Introduction

In October 2005, I spent a day walking the Lakeside Packers picket line. The beef-processing plant was in the midst of an ugly first-contract strike. During my tenure as a staff member for the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), I had walked my fair share of picket lines. In my experience, they are mostly the same: workers milling about, chatting idly among themselves, stopping vehicles and pedestrians to explain the dispute, and occasionally rallying to stop strikebreakers from crossing the line. In the world of modern labour relations, the angry energy once associated with strikes has largely been drowned in a sea of legal restrictions. Laws governing picket lines, intrusive video surveillance (practiced by both sides), and labour board injunctions generally serve to keep expressions of outrage and protest in check. More the stuff of monotony than excitement, the modern picket line resembles its early-twentieth-century ancestor only in the presence of picket signs.

However, the Lakeside strike was no ordinary strike. The plant is located in Brooks, a sleepy southern Alberta town previously known for cattle and oil well servicing and deeply entrenched in Alberta’s conservative rural culture. The employer, Tyson Foods, was virulently antiunion and had fought hard for two decades to keep the plant union-free. After a previous failed organizing bid, the company had taunted the union by hoisting a banner on its sign beside the Trans-Canada Highway declaring the plant to be “Proudly Union-Free.” Then there was the union involved in the strike—United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 401. A grocery store local, representing mostly food-related service sector workers, might seem an odd choice of candidate to take on this Herculean fight, especially when another Alberta local, UFCW Local 1118, already predominantly organized and represented meat-packing workers. What did grocery workers know about the tough work and brutal conditions of a meat-packing plant?

But what made Lakeside truly different, at least for me, was the workers. In keeping with industry trends, the composition of the workers at the Brooks plant had shifted dramatically, in the wake of an ongoing influx of African and Asian immigrants (see Broadway 2013). Half of the plant’s workers hailed from southern Alberta or other rural areas of Canada, while the other half came from Somalia, Ethiopia, Uganda, Sudan, the Philippines, and other far-flung locations.

It was a plant divided and a town in flux. I knew before I arrived in Brooks that the certification, gained by the narrowest of margins, was heavily split along racial lines, with the Canadians by birth largely opposed and the newcomers in favour. I also knew that the latest drive had been sparked by a wildcat protest (an unofficial, unsanctioned walkout) by a cluster of Somali workers: this time, the union had found a way to win over the newcomers.

I had been told that the strike was not pretty, but that warning hardly prepared me for what I experienced on the picket line. It was a crisp fall day but the sun was shining. Just off the highway, at the main entrance to the plant, clustered hundreds of workers wearing UFCW Local 401 bibs, some standing around fire barrels, others meandering across the road, still others talking in small groups—and almost every single face was black or brown. I had never been on a picket line like this. Until now, the labour movement in Alberta had been pretty “white” (Alberta Federation of Labour 2001).

Amidst the sea of African and Asian newcomers, I spotted a handful of UFCW staffers familiar to me. But even those I didn’t know I immediately identified as union staff, not because of the colour of their skin (the line that day included a few workers from Newfoundland), but because they seemed so different in every way from the people for whom they were working. The staffers were a mélange of young, energetic grocery store workers and grizzled union vets with years of experience in the labour relations trenches. Neither group seemed to have anything in common with the men and women milling around them.

Then the local president, Doug O’Halloran, drove up to the line. The energy in the crowd rose. O’Halloran, a larger-than-life former meat packer, carried himself with an air of authority tinged with modesty. After some informal greetings, he addressed the crowd. They listened, rapt, cheering and applauding everything he said. I was surprised at the enthusiasm, energy, and, yes, love they expressed for him.

Later that day, the employer tried to push some buses filled with scabs through the line. Things got crazy fast. No polite discussions here. Shouting and jeering, the picketers rocked the buses as they tried to inch their way through the sea of people. The members and staffers acted as one, unified in conviction and action. The energy was electric and vaguely dangerous. A few buses got through, while others gave up and turned away. Soon the swell ebbed and the line calmed down. It was a partial victory, but there were more battles to come.

In the days following my brief visit, the strike escalated, with more violent clashes. The employer built a dozen roads across fields surrounding the plant in order to sneak in workers. In a nightmarish incident, four managers, including the plant CEO, pursued O’Halloran along back roads in a high-speed car chase in an attempt to serve him court papers. The chase culminated in a three-car accident, in which O’Halloran suffered serious injuries.

After twenty-four days, the strike was settled, the tentative agreement narrowly approved: the Lakeside workers had their first agreement and thus solidified the union’s place at Lakeside. More than two thousand workers were now dues-paying Local 401 members. It was the largest successful certification in Alberta in more than a decade. The AFL moved on to other challenges, leaving Local 401 with the challenge of unifying a deeply divided workforce.

But for me, the strike lingered. I couldn’t shake a series of questions. Just how did they do it? How did UFCW Local 401 successfully organize Lakeside Packers? O’Halloran had a reputation in the labour movement for running a top-down union, and Local 401 was seen as a classic “business union,” playing the game the old way. How was such a union able to mobilize the types of workers that the labour movement had generally been least able to organize?

When I asked about Lakeside, people would tell me it was O’Halloran’s stubbornness that led to the victory, but I didn’t buy it. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that something more was going on with Local 401. A pattern of difficult, surprise victories was beginning to emerge. In 2002, the local had held a first-contract strike at the Shaw Conference Centre in Edmonton, which employed a diverse workforce including large numbers of Filipina women. Then Lakeside in 2005. In 2006, they struck Palace Casino in Edmonton, another first-contract dispute and another highly diverse and unlikely workforce.1

But the more I examined the local, how it operated and how it was delivering for underrepresented workers, the more confusing it seemed. There were so many contradictions, so many ways in which it was doing what leaders and other activists in the labour movement said they couldn’t do. The local was also doing more reaching out and innovating than any other AFL affiliate at the time. The range of industries and occupations it had organized was extensive. Something didn’t add up.

Finally, one day, I decided to stop trying to explain away the contradictions and to embrace them instead. Maybe there was something to be learned from Local 401’s stubborn refusal to be pigeon-holed and from being open to the idea that unions are not as simple as we have been taught.

At that moment, this book was born.

LABOUR RELATIONS IN ALBERTA

The context in which Local 401 was operating makes its success even more remarkable. Alberta is not a particularly hospitable jurisdiction for unions. It has the lowest unionization rate in the country—25 percent, with the private sector rate at 11 percent (Statistics Canada 2017). The number of certification applications to the Alberta Labour Relations Board have been dropping for more than two decades, and those that are filed fail more than 50 percent of the time—a success rate far below other jurisdictions (Foster 2012, 207). Organizing activity is low and is mostly clustered in the public and quasi-public sector.

This low rate of union activity reflects the fact that Alberta, at the time of the case study, had some of the most antiunion labour laws in Canada. A North American study found that Alberta ranked fifty-first out of sixty-three jurisdictions for labour protections (Block, Roberts, and Clarke 2003, 99), below most US states. Even though labour relations in Alberta were governed by the same system of union representation and collective bargaining (commonly called the Wagner model) that was enshrined in legislation throughout English Canada during the postwar period, the province had removed many of the provisions that assist unions in organizing and representing workers. For example, until 2017, when amendments to the labour code were made, Alberta’s Labour Relations Code had no provisions for card-check certification (whereby a certification vote is not required if the union can demonstrate majority support), first-contract arbitration, or limits to the use of replacement workers. The code, which had been in place for twenty years, also placed extensive restrictions on the right to strike, banned secondary picketing (picketing in locations other than the workplace), and tightly regulated picket line activity. The code even lacked a mandatory Rand formula provision requiring workers in a unionized workplace to pay union dues even if they choose not to join the union.2 Conversely, the code provided employers considerable latitude to communicate with workers during certification votes. In addition, Alberta Labour Relations Board procedures and practices led to long delays between certification applications and votes (giving employers more time to persuade workers), slow decisions in unfair labour practices complaints, and soft penalties against employers for Labour Relations Code infractions. Many of these shortcomings were addressed in a 2017 amendment by the NDP government, the effects of which, at the time of writing, cannot yet be fully determined.

At the heart of this situation is the fact that, until 2015, Alberta was governed for eighty years by conservative governments with strong links to industry, leading to legislation detrimental to union activity. Parties and groups that were friendlier to union issues generally found themselves marginalized in political debate in Alberta. The election, in May 2015, of an NDP government in the province was thus cause for optimism among supporters of labour rights, providing a window of opportunity for changes to existing labour laws. In addition, only a few months before the NDP came to power in Alberta, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that all workers have the right to strike and that provinces must bring their labour laws into compliance with this decision.3

These are, however, relatively recent developments. Although unions in every jurisdiction have faced challenges in organizing workers, the situation in Alberta has long been especially hostile to union activity. This historically difficult atmosphere provides an important part of the context for understanding the UFCW Local 401 experience.

RETHINKING UNIONS

UFCW Local 401 makes for an engaging, informative case study. Its recent history has all the makings of a good story—dramatic events, strong personalities, unexpected heroes, complex motivations. But there is a more important reason for telling the story of UFCW Local 401. Much of what Local 401 has accomplished in the past two decades—innovative organizing tactics, active engagement with difficult-to-organize workers, and a willingness to take on employers—can provide useful information on how to make unions more effective in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, closely examining the complexities of Local 401 grants us an opportunity to rethink our common understandings about how unions operate. The apparent contradictions within Local 401’s structures and actions contain important insights into the nature of unionism in the twenty-first century.

Mainstream thinking about unions, among both practitioners and scholars, includes some widely accepted notions about what unions do, how they operate, and to what degree they can differ from one another. These notions form the conceptual backdrop against which we generally study unions. In recent decades, many of these notions have been informed by the framework of regulations and procedures through which the Wagner model of unionism—with its emphasis on collective bargaining in good faith and on mechanisms such as grievances, arbitration, and the right to strike—was legally elaborated and institutionalized in the post–World War II period. Widely held axioms about union behaviour are useful in that they order and help us interpret what we observe. However, in an era of globalization and neoliberalism, it is critical to ask whether those accepted notions still reflect reality. This book proposes to explore that question.

Questioning the Divide

The first step toward rethinking prevalent notions is re-examining how we conceptualize unions and their activities. Unions obviously come in many sizes and forms and have varying purposes, with the result that union behaviour covers a wide range of possibilities. As always, in order to make sense of this individual profusion, we create categories. We apply a label so that we can identify the basic type of union with which we are dealing. This union is “militant,” while this one is “collaborationist.” One might be seen as “activist,” and another as “bread and butter.” This labelling has a long history: consider “yellow dog” unions and “syndicalist” unions from the early twentieth century. The problem is, of course, that labels can obscure more than they explain.

Two of the most powerful descriptors in the contemporary Canadian labour movement are “business union” and “social union.” These labels evoke certain images and lock in familiar frames of reference. Business unions are perceived as focusing almost exclusively on representing the interests of union members, chiefly through collective bargaining, while social unions broaden their agenda to include broader political and social change (Godard 2011, 172–173). Pradeep Kumar and Gregor Murray (2006, 82) offer an elegant articulation of the difference between the two as “the defence of the worker as wage earner as opposed to the worker as citizen.” This dichotomy has shaped much of the contemporary theorizing around unions and has served as a fundamental framework for the study of industrial relations (Hyman 1975). A flip through any contemporary Canadian industrial relations textbook will reveal the extent to which industrial relations scholars continue to invoke the business/social binary to characterize forms of union behaviour (see, for example, Godard 2011; McQuarrie 2015). The terms are also in common use within the labour movement.

Researchers have begun to understand the business/social union divide as more of a continuum than a duality (see, for example, Kumar and Murray 2006; Ross 2007), suggesting that unions can display elements of both. While this view recognizes that the “business” union and the “social” union are ideal types, it still relies on a fundamental distinction between the two that allows unions to be situated at particular points along the spectrum. Certain actions are assumed to be characteristic of social unions and others of business unions, and, while a union’s actions can be weighted more in one direction or the other, the analysis nonetheless rests on the same conceptual opposition.

The case of Local 401 illustrates the limitations of the two dominant conceptualizations, as do a number of other relatively recent cases. For example, in October 2007, the Canadian Auto Workers (now Unifor), long considered a bastion of social unionism, signed an employer-friendly “Framework of Fairness” with Magna International, in which the union agreed to relinquish many of the traditional principles of labour organizing, including the right of workers to strike, to be represented by shop stewards, and to lodge grievances (Rosenfeld 2007). The deal, which was widely criticized, was difficult to understand within a social unionism frame. Conversely, UFCW Canada, widely seen as a business union, has nonetheless spent years attempting to defend the rights of farm workers in Canada with little prospect of ever collecting any union dues from them (UFCW Canada and Agricultural Workers Alliance 2011), an action that clearly runs counter to the business union model.

This book challenges the use of the traditional business/social union framework to describe unionism today. Current forms of union action are responses to the specific challenges faced by contemporary unions, and these actions may or may not fit neatly into the categories we conventionally assign to unions. It is time to rethink how we understand unions and their actions. UFCW Local 401 presents us with an interesting test case for this exploration.

Unions in Motion

How we study and understand unions is changing. Historically, researchers painstakingly analyzed formal union structures to glean insights into how unions operate. Library shelves are full of books on the topic (among them Webb and Webb 1920; Hoxie 1923; Turner 1962; and Crouch 1982). Labour scholars have a long tradition of highlighting the role of actors and exploring how members and leaders of unions have shaped the labour movement (see, for example, Heron 1996; Morton 2007; Finkel 2012). Scholars have also turned their attention to how external forces—in particular, neoliberalism—are shaping labour’s destiny (Panitch and Swartz 2003; Robinson 2000; MacDonald 2014, for example). Unions are, of course, constituted by the interaction of structure, actors, and external forces. Actors are key to understanding what unions do, but their actions are bounded, defined, and propelled by the framework within which unions operate, as well as by the external world acting upon unions.

In recent years, labour scholars have recognized this reality and have produced a body of research that attempts to integrate the three elements of structure, actors, and external forces. Seeing unions as organizations in motion, they seek to understand how and why unions change or stay the same. With the goal of understanding union renewal (or revitalization), these scholars explore how unions respond to their external world, how individuals within unions react to challenges, and how structures and other stable aspects of the organization encourage or inhibit change. Their aims are to diagnose how traditional union practices and structures are contributing to the struggles of twenty-first century unions and to reveal specific strategies to revitalize and strengthen unions. Union renewal is framed both as a general response to the crisis of unionism in the face of neoliberalism and globalization and as a specific set of actions:

Union renewal is the term used to describe the process of change, underway or desired, to “put new life and vigour” in the labour movement to rebuild its organizational and institutional strength. It refers to a variety of actions/initiatives taken or needed by labour organizations to strengthen themselves in the face of their declining role and influence in the workplace and society. (Kumar and Schenk 2006b, 30)

Ostensibly, renewal entails the use of diverse approaches that have proved successful in increasing union effectiveness.

The union renewal research has begun to integrate our understanding of unions as organizations with both structure and dynamics, experiencing both change and stability. Researching the interaction of elements is more complex than simply drawing conclusions from an analysis of structure, and union renewal work has therefore painted a more complex picture of the lives of unions. And yet our understanding of the factors that lead to revitalization remains incomplete. In particular, we need to examine more closely the internal dynamics of unions that either facilitate or inhibit renewal. Even when they operate in the same context and with similar structures, some unions chart a course for revitalization, while others do not. The process of revitalization thus appears to be contingent on factors that remain, for the most part, unexplored in union renewal research.

Here, the case of UFCW Local 401 proves to be helpful. Local 401 has changed significantly over the past twenty years, yet existing models do not easily explain this revitalization. A closer look at the evolution of the local, over an extended period of time, may reveal factors that contributed to its transformation but that have thus far gone unrecognized. The question then becomes, how might we best explore the inner workings of a union?

THE POWER OF NARRATIVE

Although we have a great deal of knowledge about the structure of unions and the actions they undertake, our understanding of what motivates unions to do what they do is less well developed. In particular, we have relatively little insight into how union actors make sense of what they do—how they impart coherence to their own behaviour. I would argue that, in order to grasp the internal dynamics at work in a union, we need to turn our attention to the role of narratives.

Narratives are, of course, a form of storytelling but they are more than that. Narratives possess an inner logic, a degree of internal coherence that imbues a story with greater meaning and significance. Through the creation of narratives, we impose order on experience: we render it interpretable and thereby produce meaning. The construction of a narrative thus entails choices about what to tell and how to tell it: a narrative is one way (among many) of parsing the world. We can therefore probe its meaning and ask what interests it serves. Moreover, narratives are not inert: they shape our behaviour in two ways. By weaving the strands of our experience together to create coherence, they provide a conceptual basis on which we can make decisions about how to move forward. At the same time, the construction of narratives helps us to define our self-identity, and that story of who we are will in turn influence our decisions about how to behave.

Like members of other organizations, actors within unions are constantly involved in the construction of narratives. Leaders construct narratives for their members, the public, and themselves that explain why the union acts as it does and even what kind of union it is. These narratives can shape future actions. The effects of narrative on union behaviour, however, remains largely uncharted territory. By identifying and analyzing the narratives produced with UFCW Local 401, and by remaining alert to shifts in these narrative over time, I aim to unravel some of the connections between the stories that unions tell about themselves and the actions they take.

In what follows, I tell the story of UFCW Local 401 as it has unfolded over the past twenty years, with a view to explaining how and why the union changed. In so doing, I hope to shed new light on the processes of union revitalization. But I also seek to understand the role that narratives played in the transformation of the local and, in particular, how they functioned to create coherence out of apparent contradiction and complexity. While Local 401 will be the protagonist in this account, as with all good stories, the real message is about something bigger. This book is about both the struggles of unions to make sense of the changing world around them and their efforts on behalf of working people. When we step back to analyze Local 401’s actions, we also glean insights into union actions more generally. Although the details may be specific to Local 401, the challenges, dilemmas, and contradictions are shared by all unions today.