliaths?

Partly, it's because the companies hold the ultimate trump cards. Closing the store, or threatening to do so, says Crowther, is the most powerful weapon in a company's  arsenal. Although using closures as retaliation for organizing is against the law in both Canada and the United States, it's a violation that, according to Crowther, "the trade union movement on both sides of the border is usually unable to prove." Once the threat is made—or a store is closed in one location to send a message to workers elsewhere—employees feel their jobs are in danger, and "it's very different to unring that bell," Crowther explains. "It has a real chilling effect." Labor courts generally accept the companies' explanations for store closings—that is, that the decision was made for reasons unrelated to the union—even when they seem transparently false. Paul Meinema, president of UFCW Local 1400, which just won the favorable decision in Saskatchewan, derided Wal-Mart's usual store-closure defenses: "It's a very profitable company, and coincidentally the one store that is unionized is 'not profitable.' "

Many of these battles, Crowther observes, have been lost because the newly unionized workers can't get the company to agree to a first contract. The workers then feel the union isn't doing anything for them and, reasonably, don't want to pay dues out of their low wages. Meaningful labor-law reform in both Canada and the United States, he says, would allow a labor board to impose that first contract if a company is not bargaining in good faith.

Still, the laws and their scattershot enforcement are not the whole story. "The problem," explained Sam Gindin, former chief economist and assistant to the president of the Canadian Auto Workers and now a professor at York University, "is not just the law but the state of the union movement." When companies are determined to fight unions, it takes creativity and dedication to beat them no matter what the legal environment. Some, Gindin noted, "give up too easily if they're uncertain about the cost-benefit analysis of getting low-dues, high-maintenance workers." Workers at U.S.-based retailers or fast-food chains earn low wages and endure plenty of rights violations, creating a lot of problems for a union to resolve in exchange for not much revenue in membership dues. As a result, Gindin says, many Canadian unions don't fight very hard for such workers.

Gindin also observes that unions in Canada don't work together on these big campaigns; if they did, they'd have a better chance of winning. Labor victories like those in Hull and Weyburn are hard-won, but they won't last unless they become part of a much broader North American movement in which many more people are willing to organize to defend workers' rights. "This is not like the 1930s," Lichtenstein points out, "when there was a real crescendo, a cavalcade of labor organizing." Lichtenstein, also the author of State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, points out that civil rights activists in the 1960s were effective not just because they passed new laws but because those laws were accompanied by a "transformation in American mores." When activists convinced enough Americans that racism was morally unacceptable, it became politically unwise for employers to discriminate; in his book, Lichtenstein argues that workers' rights need to become the center of a social movement in the same way.

It's too soon to tell, but it's possible that we're seeing the beginnings of similar agitation on both sides of the border. Workers in Chicago earlier this month occupied a factory—an event essentially unprecedented in this country since the Depression. Not only was this action supported by the president-elect of the United States, but both Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase acted quickly to meet the workers' demands. After 15 years of fighting the company, Smithfield workers in Tar Heel, N.C., finally voted to join the United Food and Commercial Workers. Even pilots at JetBlue, long regarded as the Wal-Mart of the skies, will be voting this month on whether to unionize. These could be early signs, Lichtenstein says, of a "shift in the general sentiment." Without such a shift, he says, the Canadian experience shows that labor-law reform would be "just more work for lawyers."