2 | Victory at Lakeside

Brooks, Alberta, may be one of the most unlikely sites for a major union organizing victory. This small city of thirteen thousand in the heart of southern Alberta is a typical prairie town in its reliance on two industries—agriculture and oil and gas. It is also home to one of the largest beef-processing plants in Canada, Lakeside Packers (now called JBS Food Canada), which sits next to the Trans-Canada Highway just west of town. In the mid-2000s, Lakeside was a lynchpin of the local economy in Brooks, employing more than two thousand workers. It was also nonunion.

This chapter tells the story of the fight to organize workers at Lakeside Packers. The organizing drive and subsequent successful first-contract strike constitute an important victory in recent labour history. The strike was significant both for its size—it was the largest private sector certification in Alberta in decades—and for the national profile it gained through the violence and extreme tension it sparked. It is most significant, however, because of who participated in the strike. At the time of the strike, Lakeside was a racially divided workplace. Half of its workers were immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia, and the other half were Canadian-born. But it was the immigrant workers at Local 401 who were the catalysts and anchors for the certification and the strike, a group of workers that unions often struggle to organize and mobilize (Hunt and Rayside 2000). Although unions have attempted to adapt to a more diverse workforce, one with changed and changing demographics, they have also been reluctant to alter the structures and processes that alienate newcomers, many of whom are often unfamiliar with North American forms of unionism. The Lakeside Packers strike thus represents not only a significant victory for unions and immigrant workers but also a critical moment in the local’s transformation.

Although O’Halloran had begun his working career in a Lethbridge meat-packing plant, Local 401 had little experience with meat-packing and seemed an unlikely protagonist in the Lakeside story. The fact that the local organized the plant may be a historical accident. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, UFCW Canada had embarked on a strategy of merging locals to create large, multiunit, composite locals covering broad sectors. A political decision was made to amalgamate all Alberta locals into two province-wide locals. The dominant membership of Local 401 was to be workers in grocery and related industries, while Local 1118 was to represent predominantly meat-processing workers. However, one local that merged into 401, Local 740-P, had at one time represented workers at Lakeside. That anomaly gave Local 401 jurisdiction over the plant, while Local 1118 represented all the other unionized meat-processing plants in the province.

Local 401’s previous attempts to organize Lakeside, using its traditional organizing methods, had met with failure. Changed circumstances in 2004 and 2005 created an opportunity for the local, but capitalizing on that opening would require different strategies, the most important of which involved embracing the leadership of immigrant workers at the plant. The ensuing drive and strike proved to be one of the largest and most significant battles that Local 401 had ever fought. It also charted a new course for the local that would become clear in the years to follow.

HISTORY OF LAKESIDE PACKERS

Lakeside opened in Brooks in 1966 as a feedlot—a holding area where cattle are fattened up before slaughter. The locally owned company constructed the packing plant across the Trans-Canada Highway from the original feedlot in the early 1970s to support its growing operation (Broadway 2007, 567). Originally, the plant only partially processed carcasses to supply other downstream companies. It was unionized in 1976 by the Canadian Food and Allied Workers, which later merged to become United Food and Commercial Workers. In the context of the meat-packing industry of the time, Lakeside was a small player compared to the large urban plants.

Changes in the Industry

In the 1980s, the meat-packing industry across the continent underwent a significant shift in an effort to cut labour costs. In what some have called the IBP revolution (Stull and Broadway 2013, 19)—after Iowa Beef Packers, the corporation that catalyzed the change—meat-packing companies relocated plants and reorganized the labour process. The industry moved to rural centres close to livestock producers and began to use an assembly-line approach to the processing of carcasses. These changes lowered costs significantly by reducing or eliminating many elements in the process, including transportation of live animals, and by deskilling the work (Stanley 1994). Work from highly unionized and competitive urban environments was transferred to areas where there was less competition for industrial workers and unionization was lower. Together, these shifts led to significant downward pressure on wages and working conditions in the industry.

The changes also created tensions between employers and unionized workers at the threatened urban plants. The 1980s witnessed a series of strikes and labour strife in those facilities—including in Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Brandon, Winnipeg, and Kitchener (Forrest 1989)—as employers demanded deep concessions and ultimately closed older plants. In the United States, unionization rates in the industry plummeted (Brueggemann and Brown 2003). In Canada, unions fared somewhat better, finding ways to organize many of the new superplants built in High River, Alberta, and elsewhere. However, unions could not withstand employers’ cost pressures, and wages and working conditions deteriorated.

Although Lakeside was relatively well positioned given its rural location, it got swept up in the nation-wide meat-packing strike in 1984, and Lakeside workers struck the plant. In June, in an attempt to force the issue, the company hired replacement workers “at wages 30 percent below the union rate, a cut that ranged between $3.00 and $3.80 an hour” (Noel and Gardner 1990, 38). The move broke the union. Only a handful of workers maintained the picket line over the next three years. UFCW finally abandoned the strike in 1987, and Lakeside became officially nonunion.

The plant thrived through the next few years, in part owing to its wage advantage and the convenient supply of cattle. In the early 1990s, however, economic changes made Lakeside’s partial-processing model obsolete. Lacking sufficient capital to upgrade, Lakeside’s owners sold the plant to IBP in 1994, who immediately expanded production and increased the number of workers. By 2005, more than two thousand workers were employed at the plant.

IBP and its successor, Tyson Foods, which purchased IBP in 2001 (Tyson Foods 2009), adopted a staunch antiunion approach, defeating repeated organizing attempts and even at one point displaying a large banner that read “Proudly Union-Free” on the plant’s sign beside the highway. In defeating unionizing attempts, the company deployed a variety of tactics, including regularly reminding workers that the previous union had decertified. “They said, if you join this union, you’re going to be back on strike,” O’Halloran recalled. “If you join this union, you’ll lose some benefits. This is a union that likes to strike. They abandoned you in 1984 and they’ll abandon you again when the going gets tough” (ALHI interview, 2005).

UFCW Local 401 had been attempting to organize Lakeside for years. It had become an obsession of O’Halloran’s since the local had gained jurisdiction over the plant. “Over the course of the years,” he said, “I made a commitment that at some point in time—that plant would be unionized. We spent a lot of money trying to unionize it.” The local first launched a drive at Lakeside in 1992, shortly after taking over Local 740-P, and it tried almost annually after that. It even bought a house in Brooks in 1995 to use as an office and devoted significant staff resources, over a number of years, to the project.

However, the campaigns were failures. A staff member remembers the futility of the repeated attempts:

In January of 1999 we came, we signed up people, we got a vote, we were slaughtered. In 2000 we came, we talked to people, we got a vote, we were slaughtered worse. 2001, we did the same thing, [except] we didn’t take it to a vote. 2002, same thing. . . . In 2003 [another staff member] and I went back. We talked to a few employees and between the two of us, we said, Is there anything that is going to be different this year? Is anything going to change? Nothing is going to change. We are going to bust our brains. . . . We convinced Doug to give it a rest for a while. (staff, 27)

If the drive got to a vote, the results were rarely close. The company waged aggressive countercampaigns, using tactics that included threats and intimidation. During the 2000 effort, the Alberta Labour Relations Board took the unusual step of ordering a series of board-supervised, mandatory union recruitment meetings in the plant as a remedy for a series of employer breaches of the Labour Relations Code. The meetings were disrupted by shouts, taunts, and projectiles thrown at speakers by pro-employer workers (Duckworth, ALHI interview, 2007). The meetings did not change the result of the vote.

Also working against the union was the high rate of turnover at the plant. “You had to go out and get your percentage, 40 percent, to get to the board,” a staffer recounted. “Well, we would get our 40 percent, and by the time the vote came, of the 40 percent, half of them weren’t there anymore. So now you gotta go do it again, so we never had the numbers” (staff, 22).

Between 1992 and 2002, little had changed in Local 401’s attempts to unionize Lakeside, and the prospects of a different result this time seemed unlikely. In 2003, the BSE crisis (mad cow disease) hit Canada, destabilizing the beef industry and making prospects even more remote. However, in 2004, the changing dynamics in the plant due to the new immigrant workers would have a sudden and unexpected impact.

Recruitment of Immigrant Workers

Beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating in the early 2000s, Lakeside struggled to recruit enough locals to work at the plant. Troubles with recruitment, common in the industry at the time, were attributable to the deterioration of wages and working conditions over the previous twenty years (Stull and Broadway 2013, 19). Fewer local residents were prepared to work in packing plants when other options were available. Across North America, plants were changing their recruitment strategies to attract recent immigrants and refugees (Champlin and Hake 2006), with particular targets being workers from sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia (Broadway 2013, 47).

Lakeside expanded its recruitment zone, beginning with Atlantic Canada. However, soon these workers too, like the Albertans, were seeking better employment elsewhere, and Lakeside began actively recruiting recent newcomers to Canada. Reflecting industry trends, they targeted workers from sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, such as the Philippines. A disproportionate number of the new recruits had arrived in Canada as refugees, mainly from Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia. By 2004, half of the Lakeside workforce was comprised of immigrants (Broadway 2007, 569).

The influx of African and Asian immigrants altered the dynamics in the plant. First, a clear racial divide appeared, with tensions between groups. Immigrant workers were given the worst jobs, and there were accusations that they were paid less than Canadian-born workers for the same work. Conflict also arose between immigrant groups, as one staffer noted: “The Ethiopians, they don’t like the Sudanese, or the North Sudanese don’t like the South. . . . So they were very separate in that sense” (staff, 22).

Second, the immigrants, with reduced employment opportunity compared to locals, tended to stay longer, and many were more reliant on the employer than nonimmigrants were, often living in trailers on the plant site. “The immigrants had nowhere to go,” a union staff member recalled. “They couldn’t leave. They had them by the short and curlies” (staff, 22). The reduced turnover among this population increased the potential for union certification, but the union had few connections in those communities and many newcomers were suspicious of the organization. As a result, the shifting demographics did not initially benefit its organizing efforts.

ORGANIZING LAKESIDE

Still, Local 401 made no headway in organizing Lakeside. In 2003, when the union pressed pause on its annual efforts, it was with the intention to stay out of Lakeside for a couple of years and focus on other priorities. Some staffers even mused that O’Halloran had finally given up on the plant. But a year later, an incident at the plant shifted the union’s fortunes and, sooner than expected, Local 401 returned to Brooks with renewed vigour.

Wildcat Protest and Organizing Drive

On 28 April 2004, a group of about two hundred Lakeside workers, mostly Sudanese, staged a wildcat (that is, unauthorized) protest in support of a group of immigrant workers who had been fired by the employer. They gathered outside the plant gates and marched to the mayor’s office to show their displeasure (Canadian Press 2004). The workers had been fired for coming to the defence of a Sudanese worker fired after an altercation with another worker. One of the protesters described how the situation escalated:

One black guy, Sudanese from Africa, has a problem with a white guy. This white guy sprayed 180 degree hot water on this guy’s chest. They didn’t fire the white guy who sprayed the hot water, they fired the black guy. So the following morning, we were telling our friends, today we’re not going to work until the company find a solution to it, or they also fire the white guy. The news goes around and we all gather outside. . . . So the following day, the company call us. They named ten of our members to represent all those black guys, they want to discuss with them. We selected ten people. . . . They go in, discuss with management. The management told them . . . go back to your jobs or we’ll fire you. Those guys said no. Then they fired those ten guys. (Anonymous, ALHI interview, 2005)

Additional workers got involved and Lakeside eventually fired sixty people. This second round of firings led to the wildcat walkout. Wildcat strikes are high-risk actions for workers, who face significant reprisal from the employer; this makes the willingness of these immigrant workers to stage such a walkout particularly noteworthy.

The firings were the spark, but the immigrant workers had a long list of grievances that fuelled their anger at the employer, including health and safety issues, employer bullying, and inconsistencies around wage rates and hours (Inkster 2007). There were also allegations of racism in the plant. As O’Halloran noted, “Most of the supervisors, most of the people in a position of authority—safety committees, quality control, individuals who make sure the product is being processed properly—were all white people. Very seldom did a person from an ethnic community get promoted into a higher position” (ALHI interview, 2005).

Following the protest, their concerns unresolved, the group approached UFCW Local 401. Union rep Archie Duckworth remembers that day: “The Sudanese community came and asked us to come back in and try to organize the plant” (ALHI interview, 2007). The union took a different approach this time. “Doug went to Brooks and had a meeting with the Sudanese community,” said a staffer. “Doug said, if you think this time it is going to be different, it is going to have to be driven by the employees. And it was different from that point on” (staff, 27). Having learned from past mistakes, the union implemented a series of new strategies. In previous Lakeside campaigns, the union had sent down dozens of union staffers and activist releases from around the province to knock on doors and make cold calls in order to find Lakeside employees. In the 2004 drive, the union only assigned a couple of key organizers, whose job it was to build the campaign from the inside: “We had a big inside committee in 2004. We had people that were on the inside, they could tell us what was going on” (staff, 27). They learned how to build trust among the various ethnic communities. McLaren remembers the intense involvement of the lead organizer: “Archie would bring the groups together. If it was at the office, if they were having a gathering or meeting, he would be invited. He would go. If they had a wedding, he would go. . . . If it was a group of Yugoslavians, he would bring them in and they would have a feast. . . . He got involved in every single community.”

The union also cultivated the local leaders within each ethnic group and followed their advice about how to approach that particular community and build support. Staff members attribute the success of the drive to the role played by these organic leaders. “As much as I would like to give credit to our organizers, and they deserve a lot of credit, I think that [following the direction of community leaders] was the biggest thing that happened. . . . We were intelligent enough to figure out it was the only way it was going to happen” (staff, 22).

The union produced multilingual communications to reflect the twenty-six languages and dialects spoken at the plant. Inside committee members were trained to facilitate peer-to-peer organizing. Union staff worked to make the house in Brooks, which anchored the drive, a safe and supportive gathering space where members could come and socialize, talk about their experiences at work, and debrief organizing activities. Traditional methods were still used, but in concert with newer approaches. “We still had to go from door to door,” said Duckworth. “But this time it was a little different because we had a high population of the Sudanese. They helped us and were instrumental in helping us organize” (ALHI interview, 2007).

The employer did not take the drive lightly and fought back. “It was a campaign that was vicious within the plant,” Duckworth recalled. “They fired people. We had many labour charges at the board. It took us three months to organize” (ALHI interview, 2007). The employer told workers that they would have trouble with Immigration Canada if they voted for the union. They threatened to cancel benefits and planned raises (Hurman 2004). But by August, the union had more than 40 percent of employees signed up, and on 5 August, it filed for a certification vote. During the three weeks between the application and the vote, the employer’s efforts to thwart the campaign intensified. On 27 August, the vote was held. The union won by a slim margin of 48 votes, 905 to 857 (51% of votes cast). The result was challenged by the employer but was ultimately upheld. With a victory—albeit by a razor-thin margin—the union asked itself, “What do we do now? We had a certificate, but we still had an antiunion employer” (Duckworth, ALHI interview, 2005).

Negotiations and Strike

Initial negotiations did not go well. It became clear that the employer’s strategy was to play out the clock until a decertification application could be filed. A couple years later, O’Halloran remembered it well:

We start negotiations in November, and the company will only agree to two sets of bargaining per month for two days. . . . We’re telling the company, look, we’re available any day you have. We’ll take whatever day you’ve got. They would only give us four days. So we went to the labour board and argued that the company was bargaining in bad faith, they weren’t giving us enough days to negotiate. What we believed was they were simply going to string us out to the open period of when they could be decertified. . . . The company cancels a couple of dates. We’re getting into the spring, and negotiations are going no place. . . . They wouldn’t agree to a union shop, they wouldn’t agree to shop steward language, they wouldn’t agree to union visitation. . . . So in March we filed another bargaining in bad faith charge. So we have a whole lot of charges. (ALHI interview, 2007)

As is often the case, the drawn-out negotiations were affecting worker morale: “A lot of our members were losing hope for the union. What is the union still negotiating, what are they doing?” (Anonymous, ALHI interview, 2005).

During negotiations, the employer was also encouraging a decertification campaign:

They were trying to make little backroom deals with people, saying, okay if you get so many people to decert, we’ll give you this. There was rumours going around that for every decert that certain people got, they were paying them $10 a head. . . . Then they would sit in the cafeteria with these things and tell people, this is for the union, sign this. Actually it was to sign off on the union. But because they saw the word union and that’s all they understood, they would sign them. They had no clue what they were signing. (Anonymous, ALHI interview, 2005)

In the spring, the union ramped up its communications strategy, placing ads in newspapers and sending a letter to the Alberta Beef Producers predicting that labour unrest at Lakeside would “undermine your award-winning ‘I Love Alberta Beef’ campaign” and destabilize an industry rocked by the BSE crisis (Waugh 2005). The union also developed and implemented an internal communication strategy for the membership. The material played up the diversity of the workers and provided strong strategic messaging. For example, the local launched a newsletter for members called Many Faces . . . One Voice! featuring a series of photos of diverse members on the masthead.

In June, the union felt it couldn’t risk losing support by negotiating any longer and held a strike vote, garnering 70 percent support. On 20 July, the workers went out on strike. However, the same day, the provincial government intervened by appointing a one-person Disputes Inquiry Board (DIB), an action that, under the Alberta Labour Relations Code, prohibited strike action for two months. The union decided to comply with the order to cease strike action. O’Halloran described both the rationale for the decision to comply and the anger of members:

The fine for individuals is $1,000 a day, and union officials $10,000 a day. With having 2,400 people, it would’ve been millions of dollars, the fines over the course of a week. So we decided to listen and obey the law, and we’re on a microphone trying to tell people, you have to go to work. People are screaming at us that we’re a useless union, that we backed down, and why should they support us? (ALHI interview, 2005)

The effect among the immigrants in the plant was particularly negative, and the union had to spend weeks winning back the lost trust.

In late September, the workers voted, with a margin of 90 percent, to accept the DIB’s recommendation, even though it offered much less than the union was looking for. “It was a bare bones collective agreement,” said Duckworth, “which was okay for us because we knew we weren’t going to get anything better out of the employer” (ALHI interview, 2005). But the next day, Lakeside rejected the DIB’s report, saying the “recommendations, covering such things as overtime, vacation pay and seniority, would result in unacceptable labour cost increases” (Myers 2005).

Despite a modified offer from the employer and the emergence of an antiunion splinter group (Concerned Lakeside Employees for Everyone’s Rights), which filed a revocation application (Canadian Press 2005), the workers finally went on strike on 12 October, more than a year after achieving certification. The first few days of the strike were tense, violent, and dramatic.

On the first day, about eight hundred workers showed up on the picket line, with an equal number assembled across the highway to cross the line. The number of strikers was enhanced by Local 401’s decision a few years earlier to provide significant strike pay. As in the Shaw strike, this reduced the pressure on these low-wage workers to cross the line because of financial constraints. Still, the racial divide between the two groups on each side of the highway was palpable, since most of the strikers were immigrants while most of the strikebreakers were not. A number of altercations occurred on the first day. Windows of buses trying to cross the line were smashed. By the end of the day, the Labour Relations Board had issued picketing restrictions (Poole and Myers 2005). The second day was marred by a few strikebreakers assaulting three picketers who were blocking their exit from the plant (Hutchinson and Poole 2005).

On 14 October, the third day of the strike, events turned bizarre. As mentioned earlier, plant managers, in an attempt to serve court papers to O’Halloran, chased his car through back roads near the plant. The chase ended in a three-car accident, with O’Halloran’s vehicle crashing into the ditch. O’Halloran sustained permanent injuries that have left him reliant on a motorized scooter. The Local 401 lead organizer, Archie Duckworth, described the events:

I was doing an interview with CBC at the time. . . . One of the company management came up and served me while I was doing the interview on TV. President O’Halloran took off, he didn’t want to be served. He took the rest of the day off. He was driving around the back roads. Management had walkie talkies, you’d think they were the secret service or something. They were out looking for President O’Halloran all over. Eventually, he was sighted and all these people, including the [former] owner of the plant, including top management, were after him to serve him notice, and a car chase ensued. . . . They literally drove him off the road into a bad accident and Doug was seriously hurt, just so they could serve him a piece of paper. . . . Someone went up, and he was lying on the ground, and said, consider yourself served, and walked away. (ALHI interview, 2007)

Two plant managers, including the former owner of Lakeside, and O’Halloran were charged with dangerous driving and other violations. The case never went to court, since all charges were dropped following resolution of the strike.

The accident had a profound effect on the strikers and served to galvanize them. The first days of the strike left an indelible mark on the workers, one of whom described it in detail:

The first three days were probably the best and the worst. My first experience of actually being on strike. The first day, the bosses were being stopped. It was like, wow, this is cool. You’re getting overwhelmed and stuff. Then the second day, when they came across the cornfields on the buses, you were like, that tells you how much they really care about their team members’ safety, when they’re willing [to] bounce them across the cornfield to bring them into the plant. . . . Next thing I hear, a bunch of supervisors gets off a bus and start beating picketers. . . . Then the next day comes, the buses are stopped, production don’t go. Then that night, they were trying to give Doug papers. . . . They run him off the road. I don’t know about you, but to me that’s attempted murder. . . . [I thought,] will they stop at nothing to make sure this union is out? (Grandy, ALHI interview, 2005)

The twenty-four-day strike was punctuated by numerous incidents and tactical moves and countermoves by both the union and the employer. Federal meat inspectors briefly refused to cross the line, shuttering the plant. The employer built more than a dozen gravel roads across the fields surrounding the plant to get buses into the plant. The union responded by assigning picket teams to cover the back roads. Multiple charges were laid for picket line violence, including an assault on a female RCMP officer.

The dispute spilled beyond the picket line. The union engaged in an active communications battle, creating provocative ads and flyers. One flyer took aim at Alberta’s centennial year celebrations with an ad asking “Is this an Alberta worth celebrating?” and profiling an African worker along with a description of his working conditions. The accompanying website, albertashame2005.com, attempted to prod the provincial government into intervening. Another ad linked the strike to the BSE crisis.

After three weeks, negotiations resumed for the first time during the strike. In those talks, Lakeside made a sudden shift in its position. Throughout the negotiations, the company had steadfastly refused to accept any language that would provide union security (union shop provisions, for example), a clear grievance process, or union access to the site. A change in tone was sparked by the arrival of members of Tyson’s US senior management team. By 1 November, the two sides had a tentative agreement that offered a $1.90 raise over four years. The deal offered workers less than the DIB recommendation but provided Rand formula mandatory dues check-off and other union rights (Poole 2005b). On 4 November, sixteen hundred workers voted on the agreement, with 56 percent voting to ratify. Striking workers returned to work on 7 November.

It was not considered a great deal from the union’s perspective, but it granted security for the union. “We got a collective agreement,” said Duckworth. “Not a good collective agreement. . . . Don’t forget we weren’t negotiating in a position of strength” (ALHI interview, 2005). O’Halloran admitted that the agreement was substandard: “I was hoping for a higher outcome, but it has been a long battle over many years. . . . The plant is unionized and we’re very proud of that” (quoted in Fernandez 2005). In many respects, the ratification vote was more a vote about the presence of a union in the plant than the actual terms of the agreement, since antiunion employees turned out to vote the deal down in order to undermine the union presence.

When workers returned to work, tensions were high, both between strikers and strikebreakers and between the union and the employer. Over time, the relationship became less acrimonious, a process that was aided by Tyson selling the plant to XL Foods in 2009 (who then sold it to JBS Food Canada in 2013). “The first two months after the strike, we had three hundred grievances a month,” recalled O’Halloran, adding that two years later, “we have twenty-six outstanding grievances, which is unbelievable” (ALHI interview, 2005). Today, the plant remains ethnically and racially diverse, with a growing proportion of temporary migrant workers in addition to immigrants. The union successfully negotiated a new agreement in 2009 and again in 2013.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LAKESIDE STRIKE

The organizing of Lakeside Packers was the largest private sector certification in Alberta in more than twenty years. Two key variables shifted at Lakeside between the organizing failures of the 1990s and the bitter but successful strike of 2005. The first was the influx of African and Asian newcomers into the plant. Their arrival initiated a series of new dynamics that opened the door to unionization. Second, Local 401 altered its strategies in the 2004 organizing drive and the 2005 strike, learning from past mistakes and adopting some innovative organizing approaches. These two variables combined to create an unusual and significant labour victory.

The catalyst for the Lakeside organizing drive was the spontaneous wildcat protest by about two hundred immigrant workers. Their immediate concerns were over health and safety and unfair dismissals, but the root cause was a deep sense of injustice and indignity at their treatment by the employer. Many of those workers were already employed at Lakeside during previous organizing drives but did not take up the call of the union. What changed was the workers awakening to their powerlessness when they failed to have their grievances addressed by the employer. Lakeside’s heavy-handed response was a turning point. Workers interviewed for this study spoke about the sense of futility in trying to create change at Lakeside. Suddenly the union, for many of them an alien form of organization, became the only possible solution.

UFCW Local 401’s actions at Lakeside in 2004 occurred among workers who have been difficult for unions to organize. African and Asian immigrants have little experience with North American unionism. This lack of familiarity, and possible distrust, makes newcomers harder to organize. Local union staffers described how much of their energy during the organizing drive was spent explaining what unions are and how they function (staff, 2). However, a lack of experience with unions is not the same as lacking experience in collective action and solidarity. Many of the workers were leaders in their communities before coming to Canada and had no trouble fighting for issues they cared about. They were not afraid of conflict or standing up for their rights. Many had arrived from war-torn countries where conflict was a daily reality. The workers understood solidarity; it simply manifested itself in different forms.

Some of that solidarity was cultural or national in nature. “Of course they back all of their fellow countrymen,” noted one staffer. “From the perspective of the Sudanese, that is their thing. They stood behind their coworkers. They didn’t like the way their coworkers were treated, were fired” (staff, 26). A sense of ethnic or cultural solidarity is natural and not uncommon among newcomers to a country or region. However, the particular social dynamics in Brooks added to the already strong unity among the immigrants. Michael Broadway’s (2007) study of the social impacts of the influx of newcomers to Brooks found a high degree of social dislocation, social stratification, and marginalization among the immigrant population. The less-than-welcoming reception the newcomers received from the existing population contributed to the creation of strong bonds within newcomer community groups.

Those strong bonds became a powerful feature of activism when the immigrants’ focus turned to workplace injustices. The pre-existing connections, including the presence of informal leaders within ethnic groups at the plant, translated into effective union organizing networks. The work became not about teaching the workers about the importance of solidarity but about the workers themselves connecting social solidarity with workplace solidarity.

Also contributing to the effectiveness of immigrant activism was the immigrants’ lack of historical association with Lakeside. Many of the locals at the plant had lived in the region for many years, and the old grudges and bitterness from the 1984 strike and failed organizing attempts lingered. The employer could exploit those memories in its effort to thwart unionization. Such tactics were less effective with the immigrant workers, since they had no personal experience of or association with the past. In this respect, their lack of familiarity with unionism served as an advantage.

Immigrant activism was not just the catalyst that led to the successful certification and strike; it was the backbone of the campaign. Not only did immigrant workers dominate the ranks of union activists, but their social solidarity fuelled their determination to win the labour struggle. They were able to transfer their loyalty for one another to the union, as long as the union was able to demonstrate that the loyalty was well placed. This speaks to the role of Local 401 in the strike. Had the local approached the situation in Brooks in the same manner as it had in other locations or in previous attempts at Lakeside, it is possible the wildcat protest and ensuing struggle would have sputtered. However, Local 401 opted to try new tactics that were appropriate to the unique situation in Lakeside at the time.

The campaign contained a number of traditional organizing approaches—paid organizers, one-on-one contact, leaflets explaining the benefits of the union, and so on. However, the organizers adapted these tools to fit the workers they were trying to woo. While they tried a number of strategies, a few stand out as being important to the success of the campaign. First, they did not duck the workplace’s diversity. While their rhetoric spoke about being colour-blind, their actions demonstrated that they knew very well that they were talking to a heterogeneous audience and that, strategically, they needed the immigrant workers as a counterbalance to the long-standing locals. Particularly key here was their decision to respect the leaders of the various communities and to allow those leaders to choose the approach they felt was appropriate to their community. In short, union organizers chose to follow as much as to lead. Simultaneously, they fostered and developed leadership skills among the community leaders to facilitate peer-to-peer organizing within the union.

Second, multilingual communications was an important first step in building connection. In practical terms, it facilitated the delivery of the union’s message. Symbolically, it demonstrated a commitment to respect each ethnic group and recognize its value. A leaflet written in someone’s first language is a foot in the door for a union organizer.

Third, the local extended its work beyond the workplace. Organizers attended social and community functions. They created a safe gathering space for activists and members to socialize, debrief, and connect. These types of broader social activities may seem superfluous to the task of organizing a workplace, but, whether consciously or not, Local 401 was engaged in an act of translating social solidarity to workplace solidarity. In the context of organizing, creating spaces that transcend and strengthen both forms of solidarity are very important.

Fourth, the members, and not the union, were the core of the drive and the face of the union to nonmembers. This dynamic emerged in part because of the leadership taken by the immigrant workers in the early stages of the campaign and in part because the union leadership facilitated that approach. One of the reasons why previous drives had failed was their use of dozens of nonresident organizers, which allowed the employer to accurately describe union organizers as outsiders imposing themselves on the Lakeside “family.” That cannot be said when the organizer is also a coworker who stands three stations down. The use of inside committees and grassroots, peer-to-peer organizing is not new. Yet in the experience of both Lakeside and Local 401, this was innovative. It took on new forms because of how it was taken up by the immigrant activists and integrated into pre-existing forms of solidarity and collective action.

Finally, the role of the unusually high strike pay cannot be underestimated. Under normal conditions, the financial toll on picketers, especially those in low-income occupations, can be severe and can increase pressures to cross the line, abandon the strike for other employment, or vote against striking in the first place. By offering strike pay that allowed strikers to pay bills over a period of three or four weeks, the union successfully reduced one of the great risks to strikes within divided workplaces.

The Lakeside organizing drive and strike looked remarkably different than the 1997 Safeway strike. Some of the elements introduced during the Shaw action in 2002 were developed and implemented more assertively. New tactics were adopted for the first time. More importantly, Local 401 leaders and staff became more cognizant of both the challenges of and the need to address race and ethnicity. The Sudanese workers who approached the local did so out of desperation. There were many moments, such as when the DIB was appointed, when the trust of immigrant workers was strained, yet union organizers found a way to maintain and strengthen the relationship. They did so by following the natural leaders found in the communities. Handing leadership over to the rank-and-file has not traditionally been a part of Local 401’s repertoire, and it suggests a maturation in the leaders’ understanding of the work required to build relationships with hard-to-organize workers.

The learnings from the strike appear to have taken root in the plant, at least to a certain degree. In the years since the strike, the union has, of course, worked hard to unify the bargaining unit and reduce divisions, especially those of race, and according to most reports, it has been partially successful. It has implemented some ongoing strategies that reflect the unique nature of the workplace and workforce. While it has maintained the traditional staff rep structure, with two full-time staff members servicing the plant (one of whom was a worker at the plant), the local union office in Brooks runs very differently from other union offices. It serves as a drop-in centre for workers from various communities, thus acting more as a community centre than a union hall. The office manager is a former Lakeside worker who speaks five languages, which the staff reps emphasize is crucial to the perception of the office as a safe place.

The union has attempted to become involved in the various ethnic communities in Brooks, making sure that it is seen as not just the workplace agent but as a community agent. It has also continued the practice of ensuring that community leaders are also union leaders. “Two-thirds of our immigrant population are Muslim,” said a staffer, adding that two community leaders serve as president and cochair of the bargaining unit. “The Filipino community, which is rapidly becoming the largest community group we represent, their community leaders are chief shop stewards and shop stewards” (staff, 22).

Lakeside marks a significant turning point in the evolution of Local 401. It stands out, over the two decades since Safeway, as the moment of shift, when some of the newer approaches took hold and the local appeared to take seriously the question of diversity, organizing new types of workers and changing tactics to meet twenty-first-century realities. Of course, the reality was not nearly this dramatic, since the kind of evolution witnessed in Local 401 occurs slowly. In this case, it began before Lakeside and continued long after it. But isolating Lakeside in this analysis allows us to separate the events and innovations and then reintegrate them within the overall patterns and dynamics found in Local 401 during the period of study. The high-profile nature of Lakeside exposed evolving practices previously hidden in the midst of the day-to-day chaos of running a union. In some respects, Lakeside can be understood as a microcosm of the change occurring within UFCW Local 401 over the past twenty years.

Finally, it should be noted that the innovations and adaptations made at Lakeside did not result from the creation of a grand design. The local’s leadership did not map out a brand new approach for organizing and representing before launching the drive. The changes were ad hoc, arising out of the necessity to respond to changing circumstances. They were informed by past failures, but they were not an attempt to come up with a new organizing model. The process was more organic than that. One might say the innovations were more improvised than scripted.

The openness of Local 401 leaders and organizers to trying something new at Lakeside was fed by a decade of failure at Brooks and an evolving awareness of what was needed to fight twenty-first-century labour battles. Rather than walk away from a difficult fight, they forced themselves to take a fresh look at how to tackle the issues. Their decision to do so made a big difference in the outcome. It also marked a turning point for the local and how it went about its business.