An Interpretation
Fair Work, Fair Wages: Edmonton's Labour History
In this collection of brief articles the Alberta Labour History Institute offers a chronological survey of the history of work and the labour movement in Edmonton through the past century.The Alberta Labour History Institute exists to preserve the heritage of the working men and women of Alberta and their unions. Labour historians and volunteers are interviewing retired union leaders and activists; preserving stories, photographs and artifacts in new collections; and creating an inventory of existing materials in Alberta's archives.
The organization also prepares a popular calendar, organizes special exhibits and film projects.
Building from the ground up: Carpenters and joiners organize Edmonton's first union local, 1902
The organization of Edmonton construction unions began in earnest when the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners provided a charter to Local 1325 in Edmonton. Local 1325 operates to the present day, making it the senior construction local in Alberta.
Edmonton had been a desert for union organizers in the nineteenth century, but as the building of transcontinental railways through the city began in earnest, farms in the Edmonton region filled up quickly and industries servicing the farms grew apace. There was a strong demand for construction workers. While some of the construction contractors simply hired jack-of-all-trades farm boys as construction workers, the city soon filled with experienced construction workers from other points in western North America seeking work in a boom town. Many of these skilled construction workers had been members of union locals in places where they had formerly worked, and were well aware of the benefits of union organization. By 1914 virtually all of the skilled trades in construction had formed unions in Edmonton.
Local 1325 in Edmonton owed its origins to the carpenters of Frank, who had organized in February 1902, and then hired an organizer, Robert Robinson, to extend that organization throughout the province. After several weeks in Edmonton in October and November, Robinson had succeeded in convincing enough members to sign up to create Local 1325 on November 11.
Six months later, on May 15, 1903, the International Union of Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen granted a charter to Local 1 in Edmonton.
The early crafts unions in the construction field negotiated contracts with company owners to provide standardized hours and wages for craftsmen. They also kept contact with members of their union in other cities and towns to warn them when the market was flooded in Edmonton in an effort to prevent management from gaining the upper hand in negotiations that a surplus of qualified workers might produce. While strikes in the construction sector were infrequent, the unions could get better contracts from management when the threat of a strike had to be taken seriously. Excess labour often made it easier for companies to operate with scab labour.
Seven plumbers and pipefitters organize for better pay, 1904
The United Association of Plumbers and Pipefitters Local 488, later to become Canada’s largest local of plumbers and pipefitters, had its humble beginnings when seven plumbers and pipefitters received their charter from the parent international union.
The three plumbers and pipefitters who were working in Edmonton in 1903 had actually applied for a local charter that year, but the international union turned them down because their ranks were too thin. In 1905 the local signed its first collective agreement with the master plumbers in the city. The new agreement provided for an eight-hour day and sixty-four cents per hour, while the previous year plumbers and pipefitters had been working nine hours per day for between thirty-five and fifty cents per hour. To celebrate their increased wages and leisure time, the members of the new local held a gala banquet on 23 January 1906. By 1912 the local had grown to more than two hundred members.
The Edmonton “UA” local was similar to other craft unions of the time in its ethos and orientation. Craft workers took pride in their skill and developed elaborate rituals that reinforced a sense of brotherhood among fellow members of the craft. Craft unions were exclusive in that they were open only to members of the specific craft (plumbers, carpenters, machinists, typographers, and so on). This contrasted with industrial unions such as the United Mineworkers of America, which organized all workers on an industry-wide basis regardless of the specific job they performed.
Working on the railroad, 1905
The Canadian Northern transcontinental railway was completed in Edmonton, sparking economic development and trade union expansion, but also deepening poverty and misery in the city due to harsh working conditions.
The Grand Trunk Pacific, Canada’s third transcontinental railway at the time, reached Edmonton in 1909. Union locals of railway carmen, machinists and maintenance of way workers were formed as a direct result of the establishment and growth of the railway industry. In addition, unions of blacksmiths, tailors, barbers and teamsters – drivers of horse teams for delivery and other purposes – were established in the broader local workforce as a result of the railway-generated economic activity. Railway construction to the west of Edmonton in the years following 1905 attracted unskilled “navvies.”
Either passing through to the worksites or using the city as a refuge during times of unemployment, these workers inhabited shantytowns of tents and shacks in the east end near the railway tracks. Diseases such as diphtheria and typhoid were common in the shantytowns.
Solidarity, 1906
The Edmonton Trades and Labour Council - forerunner of the Edmonton and District Labour Council - received its charter of incorporation from the American Federation of Labor. The council was originally established on 16 January 1903. The decision to apply for a charter from the AFL was taken at a 2 December 1905 meeting attended by representatives of the plumbers, typographers, lathers, bricklayers and carpenters. The chair of the meeting and the first president of the chartered council was J.A. Kinney, president of the Edmonton local of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and the city’s first labour alderman in 1914.
The Edmonton Trades and Labour Council, like other city-based labour councils across the country, provided a meeting place for workers from a variety of craft-based unions to share their experiences as workers and to pursue their collective interests. Besides intervening in municipal politics to advance a labour agenda, the trades and labour council mediated local disputes among its members and organized picnics, lectures and the occasional concert. The Edmonton and District Labour Council continues this tradition today. Among many other activities, it hosts an annual Labour Day picnic for the city’s unemployed.
Edmonton's underground coal miners, 1908
The United Mine Workers of America made the first of many futile attempts to organize Edmonton miners in 1908 in the face of well-organized employer opposition to union mines.
Like everywhere else in Alberta, coal mining in Edmonton in this era was marked by frequent injury and death, low pay, little or no safety procedures, child labour, miserable living conditions, and disease. Frequently, the miners were at odds with management not only because of conditions of work but also housing, rates of pay, and the practice of "docking" wages for dirty coal.
Miners preferred industrial unions and shared little in common with urban craft unions such as the Railway Brotherhoods. The union that first represented miners in Alberta was the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). Organizers from this American-based union had come from Montana to the Galt mines in Lethbridge in 1897 and led the province’s first coal miners’ strike in an effort to reverse wage cuts. Under attack from the Canadian government and the North-West Mounted Police, the WFM withdrew to focus on American miners.
In 1903 the more moderate United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) resumed the WFM’s former efforts to organize coal miners in Alberta. While optimism prevailed throughout the new province, in 1907, the Alberta government faced a new challenge. A series of labour strikes and a severely cold winter created shortages of coal and drove up fuel prices. The governing Alberta Liberals intervened with the federal government to bring an end to the strikes. Canada’s future prime minister Mackenzie King, then a junior official in the federal government’s Labour office, mediated an end to the dispute and workers won a wage increase and recognition of limited union rights. As a result of the conflict, King drafted the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act (I.D.I.A.), which forbade strikes or lock-outs in coal mines or public utilities for 60 days to allow a board to investigate the dispute and make non-binding recommendations to the two sides.
The new legislation was a bonus for mineowners and an obstacle to successful unionism. The best weapon in labour’s hands was a surprise strike, which might force an employer to bargain seriously. Companies had at their disposal many avenues to break strikes by their workers. Companies could employ new immigrants that they could use as strikebreakers; openly fire and blacklist union organizers and supporters; and force men to sign contracts that obligated them to never join a union before they were hired. Most important, companies could depend on the militia and the North West Mounted Police to smash picket lines and harass strikers and their families. With the IDIA in effect, a union had to give 60 days notice of a strike, time enough to employ strikebreakers who signed non-union oaths; if the union struck in violation of the IDIA, the company could call in the NWMP immediately to arrest the union leaders and either force the miners back to work or give their jobs to replacement workers.
In May, 1908, UMWA organizers set out to establish Local 2540 at the Standard Coal Company in Edmonton. The company refused to talk about wages or the appalling working conditions, forcing all sides to turn to the I.D.I.A. to mediate the impasse. A board of conciliation was struck that was composed of Frank Sherman representing the union, Frank B. Smith sitting for the company and Mr. Justice Taylor serving as chairman. Before a report by the board could be turned in, a settlement by the union with the Standard Coal Company was reached that made some changes in working conditions but left wages below the proposed rate. This resulted in the UMWA membership losing their confidence in the union leadership. Several workers staged an unauthorized walkout, sabotaging the agreement.
Working in a boom-and-bust town: Meatpackers and garment workers, 1911
Before the First World War the Edmonton economy underwent a short-lived boom period. In 1911 the local economy surged, driven in large part by real estate speculation. The inevitable crash came just two short years later in 1913. In its wake, this speculative economy brought with it new investment in the garment and packinghouse industries. These early businesses made up a large part of the early industrial base of the city.
Early packinghouses provided Edmonton’s working class with its firsttaste of mass production. The workers who were hired at this time weremainly eastern European immigrants. Plants like Swifts and Burnsexerted a high degree of control over the production process, and as aresult over workers’ lives. The company controlled the speed of theassembly line and workers had to adjust their rate of work or theycould be pulled from the line. Perhaps the most resented aspect ofemployer control was the “shape up” – the foreman would meet withworkers every morning and pick and choose who would work that day andwho wouldn’t. Sometimes workers with years of experience would bereplaced by a new employee or by someone who had gained managementfavour. Such control inevitably led to attempts to unionize. Companiesvigorously opposed such attempts, by intimidation of union organizers,refusal to negotiate contracts, and strikebreaking. It wasn’t untilthe 1940s that unions found a permanent home in these industries.
Unlike the packinghouse industry, Edmonton's garment workers wereableto form unions as early as 1911. The Great Western GarmentCompany(GWG) was the first unionized mass production workplace in thegarmentindustry. Local 120 of the United Garment Workers of Americawasestablished with only seven initial members (the minimum numberneededto receive a charter). Women made up the vast majority of workersinthe garment industry. Jobs in a garment factory weregendersegregated with women's jobs paying far less than male jobs intheindustry; the only management opportunity was that of forelady. GWGdidnot oppose the union mainly because the company wanted to usethe"union made" label on their clothing. The company saw this asanadvantage to attract sales from other unionized workers.
Few other workplaces in the garment industry were unionized at this time.Despitethis, the presence of the GWG union helped to set a standardfor wagesand working conditions in non-union workplaces within thegarmentindustry. The union helped these women achieve much higher wagelevelsthan their female counterparts within the service industries.
Edmonton's sewer workers go on strike, 1912
The Industrial Workers of the World organized a strike of 250 sewer construction workers in 1912.
On September 27, 250 sewer construction workers went on strike in an effort to increase their wages from thirty to thirty-five cents an hour. The City of Edmonton had countered their demand by proposing that the sewer construction workers work nine hours a day instead of eight with the existing hours paid at the old rate, but with the additional hours to be paid at the rate of forty-five cents. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), also known as the “Wobblies,” became involved in the dispute after the strike was called.
Formed in Chicago in 1905, the IWW focused on organizing unskilled labour. Women in sweatshops, immigrants, ditch-diggers, and harvest workers were welcome in the IWW. Big Bill Haywood, a leader of the IWW who had come out of the Western Federation of Miners, said the Wobblies would go “down into the gutter to get at the mass of workers and bring them up to a decent plane of living.”
In an era before instant communication, the Wobblies organized a unique mode of communication: they organized marching bands that walked from one work site to another. At each work site, the band would halt, organizers would make speeches and sing IWW songs, informing workers that there was a strike in progress and that they should lay down tools.
Because of the IWW’s reputation as a radical labour organization, the City of Edmonton ordered that the militia be ready in case it was needed to put down disturbances arising from the strike of the sewer construction workers. To counter the Wobblies’ roving and singing pickets, police were stationed at the work sites in an effort to intimidate the strikers. In one instance, the police arrested the secretary of the IWW Edmonton local, Gus Larsen, and charged him with vagrancy.
While the strike lasted only five days, and the men returned to work on the city's terms, the IWW continued to organize unemployed workers in Edmonton. The Wobblies mobilized transient workers, organized demonstrations, meetings, marches on city hall and sit-ins at two downtown churches.
The first civic union, 1916
Edmonton’s inside workers led the way in creating continuing trade unions for municipal employees.
The trade union movement expanded during the First World War, with many workers joining to win wage increases that would counter the effects of wartime inflation. Wartime profiteering, largely unchecked by government action, fuelled the inflation. Fear of dismissal and blacklisting had prevented most unskilled and semi-skilled workers from joining unions in peacetime, but wartime labour shortages emboldened many workers.
Edmonton city labourers were among the first general municipal workers to join the rapidly expanding labour movement. Although the 1912 strike by city labourers had failed, the city’s inside workers led a new union effort in 1916. This time it was successful.
After negotiating a first contract, the inside workers were issued a charter by the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada (TLC) as the Civic Employees Federal Union No. 30 on May Day, 1917. Their successful negotiation of a contract sparked other inside and municipal employees to form unions, including city hall staff, police, fire fighters, teamsters, electricians, and street railway workers.
Working for votes; Elmer Roper and his contemporaries in 1917
The Edmonton District and Labour Council created the Labour Representation League in 1917 to field working-class candidates for all levels of government. The League, opposing the federal government’s plans to use conscription to fill military ranks, called for conscription of wealth before conscription of men could be considered for the war effort.
In its early years, the Edmonton and District Labour Council had limited its political activity to lobbying governments for legislation favourable to the working class. In civic politics, it called for an extension of the franchise, then restricted to property owners, to tenants. It also called for civic spending to be better apportioned among the areas of the city so that all social classes received civic services. Further it requested that the city provide contracts, as much as possible, only to unionized contractors paying union rates.
In provincial politics, a key goal was the hiring of more inspectors so that provincial labour laws were better enforced. In federal politics the EDLC wanted more restrictions on the rate of immigration to the country. It feared the unemployment of its members and the upper hand that employers experienced when there was a surplus of hungry workers anxious to take jobs at whatever wages were on offer.
As it became clear that the non-labour politicians were unwilling to accede to any of these demands, the young labour movement became increasingly interested in supporting candidates who supported labour’s political platform. From 1912 to 1916, in Edmonton, the EDLC endorsed a number of individual candidates. It exercised no control over the behaviour of these candidates once elected and was sometimes disappointed with the positions taken by labour candidates who had been elected to council.
By 1917, labour was far more radical in Edmonton than it had been a decade earlier when the EDLC agreed to join the Edmonton Board of Trade. In common with other workers across the country, Edmonton workers resented the unequal sacrifice that various social classes experienced during the First World War. Young workers and farmers were risking their lives in combat overseas and dying in huge numbers. Meanwhile capitalists were earning huge profits from munitions contracts and from the exploitation of wartime labour shortages, pushing up prices well beyond most workers’ ability to cope. When Prime Minister Robert Borden announced in 1917 that his government would conscript young men into combat because the voluntary system had not produced all the recruits that the government wanted, organized labour was aghast. Many labour organizations in western Canada, including the EDLC, argued that conscription of wealth in wartime should precede conscription of people. They wanted the state to operate the major industries during wartime, end war profiteering and insure that price increases ceased to rise faster than wages.
Elmer Roper, a printer who had been one of those responsible for convincing the Calgary Labour Council to establish a Labour Representation League (LRL) earlier that year, had moved to Edmonton in 1917 and convinced the EDLC to establish a similar organization.
A pre-party organization, the league would draw up platforms for the various levels of government, and endorsed candidates who ran on its platform and agreed to be accountable to fulfil their election promises. The league was responsible for nominating anti-conscription candidates for Edmonton during the federal election that year. Though voters failed to elect these candidates, the EDLC, along with the provincial labour movement, was increasingly committed to the idea of direct labour involvement in politics.
The Winnipeg General Strike echoes in Edmonton, 1919
1919 was a year of labour radicalism in Edmonton. It was marked by a month-long sympathy strike with Winnipeg’s General Strike, the first teachers’ strike in Alberta, the establishment of the Civil Service Association of Alberta (CSA, forerunner of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees), and the creation of a labour newspaper, the Edmonton Free Press, which, in various incarnations, survived until 1953.
Workers in Edmonton, like workers in all countries that had fought in the First World War, were radicalized by the glaring imbalances between the sacrifices of soldiers and workers, on the one hand, and massive profiteering by wealthy capitalists on the other. At war’s end, workers whose purchasing power had fallen during the war were determined to regain their former standard of living. Many had been inspired by the Russian Revolution to believe that the capitalist system could and should be overthrown, while others merely sought reforms within the existing system, particularly the right to bargain collectively with employers by joining unions of their own choosing. Political and economic elites were prepared to fight both revolution and reform.
A variety of activities in the city reflected the new spirit of worker militancy. On March 19, employees of the provincial government banded together in the Civil Service Association. On April 12, the Edmonton Trades and Labour Council (the ETLC) launched a weekly newspaper, which it called the Edmonton Free Press. On May 26, the ETLC called a general strike of Edmonton workers in solidarity with Winnipeg’s strikers who had virtually shut down their city from May 15 onwards in an effort to force metal shop and building trades employees to bargain with Allied Trades Councils. Finally, on October 9, 1919, Edmonton’s school teachers, members of the Alberta Teachers’ Alliance, launched a six-day strike for better wages, the first teachers’ strike in the history of the province.
The Edmonton Free Press was labour’s answer to what was perceived as hostile coverage of labour issues in the two daily papers, the Edmonton Journal, and the Edmonton Bulletin. By the end of 1919, the Free Press editor was Elmer Roper, a former printer at the Journal who had decided to establish his own printing business. A year later, Roper persuaded the Alberta Federation of Labour, which he served as secretary-treasurer, to make the paper the voice of all of Alberta labour. While the paper kept its headquarters in the capital city, its name changed to Alberta Labour News. In 1935, in the face of a crushing defeat for the political labour movement, the newspaper changed its name once again to People’s Weekly in an effort to reach beyond the labour movement and to unite social democrats in the province. The paper became the official organ of the CCF before the 1944 election and continued in operation, always under Roper’s editorship, until declining subscriptions forced its shutdown in 1953.
Just as the new newspaper reflected the desire of the ETLC to educate its membership regarding labour values, the general strike movement reflected a widespread feeling among labour activists in the post-war period that only a militant rank-and-file movement could scare reluctant capitalists and governments to grant collective bargaining rights to workers.
Edmonton’s general strike lasted from May 26 to June 25, when the Winnipeg strike was called off after police violence against strikers and the arrest of strike leaders had discouraged strikers from continuing their struggle. Government workers only struck for a few days before returning to work rather than facing employer threats of dismissal. But metal workers, forestry employees, brewing workers, teamsters, laundry workers and railway employees, along with a minority of building trades workers, all stayed out the full month of the sympathy strike.
While employers and the provincial government denounced the rise of labour militancy, it yielded results for workers. The teachers’ strike encouraged the school board to offer a slightly larger pay package. The government decided that it had little option but to recognize the CSA. Complaints about exploitation of women workers led to the passage of a Minimum Wage Act affecting only women; the minimum wages prescribed were quite minimal indeed, but it was a beginning of recognition of state responsibility to insure that workers were not exploited by employers.
Waitresses strike in downtown cafรฉs, 1923
The Edmonton local of the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union launched a strike against four cafés that wanted to cut waitresses’ wages by 27.5 percent, and won major concessions from three of the café owners.
The 1920s were a time of both labour unrest and agitation by women in Canada for reform. Edmonton and Alberta were no exception. On the one hand, there were the middle-class suffragettes, including women like Judge Emily Murphy, the first British Empire woman police magistrate who went on to play a key role in the Persons Case of 1929, as one of the Famous Five. The United Farm Women of Alberta (UFWA) campaigned for a number of measures seen as radical in their time, including a minimum wage for women, mothers’ allowances, homesteads for women, married women’s property rights, and a bureau of children’s welfare. Irene Parlby, former president of the UFWA, became Alberta’s first woman Cabinet minister, though always Minister Without Portfolio, from 1921 to 1935, when the United Farmers of Alberta formed the provincial government. She championed the UFWA’s causes but she was largely unable to convince her colleagues to improve existing legislation that affected women.
While working-class women supported many of the demands of the UFWA, they had political demands of their own and engaged in trade union struggles to improve the lives of working women. Typical was Senefta Rybka, a Ukrainian immigrant, waitress, and member of the recently formed Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union. Senefta was married to Gregory Kizyma, himself a Canmore coal miner and activist in the coal miners\\'' union. Both went on to become involved with the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association. Senefta was also active in the Canadian Peace Congress and the Voice of Women when she later returned to her home community of Calgary.
At the same time groups such as the Radical Women’s Labour League (RWLL), which had been established in 1919 to support the general strike movement, had small locals across Alberta. The RWLL, which later affiliated with the Communist Party, advocated prison reform, old-age pensions, civil rights, and equal pay, and access to birth control information. The Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire and Women’s Christian Temperance Union opposed it, and it also had its clashes with the non-communist wing of the Canadian Labour Party.
Women’s work outside the home was carefully circumscribed in this decade. Generally only single women worked at careers, and then only until they married. Only three per cent of married women worked outside the home; the civil service fired women when they married. Single women could not get access to relief, unless they could prove that no family member or friend could support them, and married women had to have children in order to qualify for relief. When they did work, women were directed into jobs considered “interest” and suitable to their disposition and temperament – domestic work, food services, nursing, teaching, and office work. Even trade unions were often hostile to women. The Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, before the First World War, had been open to bartenders, who were invariably men at the time. The union only opened its doors to women when prohibition during the war temporarily put an end to the occupation of bartender.
In 1919, F.E. Harrison, the federal government’s fair wage officer, who was a member of the federal Mathers Commission looking into labour unrest across the country, conceded “that it was impossible to his mind that any girl could live and remain decent on $9 per week ...”. He was referring to factory wages but his comments certainly applied equally to restaurant staff. Jean MacWilliams, the wife of a returned soldier, captured the plight faced by workers when she asked the Commission: “What is the use of a minimum wage if there is no Maximum to the price of commodities?”
In 1923, the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union called a strike against four café owners who were demanding wage concessions of 27.5%. The Edmonton local of the union offered a 10 percent cut and after 39 days settled with three of the café owners for a cut of 12.5%. The fourth used non-union strike-breakers and was still strike- bound after five months.
The strike came after a period of gains for waitresses who had managed, in the 1916 to 1922 period, through a combination of earlier strikes and strong negotiating, to reduce their work week to 48 hours over six days and to increase wages to $25 a week.
The first strike in 1916 had involved 53 men and women in four cafes, in the words of William Peebles HREU, business agent, “fighting to establish working conditions whereby our members, who work seven days a week, 365 days in a year, with no holidays, have a little time for recreation and a living wage”. They asked for a $1 increase per week for female dishwashers, to $8 week, and a 50 cents increase for waitresses, to $10 a week. In that strike, two restaurants settled after two months and two others brought in scabs and kept operating.
Restaurant staff worked nine to ten hours per day, often in split shifts. They were frequently paid by cheques that had to be cashed at the till at which point the restaurant owner would take some money back for room and board: for example, $5 for a cot in the basement in dark, dirty and non-segregated quarters. Others doled out the pay at $1 or 2 at a time. Waitresses were expected to run in order to increase the speed at which diners would cycle through the restaurant, increasing profits for the owners. The efforts of middle-class women fighting for abstract rights didn’t mean much to these women, although they were often assisted by these suffragists when they were on strike through soup kitchens, pickets and other supports.
A rally for Edmonton's coal miners on May Day, 1923
The early 1920s was a period of considerable labour unrest in the mining industry.
The return of soldiers, a new wave of immigration, and falling demand for coal created a volatile situation. Coal companies wanted to maintain the high profit rates of the war period. As prices fell they cut labour costs. Miners had made compromises in the interests of the war and were in no mood to make more.
Through this period, the population of the Prairies had grown faster than any other part of the country as workers migrated west in search of work. By 1921 the Prairies accounted for almost 22 per cent of Canada’s population, up from only eight per cent twenty years earlier. These workers came from less prosperous areas of Canada, as well as from European countries. Miners came from other mining areas, such as the Ukraine, Italy, Wales and Scotland. Some moved west from the coal fields of Cape Breton where company repression of the miners and their families was fierce.
Labour activism in the mines was also intense during this period with the Industrial Workers of the World, the One Big Union and the less militant United Mine Workers of America vying amongst themselves and other smaller unions for the hearts and minds of the miners. Alberta had more Communists than any province other than Ontario, and owners and governments used the fear of Bolshevism to bolster their justification for suppressing labour unrest.
Across Canada unions had just come through years of growth, reaching a membership of 378,000 by 1919. The absence of work, along with the punitive practices of governments and owners, had reduced these numbers to only 261,000 by 1924. Coal was one of the areas of labour growth as the unions, and in particular the U.S.-based United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) signed up miners from different background using materials in their own language to create a connection. Many of these workers had come from areas where unions already existed and had a favourable impression of the advantages of membership. The more radical alternative of joining the OBU was denied the workers in 1920 when the federal government passed an order-in-council that made the OBU illegal in the coal fields and transferred the membership of its adherents to the UMWA.
Edmonton itself was in the centre of a large coal area, stretching from Pembina to Tofield, and north to St. Albert and Morinville by 1922. Production was 12,000 tonnes per day, employing some 3,600 men. In the subsequent three years concern about damage to terrain where other industries were developing and population growth continued apace forced the closure of all but four mines within the city’s boundaries. Coal mine operators were also less interested in operating in an area where labour and community solidarity could be marshalled in support of striking miners.
In the early 1920s mine owners cut wages by 35 to 50 percent, locking out those who would not accept the pay cuts. While the miners had accepted pay cuts in 1919 in the belief that they would recoup the losses in subsequent years, they were unwilling to accept any further cuts.
Miners had also been frustrated and disappointed by the results of the Alberta Coal Mining Industry Commission of 1919. While supposedly established to deal with the issues of both owners and workers, the Commission spent far more time on those of the owners. In the end only four of twelve recommendations dealt with the conditions and concerns of the miners. Racism played a part in this process as Commission members were clearly not interested in the concerns of miners then known as "enemy aliens." This racism prevailed through much of society and resulted in more restrictive immigration, including the passing of the Immigration Act (1922-1923) and Chinese Immigration Act of 1923, which severely limited entry from countries other than England and France.
Miners were also frustrated by the unsafe conditions in their workplaces. Typical was the presentation at the Commission’s hearings by S. Centazzo, an unemployed miner from Edmonton. At 23 years old he had been working in the mines for 15 years and had been blacklisted by the mine owners for his union activities, making it almost impossible to find work. His testimony focused on the safety concerns in the mines and the living conditions of the miners. He indicated that the miners were not even receiving the basics to which they were entitled: “hot water to wash themselves, heated washhouses as they come off shift and drying boxes to dry their clothes”. He also pleaded for simple health and safety improvements to decrease the likelihood of injury or death on the job, all too frequent occurrences. He suggested that “miners be allowed to carry small electric lamps in their pockets as a safety precaution in case of an explosion to help them get out of the mine”. He also proposed that “[t]here should be in each mine – inside the mine – in every section or two sections a couple of blankets and an ambulance … in case of accidents.” In an accident in Drumheller, he “had to go and take a board, full of nails, and take the nails out and then carry him out on that board.” 1
1 It is worth noting here that occupational health andsafety issues has continued as a major thrust of union activity rightthrough to today when workplace deaths and accidents continue as amajor cause of death among working age Canadians, especially youngworkers. Governments and employers continue to ignore the significanceof these issues.\r\n
The 1923 agreement between the miners and Lakeside Coals Ltd. at Wabumum, west of Edmonton is indicative of what mine workers could expect. The following rates of pay work out to between $27 and $50 dollars a week for 12-hour days, 7 days a week:
Pick Miners 75 cents per ton
Loaders 50 cents per ton
Timber & track 55 cents per hour
Timber 40 cents per set for lining sets in entry
Timber 40 cents per set for lining in machine room
Yardage 60 cents per yard in entrys
Clay 40 cents per car
Slack in entrys 20 cents per ton
Drivers 50 cents per hour
Pushers 50 cents per hour
Laborers 40 cents per hour
Conditions in Edmonton appeared elsewhere in Alberta, across Canada, and internationally. In an effort to strengthen their capacity to resist, miners linked in alliances with other workers. In 1923, when Nova Scotia mine worker leader, J.B. McLachlan, was arrested on trumped-up charges, the Labor Church of Edmonton was one of the first to pass a resolution condemning the heavy-handed actions of the government and police in a letter to the federal justice minister.
It was the deplorable situations of all coal miners that led workers and their supporters in Edmonton to demonstrate their solidarity in a show of numbers in the 1923 May Day Parade. May Day had long been celebrated by workers around the world as a day of international solidarity. At a time when coal miners were under attack in Edmonton, Alberta and elsewhere, the workers of Edmonton and their families and friends showed them they were not alone in their struggles.
Electing Labour MLAs to the Alberta Legislature, 1926
Edmonton voters elected teacher C.L. Gibb to the Alberta legislature in 1926. Gibb was the first provincial member from the city elected on a Labour ticket.
After World War One, Alberta unions, having created Labour Representation Leagues during the war, decided to form a provincial labour party. The Dominion Labour Party (DLP) was formed at a convention that took place just after the Alberta Federation of Labour convention in 1919. Though its locals were open to both union affiliates and individuals, the party leadership and the leadership of the trade union movement overlapped considerably. Most of the individuals whom the party nominated for elected office were active trade unionists, almost always with blue-collar occupations.
In 1921, the Dominion Labour Party was transformed into the Alberta section of the Canadian Labour Party, a party which the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada had sponsored but from which it quickly dissociated itself in favour of labour non-partisanship. The Canadian Labour Party was committed both to immediate reforms of benefit to labour - richer workmen’s compensation, social insurance programs, legal recognition of collective bargaining, the granting of government contracts only to unionized contractors, and the like - and to gradual conversion from capitalism to an economy under social ownership.
Four Labour members were elected to the Alberta legislature in 1921, but none of the Labour members were elected in Edmonton. At the time Edmonton was one constituency for provincial voting but with five seats. The five highest vote getters took the seats. Labour’s candidates won about a third of the vote in the city, but won no seats. In 1926, by contrast, a complicated preferential ballot determined who would represent Edmonton’s citizens. As less popular candidates were eliminated, the second choices of their voters were added to the count for candidates still in the race with the eventual top five vote-getters carrying the five seats. While Labour’s support had not markedly increased in Edmonton by 1926, Gibb, as a school teacher, appeared to be able to win more second-ballot supporters than the blue-collar union officials and workers who made up the rest of the Labour ticket that year. He was re-elected in 1930 but died before the provincial election of 1935. That year, no Labour candidate in the province was able to withstand the Social Credit landslide; indeed none of them, including incumbents, won a respectable vote that year.
Labour’s performance in the legislature was controversial. While urban members like Gibb defended the legislative program of the AFL and tried to convince the United Farmers of Alberta government to implement labour’s wishes, the Canadian Labour Party was often viewed as too closely tied to the UFA. The moderate wing believed that farmer-labour cooperation was necessary and insisted that it had wrung important concessions from the Canadian Labour Party, including a higher minimum wage for women workers, improvements in workmen’s compensation, and the awarding of many government contracts to unionized contractors. But radicals insisted that the Farmers government was right-wing and anti-labour, and suggested that their own party’s right-wing had sold out to the UFA in return for patronage appointments to a variety of government boards.
Dan Knott for Mayor, 1931
Edmonton elected the Canadian Labour Party (CLP) candidate for mayor, Dan Knott, and a CLP majority on council, including Margaret Crang, Labour’s first woman councilor in1931.
The election of the Labour mayor and council in Edmonton represented the highest point of labour power in the city but soon exposed the lack of sophistication and perhaps “bourgeois corruption” of a section of Edmonton’s labour leaders. Labour’s electoral support in the city had been stuck at about a third during the 1920s, enough to elect one or more councilors in each of the annual elections that filled half the seats on Edmonton’s council at the time. But mass unemployment and poverty during the Depression radicalized Edmonton workers, and over half the electorate voted for a Labour mayor and a Labour council in 1931. The CLP candidates decried the job and wage cuts promulgated by the right-wing city administration in power in the early Depression years. They promised a program of public works to create jobs at union wages, and pledged that they would treat people on relief with greater dignity than the previous administration.
Dan Knott however proved to be a “labour statesman,” that is, a labour politician who was more interested in appeasing the business community than in fulfilling his commitments to the labour movement. More concerned in office about maintaining the city’s credit rating and not having to raise property taxes than about social justice for the unemployed, his administration’s parsimony resulted in several strikes by married men on relief, victims of welfare cuts, and demonstrations by the single unemployed, who had been cut off relief altogether.
Several Labour councilors, including labour lawyer Margaret Crang, Labour’s first woman councilor, opposed him as a turncoat but several supported him, and the combination of their votes and the votes of the right-wingers who survived the municipal elections in 1931, 1932, and 1933, ensured that Labour’s earlier promises would be broken.
Knott’s most controversial decision came in December, 1932, when he succumbed to Premier Brownlee’s request that a planned Hunger March through the city be suppressed. About 12,000 workers were on hand as the RCMP and City Police, at the request of a Farmer premier and a Labour mayor, stopped unemployed workers who wanted to bring their plight and their demands for action to the attention of the premier. Nothing demonstrated the bankruptcy of the alliance between Labour’s political movement and the Farmers government than this incident. Labour survived one more municipal election, but many workers considered Knott and his colleagues to be little better than their business opponents. In 1934, many workers simply failed to vote and, in a light voter turnout, Knott and the Labour councilors were defeated by decisive margins. The Canadian Labour Party never recovered from this rout.
Edmonton's Hunger March, 1932
By 1932 the Depression had created desperation throughout Alberta. In Edmonton, about 15 percent of the population depended upon the modest relief. Many others were unemployed but were too proud to collect relief. Others, if they were not Canadian citizens, dared not apply for assistance because of a federal policy that deported recent immigrants as the penalty for applying for relief. Single men were simply ineligible, and they were expected to go to rural relief camps or to depend upon charitable agencies to house and feed them if they wished to remain in the city.
Farmers in the Edmonton region were scarcely better off. Most grew wheat, and the price that wheat fetched in world markets was below their cost of production. Other products that farmers sold proved similarly unprofitable. Unable to earn an income, farmers, most of whom were in debt to financial institutions, faced eviction. So did many working-class homeowners who were unable to make their mortgage payments or to pay their property taxes. The provincial government – a Farmers government with Labour support - watched passively as farmers and workers lost their property to profit-hungry banks.
Led by the Communist Party and organizations sympathetic to the Communist Party, an organizing committee prepared for a major “Hunger March” on the Legislature on December 20. Farmers and workers, employed and unemployed, would march from Edmonton’s City Hall to the legislature to demand a meeting with Premier Brownlee to discuss demands for the provincial government to create work at union wages for the unemployed, and to provide other farmers and unemployed people with a decent income and to protect both groups from creditors who might seek to seize their homes or farms.
The provincial government attempted to block the main roads into the city to keep farmers away from the demonstration. But large numbers managed to detour the areas where police were turning back protesters. Mayor Dan Knott refused to grant the protesters a permit to march from City Hall to the legislature; he insisted that the rally in Market Square disperse once speeches had been made. After the rally began, 12,000 people listened to speakers who denounced the UFA government’s kowtowing to capitalists and its betrayal of farmers and workers. When the speeches were over, the Hunger March organizers asked the crowd whether they wished to exercise their democratic right to march to the legislature. The crowd cheered its approval of this plan of action and over 2000 people began to march.
The provincial government, in cooperation with the city administration, had called in a large contingent of the RCMP to prevent the march from occurring. Sharpshooters were seen on the rooftop of the city’s main post office, across the street from Market Square, in case the marchers overwhelmed the police. In short, the UFA government and the CLP mayor were prepared to shoot workers and farmers rather than to allow a peaceful march.
The City Police and RCMP moved on the marchers almost instantaneously, cracking heads and preventing the marchers from leaving the Square in formation. The March dispersed, with organizers mainly concerned to seek medical attention for the wounded. While no arrests were made that day, the next day the RCMP raided the Ukrainian Labour Temple, which served as the headquarters for the Hunger March planning.
Convinced that they would find guns to be used in a revolution, they found only sandwiches that had been prepared to feed out-of-town demonstrators. They arrested 40 individuals, charging them with a variety of crimes, including conspiracy to overthrow the elected government. But the trials of the accused resulted in a massive solidarity campaign that likely helped to persuade the courts to drop most of the charges and to convict only six people, all on minor charges.
The willingness of Dan Knott and some of the councilors to prevent a demonstration divided the Labour council and no doubt contributed to the massive defection by farmers from the CLP to Social Credit in the provincial election of 1935.
Striking for the minimum wage for women in hotel restaurants, 1935
Unemployed workers in Edmonton had been involved in a variety of strikes during the Depression, demanding better treatment from relief authorities. Many of them joined the “On to Ottawa Trek,” which called for the disbandment of the prison-like relief camps and for governments to guarantee workers a job and a living wage.
Various events in 1935 underscored the miserable treatment of both the unemployed and many workers during the Depression. Single men without work received no direct social assistance payments after 1932 when the federal government established relief camps. They could eat whatever food was provided in soup kitchens provided by charitable agencies and sleep in charity-run flophouses that had a space for the night. But this meager existence forced most of them into the relief camps, where they earned only 25 cents a day for their labour in return for food and shelter that was basic but more reliable than what the charities provided.
Unemployed married men received social assistance for their families in the form of vouchers for rent and specific foods at the local groceries in return for performing labour for the city. Single women could only receive social assistance if they could demonstrate that they had no relative or friend capable of attending to their needs.
Many employers took advantage of the large “reserve army of labour” and the desperate conditions in which this reserve army lived to keep wages on offer at very low rates. Though women workers had been covered by minimum-wage provisions since 1920, many employers, particularly restaurant owners, paid wages well below the legislated minimum wage. They were confident that the government, which had cut the number of inspectors, would not prosecute them if it caught them.
Some Edmonton waitresses were earning only $1.50 a week in 1935 when the weekly minimum wage applicable to restaurants was $9.50. Their strike in 1935 involved simply a demand that the provincial minimum wage be respected by their employers. Unemployed male workers, recognizing that the waitresses might be replaced by other desperate young women willing to work for any wage at all, joined their picket lines, making it impossible for diners to go to these restaurants. Though the police arrested many of the waitresses and their supporters, their numbers were simply too strong and popular opinion so much in favour of the waitresses that the strike could not be broken. Most of the restaurant owners eventually acceded to the demands.');
The militancy of the unemployed was evident throughout the Depression. For example, in 1934 the Unemployed Married Men’s Association (UMMA) struck for three weeks to back up demands for a bigger food allowance. Relief camps were hotbeds of political activity, mainly organized by the Communist Party, which was less of a force in UMMA. Efforts to force the federal government to replace work camps with a federal program of “work and union wages” struck a chord with camp inmates and led to the plans for an On-to-Ottawa Trek in 1935.');
The Trek began in Vancouver and picked up marchers who walked and traveled on railway boxcars as they moved towards Ottawa where they planned collectively to present a petition to Prime Minister R. B. Bennett demanding an end to the camps. While the southerly route of the marchers precluded a stop in Edmonton, many Edmontonians joined the trek in Calgary. On Canada Day, 1935, under orders from R. B. Bennett, the RCMP violently turned back the trekkers in Regina.
But while militancy met with repression, it also produced results. The relief rates for families in Edmonton rose to second highest in Canada after the 1934 strike. After Mackenzie King was re-elected prime minister in September 1935, he ordered the abolition of the relief camps, though he did little to provide the "work and wages" that both the Communists and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) demanded.
New labour laws recognize union contracts, 1938
Though Edmonton workers had formed trade unions in western Canada in the early years of the century, unions existed in a legal shadow world. Initially they were regarded as “combinations in restraint of trade,” that is, as monopolies that deprived employers of the right to determine wages and working conditions for individual employees.
Skilled workers managed to form effective unions nonetheless because labour shortages gave capitalists little option. In post-Confederation Canada, as the number of trade unions grew, John A. Macdonald had passed the Trade Union Act which extended a degree of state recognition of the legality of trade unions. But collective bargaining contracts had no legal status, and could only be enforced if a union had enough leverage to prevent management from backing away from an earlier agreement. Practices such as blacklisting union militants, forcing workers to sign employment contracts in which they agreed never to join a union, and cutting wages in violation of a collective agreement were all perfectly legal.
Organized labour fought for legislation to provide a legal status for both unions and the contracts that they negotiated, and to prohibit actions that interfered with workers’ rights to organize and to strike. The new Social Credit government in Alberta, anxious to extend its support among workers, provided at least half a loaf in 1938. The Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act made Alberta the second province after Nova Scotia to legalize collective bargaining and establish machinery for the formal recognition of union locals. Under its provisions, the Alberta Labour Relations Board opened its doors to supervise “recognition votes,” and to serve as an arbiter on issues affecting employers and unions that they could not resolve among themselves.
Alberta’s labour legislation in the era also included: Canada’s first minimum wage for males; the Alberta Tradesmen Qualification Board, which restricted various trades to licensed individuals who had completed recognized apprenticeships; and compulsory membership for teachers in the Alberta Teachers’ Association.
Edmonton's meatpackers join national strike, 1947
By the end of World War Two, meatpacking was the major industrial employer in Edmonton. Emboldened by the shortage of labour during World War Two, Edmonton’s slaughterhouse workers, once unable to surmount employer opposition to unions, finally won union recognition.
The United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) made the breakthrough in the fall of 1943 by establishing its first Edmonton local at the Burns plant. In 1944, UPWA also successfully organized Canada Packers and later also organized the Swifts plant.
The UPWA won a guaranteed minimum workweek of forty hours for its members and a basic national minimum wage of seventy-five cents an hour. By 1945, however, the union called for a national wildcat strike of all Canada Packers plants, citing a violation of the contract by the company. To forestall a national strike the federal government used its wartime powers to take over the plants and placed the issue before a conciliation board.
Although the union failed in 1945 and 1946 to get a national contract, in 1947 it was finally victorious when it called the first national industrial strike in Canadian history outside of the railway industry. In the summer of 1947 a national strike by the UPWA workers employed by the Big Three – Canada Packers, Swifts and Burns--closed Alberta’s meatpacking plants from late August to the end of October.
The major goals of the union were reached with the 1947 agreement and subsequent negotiations focused on improving on principles already won. Workers had forced their employers to accept, however reluctantly, their right to belong to a union that would bargain and sign contracts on their behalf.
The workers’ victory, however, was not popular with Premier Ernest Manning’s Social Credit government. Manning was anxious to please the oil barons who became more interested in Alberta after the oil find at Leduc in February, 1947. He denounced the notion of an industry-wide strike, and charged that union greed, fuelled by Communist ambitions, would choke the province’s economy. A revision of the Alberta Labour Act, presented to the Alberta legislature in March 1948 described meatpacking and coal mining as industries that the Cabinet could, at any time, place under the provisions of the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act. This would allow the government to stall a strike by 60 days. The new Act also made unions and their leaders subject to huge fines when provisions of the Act were violated by union members.
Union drive on Edmonton's Refinery Row, 1951
Certification at Canadian Industries Limited [CIL} created the first long-term union organization in the petroleum industry in Alberta.
Until 1951, Alberta was considered the death valley of unionism in the petroleum industry. The Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) sent Neil Reimer to Edmonton to try to change this image by organizing oil industry workers. He started at British American Oil Company (BA) where he signed up almost two thirds of the workforce, enough for automatic certification without a vote. The Social Credit government ruled that the industry was too new and important to be certified without a vote, allowing the employer time to campaign against the union and intimidate its employees. The certification was lost by 10 votes.
Many BA employees who supported the union quit and went to CIL and Canadian Chemical and helped OCAW to unionize both. That was the breakthrough which led to first a toehold and eventually the virtually complete unionization of the major companies in the refining and manufacturing sectors of the petroleum industry in Alberta.
Oil unionism expands in Edmonton
1954 – The national headquarters of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) is established in Edmonton.
NeilReimer, who had just been named Canadian Director of the OCAW,understood that the entire petrochemical industry relied on the feedstocks from the refineries.
Since Alberta was rapidly becoming amajor source of those feed stocks, Reimer decided to establish theNational Office of the OCAW in Edmonton.
Reimer knew as wellthat the OCAW, if it was to grow and be effective, had to broaden itsjurisdiction. It had to go beyond the refineries to include the growingpetrochemical and manufacturing sector of the industry.
TheCanadian section of the OCAW eventually became autonomous from itsDenver, Colorado headquarters, and through a series of mergers becamethe present-day Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union ofCanada, with 150,000 members from coast to coast.
The creation of the New Democratic Party in Alberta, 1962
Edmonton-based unionist Neil Reimer, the key figure in organizing workers in oil refineries and chemical plants, became the first provincial leader of the New Democratic Party.
Neil Reimer had been involved with the CCF party for many years as a union leader and social activist in Saskatchewan. He had played a role in the formation of the New Democratic Party and understood the importance of strengthening the left in Canadian politics, particularly in Alberta where one conservative party had been entrenched for many years. The national New Democratic Party held its first convention in 1961 and chose T.C. Douglas, CCF premier of Saskatchewan, as its first national leader. The Alberta party decided to hold its first leadership convention in 1962.
Under Reimer's leadership, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW) argued in favour of a strong role for unions in both national and provincial politics. The union granted him a leave of absence along with assurances of financial support when he assumed the leadership of the provincial NDP. Reimer and Ivor Dent re-mortgaged their houses and, along with Grant Notley, traveled throughout Alberta to build and strengthen NDP constituency organizations.
In 1961 Reimer became the president of the fledgling provincial partyand in 1962 the provincial leader. He led the party in two provincialelections, first in 1963 and then in 1967. While the party won 17percent of the vote in the latter election, it failed to elect anymembers, although it had won a by-election earlier that year in theCrowsnest Pass constituency where the votes of retired miners remainedimportant. Shortly after the 1967 election, Reimer, who had donea great deal to strengthen the party organization, decided to return tohis union position.
Grant Notley replaced Reimer at its helm.Reimer remained a life-long New Democrat and an advocate of theimportance of labour as an active participant in politics.
The birth of CUPE in Alberta, 1963
City locals of the National Union of Public Employees and the National Union of Public Service Employees united to create the Canadian Union of Public Employees.
The National Union of Public Employees had its beginnings in Alberta, the brainchild of Pat Lenihan, a well known Calgary labour leader and one-time Calgary alderman. It started out as a fledgling federation of independent civic unions in Alberta and grew to include similar organizations throughout Canada. In 1955 the Trades and Labour Congress of Canada granted it a charter.
The National Union of Public Service Employee, chartered by the rival Canadian Congress of Labour, was based largely in Ontario and was comprised of civic locals in central Canada and to some extent in Quebec. The rationale for two separate unions of employees of municipal governments became questionable when the national labour organizations merged in 1956 to form the Canadian Labour Congress. Mergers of their members gradually became the order of the day.
In 1963, the two public service unions agreed to merge to form the Canadian Union of Public Employees. At the time of merger NUPE had over 28,000 members and NUPSE had about 10,000.
Since then CUPE has grown to become Canada’s largest union with over half a million members in 5,000 locals from Vancouver Island to St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Alberta introduces a stronger health and safety law, 1976
Alberta passed the first comprehensive Occupational Health & Safety Act in the country, after years of union campaigning for the legislation.
In 1976, the first omnibus Occupational Health & Safety Act (R.S.A. 2000 Ch. 0-2) was proclaimed and came into law in the Province of Alberta. Before this, worker health and safety was governed by an array of statutes and regulations, underpinned by the common-law duty of the employer to provide a safe and healthy workplace.
Passage of the Act followed the report of the high-profile Gale Commission of Inquiry, named after its Chairperson, Justice Fred Gale. This nine-person panel was appointed in November 1973, and its Report was tabled in the Legislature in 1975. Two representatives of organized labour in Edmonton had a major influence on its outcome: Neil Reimer, Canadian Director of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union; and Irvin C. Nessel, Business Manager for the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 92, which was also based in Edmonton.
Ever since trade unions had first appeared in Alberta – particularly in the railway trades and the hazardous coal mines -- they had lobbied government for three basic rights which they felt would recognize the dignity of workers and their right to defend themselves against injury, illness and death. These were the Right to Know, the Right to Participate, and the Right to Refuse.
The Gale Commission strongly supported all three ideas, but unfortunately, not all of its recommendations appeared in the legislation that followed a year later.
The Gale Report focused on the need for full participation of an active, educated and motivated workforce in workplace management to make safe work a reality. The prime means for this, said the Commission, would be Joint Worksite Occupational Health and Safety Committee which would be mandated by law for all workplaces over a certain size. Workers and management would be equally represented in all matters, including the selection of co-chairs who would share responsibility for the committee.
Although the commission had said that these committees were “an absolute necessity for all worksites,” the Progressive Conservative government of Peter Lougheed declined to introduce a blanket requirement for them in the new law. Instead, the matter was left by regulation to Minister of Labour Neil Crawford, who chose to designate only 100 workplaces of about 80,000 in the province. The establishment of committees in all others would have to await the results of negotiations for collective agreements and other voluntary initiatives. Ultimately Alberta would be the only province in Canada that would decline to make some form of joint health and safety committee mandatory.
The 1976 Act provided for a very limited set of rights and obligations under the Right to Know. Specific requirements for warning labels, material safety data sheets, and education on workplace hazards, methods of control, and remedial action did not appear until more than a decade later, in the form of the Federal Workplace Hazards Information System (WHMIS) – and then only because federal legislation required it. The 1987 revisions to the Alberta Act and its Chemical Hazards Regulations left much to be desired, according to labour spokespersons.
Perhaps one of the strongest and most welcome provisions in the newlegislation was S.27, which not only allowed, but actually requiredemployees to refuse work if they believed “on reasonable and probablegrounds” that it posed an “imminent danger” to their health and safetyor that of their fellow employees. It also set out detailed proceduresand employer requirements for responding to such a refusal, with anappeal procedure to an independent tribunal that allowed a review ofunresolved complaints.
What the Act did not contain was aprovision to address the main barrier to workers who needed to exercisetheir right. Employees feared reprisals for refusing to work, as wellas the prospect that their decision might not be supported by theirfellow workers. A section has been added since 1976 to address thisbarrier to worker exercise of their Right to Refuse. As well, decisionsof the review panel, backed by a decision of the Court of Queen'sBench, have firmly established that, for the right to refuse to meananything at all, workers must be vigilantly guarded against any threatof discipline. Even with these assurances, however, Alberta's workersrarely assert this right.
The public sector strikes, 1980
A wave of massive public sector strikes against the Alberta government produced some of the first blows against government policies that had prolonged the effect of the federal wage and price controls of 1976.
The General Service Strike in the summer of 1980 was the first major industrial action to be taken by Alberta government employees. They had been made the object of an experiment in “permanent exceptionalism’; i.e., provincial legislation that excluded them from a system of collective bargaining which had been enshrined in federal and provincial Acts following the Second World War.');
Bill 41, the Public Service Employee Relations Act passed by the Progressive Conservative Government of Peter Lougheed had not only imposed a blanket ban on strikes by provincial employees; it also subjected them to a regime of compulsory arbitration that clearly favoured the employer. Worse yet, many of these workers had voted for Lougheed in 1971, because of a solemn promise that he would restore full collective bargaining rights to all public sector employees.
The government set the stage for a strike late in 1979, when it announced wage and salary guidelines of seven per cent and nine per cent for the new two-year collective agreement that would be negotiated in the spring of 1980. Coincidentally, these same MLAs had just voted themselves a salary increase of 47 per cent but when asked to explain this inconsistency, the Provincial Treasurer simply said, “I think you are talking about apples and oranges.”
Infuriated by this remark, AUPE immediately launched an Apples and Oranges campaign that led into the longest strike in its 60-year history. The “wildcat” began on July 2, 1980, when hundreds of employees of the Alberta Liquor Control Board walked off the job. They were followed five days later by more than 1,000 correctional officers across the province, joined by social workers, trades workers, health care workers and other personnel in those institutions.
On July 16, hundreds of administrative support workers from Land Titles, Law Courts, Transportation, Alberta Health Care Insurance Commission and other government departments joined the wildcat action. By July 18, this number had swelled to over 4,000. Even more government employees joined the picket line in towns and cities across the province after Justice William Sinclair of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench found six Correctional Officers guilty of contempt of court on July 22.
Despite dire threats of punishment from government officials, picket lines held firm until the union told it workers to return to work on July 18. On July 28, President John Booth explained at a news conference that this return signified an expression of faith and a test of government’s willingness to negotiate.
The object of this strike, the Public Service Employees Relations Act, contained several provisions that severely restricted the collective bargaining rights of employees of the Government of Alberta, as well as its boards and agencies. It contained severe restrictions to free collective bargaining, the first of which was a blanket ban on strikes on all employees covered by the Act, completely turning back the clock on a national pattern of legislation which recognized that productive bargaining cannot take place in the absence of a right to strike.
Affected workers were ordered to submit differences that arose in negotiations to a compulsory arbitration process that appeared to be totally rigged against them. Arbitrators appointed under the Act, for example, were required to consider “general economic conditions” and other specific conditions that suited the government’s purpose; “to ensure that wages and benefits are fair and reasonable to the employees and employer and are in the best interest of the public.”
The labour relations board was also empowered to determine which disputed items were arbitral, and which were to be left with the employer to unilaterally decide. These included items that are most central to the historical fight of unions to protect their members; i.e., the organization of work, the assignment of duties and the determination of the number of employees of an employer, systems of job evaluation and the allocation of individual jobs and positions within the systems, selection, appointment, promotion, training or transfer and pensions.
When the penalties were first introduced in 1977, to enforce the Public Service Employees Relations Act, they were unprecedented in their size and severity, including fines of up to $1,000 a day for trade unions or for persons not in an officer or representative position, and $10,000 a day for officers and representatives of a union. Of course, contempt of court proceedings could be and were added to enforcement.
In addition restrictions on the scope of employees who were eligible for union membership went far beyond those found in most jurisdictions, which normally exclude those exercising managerial functions or employed in a confidential capacity in labour relations matters. The additional list of excluded employees began with persons employed in: the Legislative Assembly Office, the Office of the Auditor General, the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, the office of the Ombudsman, the Legislative Counsel Office of the Department of the Attorney General, and the Executive Council.
The 1980 strike ended a period of labour history that proved to be a watershed for public sector labour relations. Up to that time, legislative restriction of trade union rights had been primarily directed at public sector workers on a case-by-case basis. However, in 1976, the Liberal administration of Pierre Elliot Trudeau effectively threw into question the whole pluralist framework established for collective bargaining in Canada in the post-war era when he invoked a regime of comprehensive wage and price controls under the infamous Anti-Inflation Board, effectively suspending free collective bargaining for 2.3 million workers in private firms over a certain size and as many as two million in the private sector. In many ways, the strike of Alberta government employees provided a preview of a generation of embittered labour relations to follow.
The 24-hour lockouts in the construction industry
The international recession that began in late 1981 led to a major fall-off in economic activity in Alberta’s oilpatch. Employment in the construction industry fell precipitously and contractors, covered by collective agreements, took steps to take advantage of the unemployed construction workers and nullify all collective agreements in the industry. One tactic became known as the 24-Hour Lockout.
Normally, expired contracts remain in effect until a new contract has been negotiated. In the early 1980s construction contractors simply refused to negotiate new contracts, and twenty-four hours after an old contract had expired, they declared that no collective contract existed with their employees. The employers then reduced wages and benefits for construction workers. The Conservative Government in Alberta, despite many requests from the unions, refused to make this anti-union policy illegal in the province.
The province also refused to prosecute construction contractors who set up “spinoff companies” and transferred work from their unionized firms to their new non-unionized firms. Though the new firms were simply “dummy firms” established with the sole purpose of negating an existing collective bargaining contract, the government maintained that they were legal entities. Indeed it proposed new legislation that would establish their legality beyond a doubt. Under union pressure it withdrew the new legislation, but it refused to prosecute any of the firms that had established spinoffs.
The outcome of the contractors’ two initiatives was that all collective agreements in the construction industry were terminated. Unemployed construction workers found themselves at the mercy of the contractors for wages, benefits and conditions. Although the construction unions made a partial recovery with the return of better economic times in the 1990s, both the 24-hour lockout and the spinoff policies are still in use by many contractors at the beginning of the 21st century.
The Dandelions take root, 1984 - 1985
Edmonton’s unemployed construction workers responded to tough times in the mid-1980s with a feisty protest group, the Dandelions.
When thousands of construction workers found themselves unemployed and with no prospect of work during the long recession of the 1980s, they realized that their union representatives were fighting an uphill battle to restore collective bargaining in the construction industry. The unemployed began to have small meetings with various politicians of all levels of government. Eventually those small meetings became very large meetings, sometimes with hundreds of unemployed workers participating.
They developed an organizational structure and began to refer to themselves as the Dandelions. Dandelions, they noted, were tough weeds that defied efforts to uproot them; construction unionists, they warned governments and employers, would also resist any efforts to remove them from the landscape. The Dandelions were synonymous with grassroots unemployed construction workers. Their signs on lawns and in windows throughout Edmonton reminded city residents of the unfair practices that construction contractors were employing, with government support, to destroy free collective bargaining in the construction industry.
Although the Dandelions failed to convince the government to legislate against spinoffs and 24-hour lock-outs – see the previous article, regarding 1983 – they were able to convince some contractors to negotiate collective agreements with their workers.
The Dandelions provided a worthwhile voice for unemployed workers at a time when all workers in Alberta badly needed some support. Exposing the government's complicity with anti-union contractors contributed to the major defeat that the Conservatives suffered in Edmonton and areas in the provincial elections of 1986 and 1989, mainly to the benefit of the New Democrats.
Trouble on 66th Street: the Gainers strike, 1986
A six-month strike by the United Food and Commercial Workers local at Gainers meat-packing plant led to the employment of replacement workers and the police repression of strikers. The treatment of strikers enraged the city’s workforce and focused national attention on Alberta’s labour laws.
On June 1, 1986 1,100 workers at the Gainers meatpacking plant – members of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 280P – went on strike. The strike, which lasted for six and a half months and saw the arrest of over 400 union members and their supporters, was one of the most bitter labour disputes in Alberta’s history.
The main issue going into the strike was wage parity with other meatpacking plants in Canada. Peter Pocklington, the company owner, refused the proposal, arguing that wage parity would make Gainers uncompetitive. He said “the unions are very self-serving … In Taiwan workers get $300 a month for the same jobs. And Taiwan isn’t that far away by air. They need to find out what the new realities of business are.”
In 1984 Gainers had imposed a wage freeze for existing employees, a $5per hour cut in the starting wage -- down from $11.99 to $6.99 per hour– the removal of many benefits, a reduction in paid sick leave, andforced overtime. In return Pocklington had promised profit-sharing oncehis company had been “turned around.”
Over the next two years productivity at the Gainers plant increased substantially thanks toendless hours of overtime. Doing more work for less money, the workersearned millions for Gainers and they knew it. As the 1984 agreementneared its end, it became clear that Pocklington would not make good onhis promise of profit-sharing. The union held a strike vote. Over 96per cent of the members voted in favour of a strike.
Almostimmediately the company followed through with its threat to bring inreplacement workers who had already been lined up to break the strike.
On the first day of the strike, Sunday, June 1, picketers prevented the buses and most of the farm trucks delivering hogs from entering the compound. The strikers were unable to prevent replacement workers from crossing the picket line. On June 2, the company was granted an injunction to limit the number of pickets at the plant. Violence on the line increased as strikers and their supporters defied the injunction. Edmonton police were called in and began making arrests. Pocklington fuelled the ire of the strikers by publicly labeling them “terrorists” and referring to them as “former employees.” He announced that replacement workers would be given permanent jobs while those on strike would lose their jobs, publicly stating that he would never sign another collective agreement, and announcing that Gainers planned to terminate the employees’ pension plan, which was worth about $10 million.
The massive presence of police at the Gainers plant, sometimes in full riot gear, allowed busloads of replacement workers to be escorted into the plant. The strikers, UFCW 280P, along with the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) and others who supported the strike, organized rallies, including one on June 12 at the Alberta Legislature that drew an estimated crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 people, the largest rally over a union issue in the province’s history.
One of the most successful tactics employed by the union was a campaign to boycott Gainers’ products. The Gainers boycott received more support than any other campaign against a single company in Canada.
The company and the union finally came to an agreement on December 12, amid mounting pressure from the Government of Alberta and the public. It included no wage increase – but no wage rollback either – and the members reluctantly accepted the terms of the agreement.
In the aftermath of the strike the Alberta Federation of Labour launched a full-scale campaign to change Alberta's labour laws. The provincial government's response was to send its Minister of Labour and a number of cohorts on an international junket to study their labour legislation, only to return to the Alberta legislature to draft and enact even more punitive labour laws. Labour's key demand for anti-scab legislation was ignored and never implemented.
Eleven years after their great moral victory, UFCW Local 280P members were once again forced to take strike action to preserve what they had fought so hard to maintain. Maple Leaf Foods Ltd., the new owners of the meatpacking plant, laid them all off and closed the plant.
Provincial budget cuts hit Edmonton's workforce, 1994
Government budget cuts resulted in massive layoffs in the public sector across Alberta, beginning in 1994. Edmonton, as the capital, is hardest hit.
The 1993 re-election of a Progressive Conservative government led by newly-elected leader Ralph Klein ushered in a period of unprecedented cutbacks to the public sector. The new administration began a drastic reduction in provincial government spending, slashed many services and programs and privatized others, and launched the “business reengineering” of government itself.
The Klein Revolution, as it was called, was effectively announced in May 1993. It served as the basis for the Conservative Party”s platform during the provincial election that took place a month later. Radical plans for cutbacks and privatization were justified by appeals to neo-liberal values and “new right” politics that targeted debt and deficits as the number one issue facing Albertans. Proposed solutions focused almost exclusively on slashing of expenditures, rapid privatization of public services, dismantling of “non-essential” programs, and the creation of a “business friendly” tax and industrial relations regime for the Province.
The Deficit Elimination Act approved by the Legislature just before the 1993 election, was sold to the Alberta public as an unavoidable response to the unfamiliar and well-publicized budget deficits and debt-servicing charges the province was experiencing for the first time in decades. The Act made balanced budgets mandatory by 1996-7, with clearly-defined deficit ceilings during the interim.
The first budget of February 1994 proposed expenditures cuts of nearly 30 per cent over three years for all program areas outside a so-called “core”. The core areas of education, advanced education and career development, health, family and social Services, meanwhile, were subjected to cuts between 12 and 19 per cent. While the budget claimed an overall reduction target of 20 per cent, a study by former Conservative cabinet minister, Allan Warrack, estimated that the real per capita expenditure cut was actually over 27 per cent, once population growth and inflation were factored in.
The results were devastating, especially for communities in and around Edmonton, where the majority of affected workers and their families lived. With deep cuts in instructional grants, for example, staffing levels in both schools and the provincial education department were reduced by over 18 per cent, and even more jobs were eliminated through reductions in funding for new schools and other capital projects. Meanwhile such developments as the legalization of charter schools, restructuring of school boards, and increases in tuition and user fees put further strains on both the Kindergarten to Grade 12 systems and the post-secondary systems.
The first and likely the most damaging cuts were made to Alberta’s health care system. Only one month after he was elected, Premier Klein announced a $65 million cut to hospitals, to be applied retroactively and mostly to urban-area hospitals, including Edmonton. At the same time, responsibility for delivery was restructured into 17 regional health authorities, allocations for physician services were reduced, and services and procedures no longer deemed “medically necessary” were “de-insured.” Hospitals and other care institutions were forced to trim costs, cuts were made to such programs as Aids to Daily Living, public health laboratory and ambulance services, and seniors’ health benefits, with the result that many services were downloaded onto local governments, communities, and families.
The 1995 provincial budget raised targets for cuts to public-sector employment to 25 per cent for the next two years. While the Klein government originally spoke of a hiring freeze, attrition and a severance program, it openly admitted much later that lay-offs would occur – as they indeed did. Statistics Canada figures show that during 12 months up to June 1995, employment in Alberta’s “public administration” sector dropped nearly 19 per cent, falling from 90,000 to 73,000. In Edmonton, where the bulk of these workers lived, employment in this sector alone dropped 29 per cent, from 38,000 in July 1994 to 26,800 in July 1995. Additional job losses were added when these losses rippled through other sectors. Edmonton’s economy suffered badly during those years.
The ability of public sector unions to defend their members and their families was severely compromised by the drop in membership levels and funding. The Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the largest union in the Province, lost almost 35 per cent of its members, dropping from almost 50,000 to just over 32,000 in the space of three years. Similar losses were felt by the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Alberta Teachers' Associations, and other unions.
The economic effects of job cuts in Edmonton were further exacerbated by a five per cent reduction in compensation for all remaining workers in health care facilities, school boards, postsecondary institutions, and government departments. As well, the government committed itself to "outsourcing" as much government work as possible to the private sector, where wage and benefit levels were generally lower. It also introduced performance and productivity measures for those services that remained public. The overall effect of these measures was a dramatic drop in employment levels, pay and working conditions, and job prospects for workers in the Edmonton region.
Edmontonians defend public health care, 2000
In 2000 the Alberta government tabled Bill 11 -- legislation that would allow regional health authorities to negotiate contracts with for-profit health care providers to provide care in what was euphemistically described as "approved surgical facilities."
Bill 11 marked another attempt by the Klein government to institute market alternatives for health-care delivery in Alberta, and, in labour\\''s view, violated the Canada Health Act.
The push to develop market alternatives began after years of health care underfunding. Like Bill 37 before it, Bill 11 was an attempt to exploit Albertans\\'' anxiety over the state of the health care system in order to promote privatization. Government strategy not only failed to convince the public of the need for further privatization, it triggered one of the largest and most sustained periods of public protest in Alberta history.
Edmonton trade union involvement in the protest was pivotal though it marked a substantial change in the type of organizing that unions had usually been involved with. The Edmonton protests grew out of a diverse and loosely connected coalition, which ranged from concerned citizens, seniors groups, health care providers, the academic community, trade union locals which represented health care workers, and many other unrelated unions who acted in solidarity with health care unions and the public in general.
Unions provided research material, which helped to inform their members and the public of the dangerous precedent that the Klein government\\''s proposals would create. By helping to educate and organize their membership and the general public, local unions and their coalition partners were successful in building a massive protest movement which represented the viewpoint of the vast majority of Alberta citizens who support universal health care delivery and the principles of the Canada Health Act.
Although the legislation was eventually passed, the size and conviction of the protests genuinely surprised the Alberta government. The province subsequently took a go-slow approach to the original privatization plans. Perhaps more importantly the protests showed local unions how successful this type of community-based organizing can be.
The A-Channel story: Edmonton's first television strike, 2003
On September 17, 2003 members of Local 1900 of the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada, which represent workers at the A-Channel television station owned by Craig Media, went on strike after the employer walked away from first-contract negotiations. Ninety of 105 on-air and behind-the-camera workers walked out. It was Edmonton\\''s first TV station strike.
The employees\\'' main grievance concerned salaries, which were substantially lower than the industry average. In return for accepting salaries well below the industry standard, employees were promised that their salaries would be increased once the station was established and making a profit.
The statement "Station of broken promises" became a symbol of management\\''s failure to make good on its promise. Workers also pointedto the station\\''s high staff turnover, which they feel was due to thestation exploiting the inexperience of young workers who are willing tosettle for lower wages in order to gain industry experience. Strikerswere also worried about the transfer of positions to A-Channel\\''snon-union Calgary station.
The A-Channel strike, the 2002 Shaw Convention Centre strike and theCalgary Herald strike of 1999 indicate the difficulties unions facewhen attempting to negotiate first contracts in Alberta. Many employersattempt to use every tool at their disposal to intimidate anddemoralize strikers in order to break newly formed unions.
Several contentious issues surfaced in the A-Channel The employer warned mediaoutlets not to run strike advertisements, which asked viewers to tuneout until management negotiated a fair settlement. Management alsoattempted to sue individual strikers for "intimidating" the station'sadvertisers to pull their ads off the air. This occurred even after theAlberta Labour Relations Board ruled CEP Local 1900 had a legal rightto contact advertisers who run commercials on A-Channel and ask them tosuspend their ads until the strike is settled.
Several advertisers, such as the City of Edmonton and Capital City Savings,agreed to such a suspension of advertisements. As of January2004, the station learned that its adult audience for its evening newsprogram has dropped by over 40% from the same period the year before.
Local unions continued to support strikers through solidarity fundraisers and picket-line support.
Goodbye, Levi's: Edmonton's historic garment factory closes, 2003
On 25 September 2003, multinational clothing manufacturer Levi Strauss announced that it was closing its remaining North American plants, moving all of its production offshore. The move affected 448 Edmonton workers, and a total of 1,180 workers at three Canadian plants.
Company officials admitted that the Canadian plants – one in Edmonton and two in Ontario -- were efficient and productive. The Edmonton plant, the most productive, made between 15,000 and 16,000 pairs of jeans a day. The stated reason for moving all production to countries in the Caribbean and Asia was increased global competition, but wages were much lower in the region and labour laws were almost non-existent. The operational costs of the Canadian plants were higher than the offshore plants, and they allegedly could not change production to new lines of clothes as quickly as fashion trends demanded. This move seemed at odds with Levi’s self-touted reputation as a progressive company within the historically exploitative garment industry. Only one week after the company announced that it was closing the North American plants, the company reported record second quarter profits - $US 26.7 million, up 95 per cent from the previous year.
Levi Strauss had been in Edmonton since 1961 when it acquired the operations of Great West Garments (G.W.G.), founded in Edmonton in 1911. When Levi's bought the plant, it eliminated pay by piecework and started paying workers by the hour. The 488 workers affected by the closure in Edmonton were primarily immigrant women. The workers were represented by Local 120G of the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW). Their average length of employment with the company was 17 years. They had earned between $10 and $12 per hour and enjoyed a good benefits package relative to their fellow workers in low-skilled industries. Naturally the workers were concerned about finding decent jobs. The union worked with the company and City of Edmonton in a partnership to provide training and job search assistance.