100 Prominent Canadian Academics on the Employee Free Choice Act

I mentioned a while back the concern a number of Canadian scholars had expressed about the misuse and mischaracterization of Canadian labour law and industrial relations in the ongoing debate about labour law reform in the United States.  Some opponents of the proposed Employee Free Choice Act have argued that the higher unionization rates in Canada has caused unemployment here.  That linkage is a stretch, to put it mildly.
Here is a list of prominent Canadian scholars that have endorsed a letter refuting the claim by some opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act that relatively better labour laws in Canada and the higher unionization rate here are somehow a ’cause’ of unemployment.  The letter also warns against the misuse and mischaracterization of Canadian law and statistics in the American labour reform debates.
Notably, Canada ranks considerably higher than the U.S. on all important measures of poverty and income equality.  In other words, in the U.S., which is virtually union-free at under 10% union density, income inequality is the highest of all advanced economic nations. That  is, the vast majority of wealth goes to a relatively small percentage of Americans.  That is the statistic that President Obama has used to explain his desire to rebuild the American labor movement, since unions do usually manage to bargain a greater share of the pie for workers.  What opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act have still failed to explain is how they would address the shameful income disparity in the richest country on the planet.  Their answer appears to be ‘stay the course’, allow collective bargaining to mostly disappear, and rely even more on the ‘free labour market’ without government regulation.
Is that an acceptable solution to the problem?  Or is vast income disparity not a problem at all?  Note that the country with the lowest income inequality, Denmark, also happens to have among the highest unionization rates in the world, and, by the way, the Dannish are also perennially found to be happiest people on the planet in those sorts of surveys. Professor MIchael Lynk recently discussed the link between income inequality and unionization in his Rand Memorial Lecture.