CONCLUSION
A HISTORY TO BUILD UPON

ALVIN FINKEL

Yvon Poulin was only seventeen in January 2004 when he died after falling head first into a bailer while at work near Peace River. Labour studies scholar Bob Barnetson elaborates on this preventable death on the job:

During his three months on the job, Poulin complained about a lack of training. He was also looking for less dangerous work elsewhere. After his death, inspectors found Poulin’s employer had failed to ensure an alarm system was installed to warn workers when the machine was in operation. Poulin’s employer used a legal loophole to have charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act dismissed.¹

In 2008, as the Alberta economy reached the peak of one of its many booms, 166 workers died in industrial accidents: a death on the job every 2.2 days.² They died from exposure to dangerous substances, harmful environments, transportation accidents, contact with equipment and utilities, falls, fatigue, fires, and explosions. Many more workers lost worktime due to complications from overexertion in an economy where many hours of overtime and working for weeks without a break became common in many sectors, especially construction. Assaults became more common, particularly on overburdened health care workers.

Alberta’s rate of work fatalities in 2008 made it one of the most dangerous places to work in the Western world, despite the fact that deaths on the job are preventable. The province’s worker fatality rate of 5.9 per 100,000 was far greater than that of Canada as a whole at 4.2 deaths per 100,000 workers.³ Still, Canada had the fifth-highest rate of workplace deaths in the OECD, with only relatively poor countries — South Korea, Turkey, Mexico, and Portugal — posting worse records.⁴

The maiming and murder of workers continued unabated because the Alberta government, with its pro-employer bias, had the worst record among Canadian provinces of prosecuting employers who failed to meet safety standards. No one in Alberta has been jailed for causing a worker’s death, and in the rare case where there is both a prosecution and a conviction, the fines that are paid are modest. Promises for over a decade by labour ministers in Alberta to step up prosecutions have proved to be no more than hot air. Alberta was also the only province that exempted farm workers from labour standards, and thirteen farm workers died on the job in the province in 2009. The Government of Alberta spent five times as much in 2009 on insurance rebates to Alberta companies with government-endorsed safety certificates than it spent on inspecting job sites and enforcing occupational safety laws. The safety rebates are available to companies with worker fatalities, even those with multiple deaths.⁵

Meanwhile, the province’s Workers’ Compensation Board is accused by the Alberta Federation of Labour of focusing not on ways to help injured workers but on ways to deny their claims and reduce benefits for injured workers. Alone among Canadian provinces, the board pays bonuses to employees who get workers off compensation and back to work.⁶

This carnage on the job and the government’s cavalier response give the lie to notions that Alberta, with its fossil fuel economy and high average incomes, is a workers’ paradise. It also comes as no surprise that Alberta has the lowest union density in the country. While the national average of workers in Canadian provinces who are members of unions or who are covered by collective agreements was 31.4 percent for 2009, only 25 percent of workers in Alberta were in those categories. Not surprisingly, most of the provinces with above-average union density have recent experience of social democratic governments: Quebec at 39.8 percent and Manitoba at 37 percent, and Saskatchewan and British Columbia close behind. The outlier is Newfoundland and Labrador, which has a 39 percent union rate, though it has never had an openly pro-labour government.⁷ Clearly, there is a relationship between the inability of unions in Alberta to represent more than a quarter of the paid labour force and their inability to affect government policy in such areas as occupational health and safety.

But Alberta’s unions consistently attempt to represent the province’s workers despite the disappointingly low density of unionization and the challenges of cooperation among a number of separate organizations that sometimes work together well but often go their own merry ways. Of 418,000 workers covered by a collective agreement in 2009, about 125,000 were members of the 31 unions that belonged to the Alberta Federation of Labour. Another 75,000 were members of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, while the Building Trades Council claimed 60,000 members and the Alberta Teachers’ Association counted about 43,500 members. The Christian Labour Association of Canada, whose claim to being a union the above-named groups rejected because of its pro-employer bias, had 15,000 members.⁸

As the statistics in table c.1 demonstrate, there is now a huge gap in unionization rates between public service jobs and private sector jobs. Only one worker in eight in the private sector is covered by a collective agreement, while seven in ten workers employed by governments enjoy such coverage. But only one worker in five is in the public sector, and if the public sector cutbacks that have characterized the neo-liberal era continue, that percentage will decline with time. So the trade union movement faces the double challenge of trying to re-invigorate its private sector presence while defending public sector workers who are mostly unionized but who are under constant ideological attack from employer-friendly governments and their powerful media.

TABLE C.1 ESTIMATED UNION COVERAGE, 2010 ANNUAL AVERAGES

As we have seen throughout this book, it is, for the most part, not the unions that are at fault for the low rates of unionism in Alberta. Rather, it is anti-labour legislation promulgated from the Manning Social Credit period to the present that has limited the ability of workers to have representation on the job. The current global context is dominated by post-Fordism: that is, an increasing emphasis on “flexible” workers to whom employers promise neither long-term employment nor much in the way of benefits while governments cut away the social programs that at one time would have helped these workers as they move from employer to employer with periods of unemployment in between. In such an environment, unions will face quite a challenge trying to increase the extent of their coverage of the workforce. It is challenging in any context to organize transient workers, workers in small work units, workers who work mainly from their homes, and workers under constant threat of dismissal and/or deportation, all of which are growing segments of the international labour force. It is doubly difficult to organize such workers in Alberta, where governments are so friendly to employers that the two often seem enmeshed.

It is easy to be cynical about anything changing in Alberta. Its corporate elite is firmly entrenched and controls the governing Progressive Conservative Party, the rising opposition Wildrose Party, and most of the media, giving it an unchallenged means of inundating workers with its message that unfettered free enterprise works best for Albertans. Many of the province’s workers are transients who hope to return to their home provinces after they have collected a nest egg. They don’t want to upset the apple cart in between.

But as this book reveals, each generation has produced workers who have been willing to take chances to fight for social justice, whether via their unions or in the political arena. Though unknown to most Albertans, the most egalitarian forms of government were established in the province during the millennia of First Nations settlement, as chapter 1 revealed. The fur-trade period, with its partnership between Natives and Europeans, probably deserves second place. It was followed by the brutal dispossession of Native lands and the imposition of a colonial society, as we saw in chapter 2.

Chapter 3, dealing with the creation of a proletariat or working class during the early settlement years, indicated that conservatism and radicalism existed side by side in the workforce, with similar splits within the fledgling trade union movement. The early Alberta Federation of Labour united the unions that tried to effect change largely by legal means despite the extent to which the laws made defending the rights of workers very difficult. Most of its members were organized on the basis of a particular skill, not on an industry-wide basis. By contrast, the radical miners and the Industrial Workers of the World reflected a revolutionary perspective that rejected notions that workers could achieve gains while the capitalist system persisted. The IWW proposed that workers organize on an industrial basis without making distinctions among each other on the basis of crafts, a form of organization that it claimed left most labourers without an organization.

As chapter 4 suggested, that debate continued during World War I and the interwar period. The conscription debate and the huge increase in the cost of living during the war kept the pot boiling that gave the One Big Union widespread support among Alberta workers. But a combination of the state, employers, and craft unions ensured that the OBU’s life was short-lived. One wing of the 1920s labour movement believed that an electoral alliance with the United Farmers of Alberta would gradually deliver changes of benefit to working people, and during that decade, some gains were made. But as such gains were undone during the Depression, the Communist Party, while weak electorally, gained an important following as a leader of both the unemployed and unionists.

Chapter 5, outlining events between 1940 and 1960, told a story both of improved wages for many workers, at least those connected with the rising fossil fuel industry, and the evolution of a reactionary industrial relations regime meant to make the province attractive to the oil and gas industry. Debates within the trade union movement continued, but few revolutionaries were left in this period of economic growth and a vicious Cold War that limited robust social debate in Canada. Unions were viewed as conspiratorial organizations by Premier Ernest Manning, not much better than the rats that Alberta government policy was trying to keep out of the province. Ironically, the Alberta Federation of Labour, before it merged with the Industrial Federation of Labour of Alberta in 1956, had lost its fighting spirit and tended to kowtow to both employers and the government. Only the presence of the industrial unions, which operated within the constraints of Manning’s anti-union legislation, kept the spark of resistance alive in the province.

In chapter 6, we saw the gradual rise of a new militancy in the period from 1960 to 1980, with the public sector leading the way. This brought many women into the membership, and eventually the leadership, of a trade union movement that had been disproportionately male. But it left many women and men working in small enterprises in the private sector still beyond the reach of trade unionism and any measure of social justice.

Chapter 7 analyzed the 1980s, when a major Alberta recession called into question the popular view after World War II that capitalism had solved its internal contradictions and could offer economic growth and near-full employment forever. Having been spared the high unemployment that other provinces had experienced in the 1970s, Alberta workers were not amused at their suddenly precarious economic position. Nor were they willing to stand idly by while their government poured billions into private corporations facing bankruptcy, at the same time recognizing the existence of a working class mostly by passing anti-labour legislation. A series of major strikes in both the public and private sectors demonstrated the greatest militancy that workers in the province had evinced since the Great Depression. Even their voting patterns in some areas of the province shifted leftwards to the New Democratic Party, which had been fighting for workers’ rights since its formation in 1961 but did not enjoy clear electoral success until the 1980s. Used to working on its own to effect social change, the labour movement increasingly linked up with progressive social movements, sometimes playing a leading role, at other times a supportive role.

Chapter 8 described the intensification of the neoliberal government and employer counter-offensive to this growth in labour militancy. Attempting to divide public and private sector workers and exacerbate divisions within society as a whole, the government of Ralph Klein tore up the social contract of the postwar period in which health, education, and social services were seen as entitlements of the population and public servants the loyal deliverers of these services. The government complained that the province was broke, its publicly delivered services bloated, and public servants pampered. Cuts, privatizations, and attacks on the destitute became the order of the day. The labour movement, after its militancy and occasional victories in the 1980s, seemed somewhat exhausted by the time Klein came to power. Its opposition to the neo-liberal regime appeared anemic until 1995, when Calgary hospital laundry workers, taking the lead on their own, caused their union to mount a popular resistance to job cuts. It wasn’t followed up with a truly massive campaign by labour to defend its rights, but the Klein government was unnerved and the Klein Revolution slowed down. Efforts to counter neo-liberal ideology seemed to founder overall, even though a large section of the working-class population of the province seemed skeptical about the government’s directions.

Women, both as workers and as home caregivers, were disproportionately victimized by policies that had as their underlying philosophy the notion that the state owed no one — except big corporations, whom conservatives believed were the engines of economic growth — a measure of help. The gradual reduction in health care, education, and social services jobs not only took away the unionized jobs of some women but forced many others to serve as unpaid caregivers to a larger extent than they might have if social and health programs had been properly funded. As chapter 9 suggested, while Alberta women were increasingly in the labour force, their pay was lower proportionately to men than that of women in other provinces, and services such as daycare and homecare, which recognized that women still bore the major responsibility for family care and housework, were always underfunded and, in the Klein period, often disappeared altogether.

Chapter 10 traced the gradual removal of whites-only policies in Canadian immigration and both the opportunities and challenges faced by visible minorities in Alberta. Again, the province was slower than other provinces to pass and enforce human rights legislation. Visible minorities often found that their professional experience acquired in their homelands was not recognized in Canada. Meanwhile, the view of governments and corporations that certain groups of migrants, in which visible minorities loomed large, would work particularly cheaply and uncomplainingly led to the hiring of tens of thousands of temporary foreign workers during the economic boom that began in 2002. Despite efforts of trade unions to speak for the interests of these workers, many employers tended to ignore labour laws as they dealt with this vulnerable population who were too afraid of being deported to complain when their human rights were violated.

Clearly, the Alberta labour movement has its hands full in trying to deal with the many problems associated with an increasingly “marketized” and “globalized” economy in which a relatively small group of international corporations and financiers play with people’s lives and make it seem useless, even sinful, for governments to intervene on behalf of the public interest. Labour has at times also supported a global economy, but its vision has been completely different: it has called for production for use, not for profit, and a sharing of international resources and wealth. In the future, it will have to revive such notions and create the international alliances that can make them a reality if it wishes to provide a counter-model to the one that global capitalism has developed.

Alberta’s unions correctly attacked the provincial Progressive Conservative government during the 2008 provincial election for having “no plan” about how to ensure that the province’s energy-fuelled prosperity create long-term economic stability, responsible environmental stewardship, and a better distribution of the province’s wealth so that homelessness and want, the flip side of the coin of the conspicuous consumption of corporate executives, disappears. But the unions have struggled with creating a detailed vision of their own. Objectively, most of labour’s campaigns for several decades now have been efforts to preserve previous victories from the Fordist era rather than to gain new victories. Labour lacks a unified vision to guarantee better lives for workers and more worker participation in society’s decision making. The union movement and its allies have had some successes, such as preventing the privatization of medicare and limiting the extent of privatization of education and other programs. But on the whole, workers are losing ground.

Particularly as a result of the Klein Revolution and its aftermath, capital’s share of provincial wealth relative to that of labour has increased, and the public sector has been weakened. Economist Greg Flanagan notes that Alberta spent only 13 percent of its provincial GDP on government services in 2003, compared to 22 percent in 1993, at the beginning of the Klein era. While spending across all provinces also fell during that period, the national average dropped only from 27 to 22, making Alberta easily the stingiest province. Flanagan notes that “the role of government as stabilizer was abandoned, as regulator was considerably reduced, and as provider of public goods was diminished.”⁹ The poor suffered most from cutbacks while the wealthy received most of the benefits from tax changes that created an artificial sense of a “debt wall” in Alberta.¹⁰ The flat tax instituted by Ralph Klein deprived the Treasury of $5.5 billion in annual income in 2006 alone. Meanwhile, the government’s corporate tax receipts remained static while corporate profits before taxes quadrupled from 1989 to 2008. In 1989, corporate profits per person in Alberta amounted to $3,600. By 2008, that figure, adjusted for inflation, had risen to $15,000. Little wonder then that while provincial GDP rose 76 percent in the two decades after 1989, personal income rose only 39 percent. Between 1989 and 2008, spending per person on health care rose 37 percent and on schools a mere 6 percent, while social service spending fell a full 15 percent. Corporate profits, on the other hand, rose 314 percent.¹¹

Norway, a country of just under five million people, offers an alternative that the labour movement in Alberta studied closely in the early 2000s. Its history is quite different from Alberta’s. A country with a long history of social-democratic governments before it struck North Sea oil riches in the late 1970s, Norway has managed to create one of the world’s most prosperous economies and one of its most socially just societies in terms of wealth distribution and protection of labour rights. Both Alberta and Norway adopted the notion to establish public trust funds that would invest some of the oil royalties received by the state to ensure that funds be available to create new industries and protect social programs in the period after the fossil fuels are tapped out. Alberta established the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund in 1976 and initially placed 30 percent of oil royalties in the fund. Beginning with the 1982 recession however, the government began using the royalties that it collected from the energy companies for current expenditures and retirement of debt so as to maintain a low-tax regime.¹² On 31 March 2011, the government reported that the Trust Fund was worth $15.2 billion. By contrast, in 1991, Norway established the Statens Pensjonsfond, its sovereign wealth fund, which took ownership of two-thirds of Statoil, the largely state-owned energy firm that dominates the country’s fossil fuel industry, and subsequently placed virtually all of its energy earnings in the fund. In May 2011, the fund’s value was reported as $525 billion, or thirty-five times the value of the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.¹³ Norway’s social programs left Alberta’s and Canada’s in the dust, but they were paid for by steep, progressive taxes, not from the earnings of the Statens Pensjonsfond, which were seen as savings for a post-oil period. Norway’s sovereign fund invested heavily in alternative energy sources and in environmental projects more broadly, accepting a role of social responsibility that Alberta’s private-enterprise energy industry lacks.¹⁴

Norway’s labour movement — facing a growing neo-liberal movement that resulted in relatively right-wing governments being elected in 1997 and 2001, as well as a Labour Party that included a neo-liberal faction — created the Campaign for the Welfare State (CWS) in 1999. Although this organization initially grouped only six unions, it gradually came to embrace almost the entirety of Norwegian labour. It demanded an end to privatization and cutbacks, and called for the expansion of social programs. The CWS was powerful enough to persuade three political parties — the Labour Party, the Socialist Left Party, and the Centre Party — to promise in writing before the 2005 election that they would implement the CWS program if elected; it also forced them to commit to a pre-electoral coalition so that they could not weasel out of their promises by failing to work together after the election. That coalition was elected with 60 percent of the votes in 2005 and re-elected in 2009.¹⁵

The higher taxes in Norway have not created the unhappy society that conservatives suggest it should. Quite the contrary. Norway, as one of the most egalitarian countries among the advanced capitalist nations, can boast of some of the most impressive social statistics in the world. It reports low rates of poverty, crime, obesity, mental health problems, and infant mortality. An important international study found that the poorest 20 percent of Norwegians had better social statistics than the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans.¹⁶ This finding was one of the pieces of evidence used by the authors of this study to determine that countries that achieve the most equal distribution of wealth end up with the happiest populations overall. While the richest 20 percent of Americans were obviously very much happier and healthier than the poorest 20 percent in their own country, just living in a rat-race society where a change in their economic circumstances could put them out on the streets appears to be enough to imperil their health so that they are worse off than the relative poor in Norway, where state social security assures that almost everyone feels that he or she has a stake in society. In 2010, as it had been for many years, Norway sat atop the United Nations’ Human Development Office’s list of the best places to live in the world, a ranking based on such factors as average incomes, degree of poverty, equality among the sexes, and educational attainments. Canada ranked eighth.¹⁷

Whether a “Norwegian vision” is sellable in conservative Alberta is questionable. Two non-government organizations in which the trade union movement is influential, Public Interest Alberta and Join Together Alberta, have been making tentative steps toward raising issues about the “next Alberta” by focusing on the shackles placed on meeting public need by the conservative commitment to low taxes regardless of ability to pay. But they place a much greater emphasis on preserving existing jobs than on campaigning for a radical extension of the welfare state or greater socialization of industries such as the energy industry. However, the Alberta labour movement, along with the Canadian Labour Congress and the NDP, is currently campaigning for a doubling of Canada Pension Plan benefits, a national daycare program, and the expansion of the medicare program to include homecare, pharmaceuticals, denticare, and holistic alternative medical treatments. Through its involvement with Public Interest Alberta, it is also involved in national campaigns to end poverty.¹⁸

As we approach the future, the lessons of our forefathers and foremothers in the labour force and the labour movement will hopefully guide us to seek a more just society as they did. When the Alberta Federation of Labour formed in 1912, it regarded itself as speaking for all working people. Through the years, the AFL, along with other labour organizations, has tried in different ways to improve the lives of workers. As the federation approaches its second century, it behooves all trade unionists, whether they are members of the AFL or not, and indeed all working people, to think about how the AFL and the broader labour movement can build upon past achievements of working people in Alberta to shape an agenda for this century. The key goals will be, as they have always been, to create for and by working people a stable economy with safe, clean jobs over which workers exercise some control and with first-class health, education, housing, and public transport, as well as liveable communities with breathable air and a variety of affordable recreational and arts activities within reach. As it has been in the past, the fighting spirit of the trade union movement will be crucial to achieving such goals.

This book has relied a great deal on the words of workers themselves about Alberta’s past and future. And so it ends with the words of a coal miner, Enoch Williams, who served as mayor of Blairmore from 1936 to 1951. Interviewed in 1969 at the age of eighty-five, Williams said:

All of this here comes from the resources of the country, the resources of the world, and God, if there is a God, he never put it there for the benefit of a few. He put it there for the use of all of his people. At least, I’m simple enough to think that. And the only way we’re ever going to get to the bottom is say “NO, there’s no more oil, fellow, and there’s no more gold, there’s no more copper, there’s no nothing anymore — all things that’s in the ground belongs to the people. And it’s going to be — not for profit, but for use for and by people.” And I’m simple enough to believe that that’s it.¹⁹