3 | From Strength to Strength
A Paradoxical Path

The mood was upbeat on 8 October 2013 as eighty-seven hundred workers at the Real Canadian Superstore grocery chain went back to work after a brief but highly successful province-wide three-day strike. The workers—a mélange of immigrant women, young workers, and long-serving middle-aged men—had reason to feel buoyant. They had just successfully stared down a large corporation demanding concessions and forced it to retreat.

The contrast with Local 401’s other province-wide grocery strike sixteen years earlier, the 1997 Safeway strike, is stark. Similar numbers of workers in the same industry were dealing with similar issues, but the results were dramatically different. Whereas the Safeway strike dragged slowly to a disappointing outcome, Superstore workers were able to bask in a swift and decisive victory. What had changed? While the dynamics of any labour dispute is unique and the outcomes cannot be attributed to any single factor, the union local that struck Superstore was clearly not the same one that had faltered in the Safeway strike almost a generation earlier. By 2013, Local 401 was battle-tested and better equipped to mobilize thousands of workers across the province. In many respects, the Superstore victory can be seen as a culmination of sixteen years of slow evolution in Local 401.

In this chapter, I examine the years following the Lakeside strike, a period marked by multiple labour disputes and a significant demographic shift in the local’s membership. I explore the contours of the local’s ongoing evolution; look closely at some of the disputes, with particular attention to the 2013 Superstore strike; and investigate the dual trends of change and continuity within the local.

AN ERA OF MILITANCY

Between 2000 and 2014, no union in Alberta went on strike as often as UFCW Local 401. In that period, the local went on strike or was locked out no less than ten times. Workplaces represented by the local lost 215,000 person-days to labour disputes—almost a quarter of all days lost to strikes and lockouts in the province, despite Local 401 representing only about 7 percent of all unionized workers in Alberta (Alberta Labour 2017).

An inventory of the disputes reveals a wide range of industries and contexts (see table 1). Two (Lakeside and Superstore) were unusually large, and three (Shaw, Palace Casino, and Old Dutch) lasted months before resolution. Three of the disputes were first-contract strikes (Shaw, Lakeside, and Palace), and most involved employers outside the local’s traditional grocery retail industry. Most of the strikes also involved nontraditional workforces marked by high numbers of immigrants, young workers, and women. Some of the more significant disputes are recounted briefly below.

In addition to its strike activity, Local 401 used an active and aggressive organizing strategy. Between 2009 and 2014, the local filed thirty-eight certification applications, second only to Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the province’s largest union (with sixty-nine).1 Not all applications were successful, but over the past decade, the local has successfully organized workers in a wide range of industries and occupations.

On a global scale, Local 401’s achievements may seem modest. In an Alberta context, however, with a labour movement reeling from the country’s most antiunion labour laws, years of Conservative governments, public sector austerity, and an economy dominated by powerful energy corporations (Foster 2012), Local 401 has been one of the most militant and active unions in the province. Furthermore, it achieved its gains in industries that are traditionally difficult for unions to organize.

Lakeside, with its headline-grabbing tension, was the local’s highest-profile dispute. It was also a key turning point for the union. In the years that followed, Local 401 engaged in numerous disputes, employing tactics learned at Lakeside and developing new ones. Many of these actions are noteworthy either for the tactics employed or for who was involved. Of particular interest are the Palace Casino and Old Dutch Foods strikes in 2007 and 2009, respectively.

Table 1. UFCW Local 401 Labour Disputes, 2000–14

Palace Casino

The 303-day strike at Palace Casino in Edmonton lacked the violent altercations that had marked Lakeside, but it was a significant dispute in its own right. Palace Casino, located in the sprawling West Edmonton Mall, is owned by BC-based Gateway Casino and Entertainment, which runs a chain of casinos in the western provinces. The staff at Palace Casino—dealers, servers, kitchen staff, and custodial workers—were predominantly women, many of them young and born outside Canada. Wages in casinos are typically low and are sometimes supplemented by tips. At the time of the strike, wages for dealers ranged between nine and twelve dollars an hour (Finlayson 2006). Much of the work is part-time and unpredictable. However, as one union staffer put it, there is a great deal of professional pride among casino workers: “They consider themselves to be almost like a trade—they’re professionals. . . . These are people who deal with tens of thousands of dollars every shift. . . . There’s this elevated status: ‘You know I work in the gaming industry.’ Even though the wages are crap. And there is a real pride among the workers in the gaming industry” (staff, 2).

Workers at the casino had been represented for about ten years by a staff association. However, difficult financial circumstances in the association and the employer’s increased reluctance to bargain led the association membership in 2003 to seek out formal union certification. The workers approached a number of unions, but the unions, fearing the fight was too difficult, rejected them. One example was the response of the Canadian Union of Public Employees: “CUPE looked at it and made the decision that we don’t want to take you because there is no way we can get an agreement without taking a prolonged strike. You could see it coming. The employer was not going to deal with these employees” (staff, 9). According to union staff and the Palace workers interviewed, other unions approached included Canadian Auto Workers (CAW, now Unifor) and Teamsters. Eventually, Local 401 agreed to take on the certification, making them the official bargaining agent, even though they knew it would be a difficult challenge.

While the staff association had negotiated an agreement with the employer, it lacked most of the basic features of a formal collective agreement, including grievance process, dues check-off, and union rights clauses. Lacking those rudimentary tools, the union made no headway with the employer. “The next three years we fought with the employer,” recalled O’Halloran. “They wouldn’t let us in to service the place. . . . It was a war for three years” (ALHI interview, 2005). Long before the agreement expired, Local 401 knew it would take a strike to get formal union recognition. Due to the inadequate nature of the contract drawn up by the staff association, the ensuing strike was, for all intents and purposes, a first-contract strike and was treated as such by the local. It did not charge dues and it prioritized internal organizing by identifying union supporters, persuading those skeptical of the union, and mobilizing activists. Union staffers indicated that they designed their efforts as a three-year strike-preparation campaign. Early on, the local expanded the scope of the conflict to the broader gambling industry, extending blame for low wages to provincial government policy. As an Edmonton Sun reporter noted at the time, “The union also wants to turn the strike into a debate over the way the province runs casinos” (Bhardwaj 2006).

The strike began on 9 September 2006. The main issues outstanding at the start of the strike were wages, safety conditions, and the key union representation rights of dues check-off, an on-site union office, the right of the union to access members in the workplace, and a grievance policy. A majority of members picketed or stayed away, although a significant number of strikebreakers, combined with management, allowed the casino to continue operating in a reduced capacity. As O’Halloran noted, the casino’s location inside a shopping mall posed a serious challenge for picketing:

Because it’s in West Edmonton Mall, we had two people against us: we had the mall and we had the Palace Casino. The mall had us before the [Labour Relations] Board. As a matter of fact, the strike commenced Saturday morning, and we were at the board at 7 o’clock Saturday night with them complaining about our picketing. We were able to negotiate down the road, after a week or so, that we could have twenty people inside the mall, thirty outside entrance nine, and as many as we wanted back by the poker door, where you come in and out of the poker room. (ALHI interview, 2005)

Crossing the line by customers was also an ongoing issue for the strike. The union set up a video camera by the casino’s main entrance, with a sign warning that photos of crossers would be posted on a website (www.casinoscabs.ca). Initially, the union claimed that this tactic was intended to prompt customers to stop, giving picketers an opportunity to talk with them and dissuade them from crossing, although it did threaten to post photos of customers who were “really obnoxious” and “caused problems” (O’Halloran quoted in “Gamblers’ Mugs,” 2006). Ultimately, the union never posted photos on the website, although it did use some in leaflets and on posters.

The tactic sparked significant controversy. The employer protested, and several customers filed complaints with the province’s privacy commissioner, who ruled that the union’s act of taking photos and videos of individuals and threatening to post them contravened Alberta’s Personal Information Protection Act (PIPA). The union fought the order to desist and won, with the Court of Appeal deciding that this application of PIPA violated the union’s constitutional right to freedom of expression, guaranteed under section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This decision was subsequently appealed by the Alberta government to the Supreme Court, which ruled on the case in 2013, siding with Local 401 over the privacy commissioner.2 The decision is seen as having strengthened union rights in Canada in that it found that a union’s right to free speech during a labour dispute takes precedence over privacy legislation (Simons 2013).

In the first few weeks of the strike, the action was fairly low key, but bargaining was going nowhere. The union began ramping up its communications strategy. Leaflets, websites, and ads began highlighting issues such as security and health and safety, introducing “West Edmonton Mouse” to Edmontonians to bring to their attention an alleged mouse infestation in the casino. The local eventually expanded the scope of its attack, turning the focus on the nature of the gaming industry itself. Its leaflets shone a light on the “dark side” of gambling and the game industry, with one in particular linking problems in the industry with the workers’ grievances. It is worth quoting at length:

So why are we here? It’s time to consider the truth about casinos. It’s time to speak out. Gambling is entertainment for some. But entertainment can become a serious addiction. Lives are ruined. At a casino you could be sitting next to someone that has become irrational and suicidal. Casinos play on our weaknesses. They encourage greed. One major Alberta religious leader recently called them exploitive. . . . The Alberta government claims to care about family values. But the government continues to let the casino industry grow in its present form. The government agency responsible for casinos refuses to even consider worker grievances. Many charities now refuse to accept casino money—at least they know what hypocrisy is!

The provocative campaign was designed to link the employer to ethical questions linked to the broader industry as well as to goad the Alberta government into the dispute, but it largely failed to achieve those goals.

Little shifted with the dispute until January 2007, when the employer applied for a Labour Board–supervised vote on its latest offer. The offer provided a bump in the wage increases and offered a signing bonus, but it excluded any union rights. The employer calculated that after four months on the picket line and now suffering through the depths of an Edmonton winter, the workers would take the sweetened pay package at the expense of longer-term effectiveness of union representation. The workers voted down the offer by a slim margin of 58 percent (O’Donnell 2007), and the strike continued through the winter.

The strike was settled on 10 July 2007, when the employer finally relented on union rights issues. The workers earned significant pay increases and signing bonuses and gained core union rights clauses to ensure representation going forward. No dramatic turn of event led to the shift, nor did the communications strategy appear to have an impact. More likely, the fact that the number of picketers did not drop appreciably over the ten-month strike sent a signal to the employer that the workers were not going to cave. Thus, it appears that an important factor in the dispute’s resolution was the unusually high strike pay afforded the picketers, who, in many cases, earned as much picketing as they did at work.

In many respects, the Palace Casino strike was an ordinary, if somewhat drawn out, dispute. Aggressive communications were less effective than traditional picketing (albeit with enhanced pay), which won the day, despite the fact that these were workers who were not experienced with union activism and who came from demographic groups that are generally difficult to organize. That Local 401 first mobilized these women, newcomers, and youth to strike and then kept them on the picket line for ten months speaks to the effectiveness of its organizing strategies.

Old Dutch Foods

In 2007, Local 401 inherited the bargaining unit at the Calgary potato chip plant owned by Old Dutch Foods, a Minnesota-based snack food manufacturer, following a merger with Local 373A, a relatively small local that had represented workers at Old Dutch Foods since 1971. As in many food-production facilities, the workforce was highly diverse, encompassing many ethnic groups and roughly equal numbers of men and women. The workers at the plant whom I interviewed reported that the various sections within the facility were racially and ethnically segregated, with different groups dominating particular functions. In addition, language barriers existed among the groups, with the result that employees often didn’t know, or even understand, one another. “We were just shut-off little departments of the company,” one worker said (member, 36).

One of the long-standing features of the collective agreement at Old Dutch was a provision that created an open shop, making membership and the payment of union dues voluntary. While a majority of workers at the plant had joined the union, a significant minority refused, creating tensions within the plant and weakening the position of the union. Local 373A had attempted, on numerous occasions, to bargain a Rand formula mandatory dues check-off, but Old Dutch had refused. At the time, Alberta was one of four provincial jurisdictions in Canada (the others being Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island) whose labour code lacked basic provisions for union security, in the form of a mandatory dues check-off, thereby requiring unions to negotiate it (Alberta Labour Relations Board 2009, para. 32).

When bargaining opened in 2008 for a new agreement, one of Local 401’s priorities was to achieve some form of closed shop or Rand formula provision. This position proved to be the key point of conflict between the union and the employer, with Old Dutch maintaining its staunch opposition to mandatory dues check-off. Bargaining over the course of nine months failed to resolve the matter. On 29 March 2009, the employer locked out its workers. (For a detailed overview of the dispute, see Alberta Labour Relations Board 2009, paras. 6–25.)

Since inheriting the bargaining unit, Local 401 had been actively organizing within the plant to increase the union membership and to build leaders among the various departments and ethnic groups. At the time of the lockout, 80 percent of the workers were union members (Gignac 2009), but strong tensions still existed between members and nonmembers. The picket line was a central site of the tension, since a significant minority, that included nonmembers and a portion of union members, crossed the line to continue working. Strikebreaking was encouraged by the employer in the lead-up to the lockout. Management “ran the shop,” said one union member. “They asked everybody within a week [of the lockout] if we would be willing to cross” (member, 36).

Strikers recall conflict building slowly over the months the picket line was active:

At first they were kind of laid back. They would walk and block [traffic] but they wouldn’t really get out there vocally. And then a couple months into it, then you started seeing it come out of them. These people are crossing our picket line, they are taking our work from us. . . . We battled some nasty nights and nasty days of weather, but in the end, they realized what we were standing there for. (member, 32)

Over the months, the picket line held and the dispute lapsed into a form of stalemate. Once again, the generous picket pay contributed to the stability of the picket line: “They paid our medical. We almost had the same wages we had when we were in there, and that was unheard of at that time” (member, 36). The pay not only shored up workers economically; it also contributed to building union loyalty. “Whatever they ask from us,” said one member, “I would be more than willing, just because [of] what they did for us during that picket line” (member, 36).

Ultimately, the Old Dutch dispute was resolved through legal channels, rather than on the picket line. In July 2009, the Local 401 filed an unfair labour practice complaint against the employer for failure to bargain in good faith. Included in this complaint was a constitutional challenge, in which the union argued that the absence from the Labour Relations Code of a minimum provision for union security, such as a mandatory Rand formula dues check-off, weakened the union’s ability to represent its members effectively in collective bargaining and therefore infringed on the fundamental right to freedom of association laid out in section 2(d) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Previous attempts to compel Rand, both at Old Dutch and in other cases, had failed. However, the union’s argument was bolstered by the Supreme Court’s decision, two years earlier, in Health Services and Support v. British Columbia, in which the court ruled that the right of union members to engage in collective bargaining was protected under section 2(d) of the Charter—a decision that upheld union membership as a form of association.3

In November 2009, the Alberta Labour Relations Board ruled in favour of the union’s complaint. The board decided that Old Dutch’s refusal to negotiate a union security clause in the collective agreement constituted a failure to bargain in good faith and that the Alberta Labour Relations Code was unconstitutional for failing to include mandatory provisions for union security such as a Rand formula dues check-off (see Alberta Labour Relations Board 2009, esp. paras. 66–69). The weight of the board’s decision, which ordered the employer back to the table with a proposal on the union security issue, motivated Old Dutch to retract its opposition to Rand, and the parties settled an agreement a month later that included a Rand formula dues check-off.4

Despite the legal victory and successful agreement, challenges related to the diversity of the workforce did not disappear. The union replicated its approach at Lakeside with the Old Dutch workers. A staffer recalled the linguistic challenges: “When we did our ratification vote at Old Dutch, we had to bring in six different translators, just to be able to get them to understand the collective agreement” (staff, 9). In addition, tensions between picketers and strikebreakers persisted. As one member put it, “Now we have to work with these guys who crossed the picket line—who kept us out there probably months longer than we needed to be” (member, 36).

The Old Dutch dispute once again saw Local 401 applying lessons learned at Lakeside to mobilize diverse groups of workers and to solidify their resolve, shored up by adequate picket pay, to have their demands met. Most significantly, the workers remained on the picket line for eight and a half months over a matter of union principle rather than bread-and-butter issues such as wages or safety. The individual workers stood to gain little from holding firm on Rand, but the union was successful in persuading these workers that a stronger union means a better workplace down the road.

Other Disputes

Between 2009 and the 2013 Superstore strike, Local 401 engaged in four other labour disputes that garnered less attention in the media and the labour movement. Some were smaller successful strikes that ran in a fairly traditional manner, while others failed. In September 2009, workers at McDonald’s Consolidated and Lucerne Foods in Edmonton, the wholly owned warehousing and ice cream divisions of Canada Safeway grocery chain, rejected a deal recommended by the bargaining committee. A few days later, the employer locked the workers out. President O’Halloran’s reaction to the rejection and lockout reveals much about his approach to situations when his authority is questioned. Publicly, he called the strike a mistake and predicted that it would be long (Canadian Press 2009). In private, he berated and threatened the membership for their decision but pledged his support. A staffer described the tense interaction between O’Halloran and the members at the tentative agreement-ratification meeting:

Doug O’Halloran got up at that meeting and said, If you vote to go on strike, you will not only potentially be out for a very long time, I think you are just going to rot out there. There is a big potential that Safeway’s going to just sell the Edmonton warehouse and move all their operations to Calgary. And he was very forthright with them. He knew it was unpopular, he was very unpopular for saying that, he got beaten up a lot for saying that. The members said, You’ll do what we fucking tell you. They voted it down. He said, We’re going on strike. Ultimately this is a democracy—you cast your ballot, we’re gonna go on strike, let’s go on strike. Come on, let’s go. It almost felt like the father with the teenage son or daughter that just won’t listen no matter what you say. He’s like, alright let’s go. He was very vocal and he got shit on heavily at that meeting. Yelled at. Screamed at. He takes it, he lets them vent, but then he says, You can say whatever you want to me. I don’t give a shit what you think of me, but I’m telling you as your president, my job is to say you are going to be out forever and you have the potential of losing your job entirely if you go on strike. (staff, 2)

Within a week of walking out, members had changed their minds and agreed to take a deal that looked identical to the one they had rejected a few days earlier.

The 2011 Sobeys Forest Lawn grocery store strike in Calgary was also a failure, with the members giving in to concession demands after almost two months on strike. The union leadership blamed the members for the loss, as is evident from McLaren’s comment: “We wouldn’t have lost it if the members had of stayed strong, because the community supported it. We would have won it.” A more relevant factor may be that it was a single store certification, so the workers lacked the weight of a province-wide action that would impact the employer at multiple sites.

More successful were the 2010 strike at McKesson Canada, a health supplies warehouse, and the 2011 strike at Gate Gourmet, an airline catering company. Both disputes were fought over traditional issues of wages and specific workplace grievances. What is noteworthy about these two strikes is the demographic makeup of the workforces. McKesson is staffed heavily by Filipinos and also has a high proportion of young workers. Gate Gourmet employs mostly South Asian women. However, there is no evidence that the union chose (or needed) to employ some of the innovative tactics used during previous disputes, and these strikes appear to have played out in largely traditional ways.

No union wins every strike and the lack of innovative tactics in these lower-profile disputes does not necessarily nullify the significance of the approaches employed at Lakeside, Palace, and Old Dutch. Union practices are often uneven, and without a fuller understanding of the specific contexts of these smaller strikes, it is difficult to ascertain if other practices would have been more successful. What these strikes do highlight is the presence of an essential pragmatism among the Local 401 leaders. They approach each situation not from a programmatic, predetermined action plan but from an in-the-moment, problem-solving perspective. The leaders of Local 401 act from instinct to determine what actions are needed and what tactics might work. They are, of course, not always right, but more often than not, they appear to find a successful approach.

CHANGING DYNAMICS, STATIC STRUCTURES

Before recounting the events of Local 401’s most recent significant strike, it is important to discuss the changes that have taken place within the local since the Safeway strike of 1997. During this period, the union began to take politics more seriously and shifted its vision of the union role in social change. In addition, the influx of new types of members and the move toward a more mobilized rank-and-file shifted dynamics. During the course of these changes, however, the rigid, stable power structure of the local has remained static.

Changes to Internal Dynamics

The formal structures of Local 401 have not changed: the president continues to wield extensive authority over the operations of the local and the democratic bodies continue to play a minor role. General membership meetings are frequent, yet sparsely attended, and they rarely include addressing significant issues or making meaningful decisions about the direction of the local. Local 401 remains steadfastly “Doug’s local.” Yet, within this stable structure, the leaders have made significant changes to shift the direction and focus of the local. As discussed earlier, they have expanded their organizing targets, adopting innovative strategies to reach out to new groups of workers. Their decision to increase strike pay facilitated their use of a more militant approach with employers. The relief rep system formalized a training process for up-and-coming activists. Aggressive and provocative communications strategies expanded the scope of the local’s grievances to broader social and political issues.

In the past six or seven years, the process of shifting internal dynamics has continued. First, through most of its history, the key servicing functions in Local 401 were performed by hired staff. The role of shop stewards was limited. The staff rep managed even the early stages of grievances, with the steward’s role restricted, for the most part, to acting as a first point of contact. This pattern was particularly true in the grocery stores and retail. In food-production plants (most of whom Local 401 inherited through merger), stewards were more involved in workplace issues, but these constituted a minority of the local’s bargaining units. As a result of this stunted steward network, the staff rep was a crucial actor in the affairs of the union, which in turn enhanced the influence of the president as the staff’s boss.

Beginning around 2010, the union began an extensive project of expanding the shop steward network and increasing the role of shop steward in handling grievances and enforcing collective agreements. Large training workshops with new activists have focused on building the necessary skills for on-the-floor advocacy for members. This new focus on the role of stewards dovetails with an increased emphasis on generating and mobilizing new activists. Over the past decade, staff reps have been explicitly mandated with identifying, mentoring, and encouraging new activists—in particular, young workers. While this may not sound especially radical, for Local 401 it represents a marked shift in approach.

To reflect its shifting priorities, the local has also made a few changes to its committee structures, including a concerted attempt to revitalize the local’s long-running youth committee, which has languished in inactivity. In 2013, a new committee, the Community Action Network Committee, was created with the mandate of reaching out to the broader community, including different ethnic and cultural groups, nonprofit organizations, and engaging in local community issues. Its goal is to increase the union’s profile and participation on community issues, to “get involved in people’s communities so that they know we are there [to help]” (McLaren). The effectiveness of this committee has not yet been determined.

The local has adopted a pragmatic approach to embracing diversity and mobilizing groups that are often marginalized. The changing demographics of the grocery industry brought more newcomers, women, people of colour, and youth into the local’s ranks. As we have seen, the decisions to organize workplaces with higher proportions of immigrants, women, and youth were reactive and idiosyncratic rather than part of a coherent strategy to reach out to those groups of workers. However, once confronted with the reality of a diverse membership and potential membership, the local engaged in a process of learning how to effectively represent such a membership, and much of this learning came from mistakes. One staffer stressed the importance of adaptability in working with a diverse membership:

I think it is a one-on-one, a case-by-case, it’s a feel your way around, what works, what doesn’t, . . . particularly if you’re on strike as much as we are, taking on different people that we are. You have to be very light on your feet, very agile. . . . Okay that didn’t work I’m not going to do that again, I am going to do this. Or this person’s not that person, so I am going to deal with them differently. (staff, 2)

Initiatives such as multilingual communications, outreach to cultural social networks, and peer-to-peer organizing arose to solve practical barriers faced by the local. For example, the union started working to incorporate cultural leaders actively in the workings of the local after observing dynamics among particular cultural groups. “So if you want to organize a place or even get a strike vote,” said McLaren, “I will use the Filipinos for example—if you got a strong Filipino who really believes in the union, that one person can turn an entire group of Filipinos to understanding . . . why you gotta take these steps, do what you gotta do, right?” Hesse explained the local’s approach as doing whatever needs to be done:

For example, we organized the Baccarat Casino, largely an Asian workforce. So how’s a white German Polish guy organize an Asian workforce? Well, we interacted with the workers, found people of that ethnicity who were of a similar mindset to us, immediately employed them . . . as organizers, instantly. They just started doing house calls with us. . . . [We] translated documents into simplified Chinese. . . . So that is recognizing your demographic and reaching out to that demographic.

The local’s definition of diversity, however, seems somewhat narrow. The local’s staffers and leaders see the process as one of building “cultural sensitivity” (staff, 27) rather than equity. They measure their progress in terms of numbers: “When I became president,” said O’Halloran, “we maybe had two people on staff who were female—on the executive board, maybe three, four. Now 50 percent of the executive board is women, 50 percent of the staff are women.” What appears to be lacking is self-reflection about how sensitivity to the diversity of membership might require changes to the union’s structures and processes. While the union’s leaders have recognized the need for inclusivity and have taken steps to reach out to a broad range of workers, they have done nothing to alter the basic structures and processes of the union so as to allow for greater democracy. They have essentially asked new workers to accommodate to a white-dominated, patriarchal world.

Increased Focus on Politics

UFCW Local 401’s approach to broader political and social issues has also evolved over the period of study. While the local has long been an affiliate of the Canadian Labour Congress, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL), and local district labour councils, its political and broader community involvement has increased.

In the 1980s, Local 401 was seen as a conservative union with the Alberta labour movement, since it regularly took sides against more activist-oriented leaders at the AFL, district councils, and other labour organizations. In the early 1990s, the local ceased paying dues to the AFL for a number of months in protest of its left-leaning actions at the time. Over time, though, Local 401’s commitment to the house of labour has increased. By the early 2000s, it was taking a lead role on many AFL committees and projects.

While it was a nominal supporter of the NDP for many years, occasionally releasing staffers to work election campaigns and providing token financial support, the local did not formally affiliate with the party until 2008. Since that time, it has taken a more active role with the party, sitting on the provincial executive, having a larger presence at party events, and substantially increasing financial donations (until the 2015 ban on corporate and union donations). The president has used his stature to wield influence on key party matters such as the nomination and election of the provincial leader. Support for the NDP is not generally considered radical political action, but we need to recognize the context in which this support occurred. For decades, the NDP was a small third party with few prospects of electoral victory. More pragmatic unions supported the Liberals or, inexplicably, the governing Conservatives. While this changed dramatically in the 2015 provincial election, with the NDP winning a surprise majority government, before that unexpected shift, no union that supported the NDP had visions of access to power.

Early in the period under review, much of the local’s external energy was spent on charitable causes such as the Leukemia Foundation. Although it continues that support, it has recently begun to engage with groups and causes that have a more political focus. The local has, for example, supported a variety of campaigns launched by Friends of Medicare to defend public health care. Since 2011, it has offered sustaining support to the Parkland Institute, a left-wing research institute affiliated with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. In 2012, it joined Public Interest Alberta, a provincial advocacy group working on a variety of public policy issues, including seniors, privatization, homecare, and education. Over the past decade, Local 401 has become a strong supporter of gay pride events in Edmonton and Calgary, sponsoring events and participating in the respective pride marches. In 2014, it formed a partnership with Migrante Alberta, a grassroots organization mobilizing and advocating for temporary foreign workers in the province.

The local remains reluctant to engage actively with direct or radical political efforts, preferring financial donations and association with established left-wing organizations. It also continues to place a greater emphasis on electoral politics than on extraparliamentary organizing, although that is shifting with its recent relationship with Migrante Alberta. On the whole, however, over the past decade, Local 401 has become more vocal politically and more supportive of left-wing political organizations.

THE 2013 SUPERSTORE STRIKE

UFCW Local 401 has undergone many significant changes in the past twenty years, even while it has maintained its overall structure and approach to leadership. Change is most evident in its handling of strikes. Thus, the most appropriate place to end the story of Local 401’s transformation is with its highly successful 2013 Superstore strike. Here, the new UFCW is clearly on display and stands in marked contrast to the failed 1997 Safeway strike.

In the 1980s, the grocery giant Loblaws was responsible for one of the first volleys in the transformation of the grocery industry in Canada by launching the Real Canadian Superstore discount chain in Western Canada. Superstores were large, warehouse-like, no-frills stores that attempted to keep prices to a minimum. When launching the new stores, Loblaws negotiated voluntary recognition agreements with UFCW locals in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba, with Local 401 being the Alberta local. Beginning with those deals and continuing to the present day, wages and working conditions for Superstore workers have lagged behind those at more established employers such as Safeway and Sobeys.

As recounted earlier, shortly after taking over Local 401, Doug O’Halloran reversed the union’s long-standing position on voluntary recognitions and achieved formal certification for all Superstore locations in the province. While this made the union status more secure, it did not substantially increase the workers’ bargaining position with the employer. Working conditions continued to lag behind the local’s other grocery bargaining units. The workforce at Superstore also differed from that of the traditional grocery chains. Since the work at Superstore is more part-time and has fewer benefits, turnover is significantly higher. The majority of workers come from two groups: youth and immigrant women of a diversity of ages. The combination of high turnover and employment of groups traditionally more reluctant to join unions has made union mobilization more difficult at Superstore over the years. Adding to the challenge was that by 2013, 80 percent of Superstore staff were part-time, working fewer than twenty hours a week (Stephenson 2013).

Relations with the parent company had long been difficult, since Loblaws was highly motivated to keep labour costs down, a tendency amplified with the entry into the market of other low-cost retailers such as Walmart and Costco. However, the union had been ineffective at sufficiently mobilizing its members to create counterpressure. In 2008, the union brought the workers to the brink of a strike across the province, only to give in within minutes of the strike deadline, accepting a substandard deal that included many concessions. Union staff attribute the last-minute retreat to not trusting, despite a strong strike mandate, that the members would actually go out and stay on strike (staff, 2). Many rank-and-file members were unhappy with the retreat, as demonstrated by one member’s comments:

I didn’t agree with the settlement. . . . I was worried about the roving night crew that they had, that would go from store to store to store. There was no language for them in the agreement. I was upset. . . . I actually did well off that strike, as I was only forty hours away from going to that new top rate, and so I got a giant raise. So I did well for myself, but I was still not happy for all those others coming to me asking, what happened? What happened? (member, 16)

When bargaining opened in 2012 for the next contract, the situation was different. In the intervening years, Local 401 had ramped up its internal organizing, attempting to find a deeper pool of activists prepared to take on a fight. It had adopted some of the strategies learned at Lakeside and elsewhere, identifying informal leaders in various ethnic groups and among young workers. Even before entering bargaining, the local’s leadership knew it would be a difficult round. “We started a year in advance at Superstore,” said Hesse. “We told people we would be on strike in September and we got them interested.”

The situation was also different because the employer adopted a regional bargaining strategy, asking for the same set of concessions from the Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba locals. Loblaws argued that the concessions were necessary to create “a sustainable business model needed to support our colleagues and serve our customers” (Gandia and Wood 2013). The employer was seeking reduced hours for part-timers; more flexibility in scheduling; and significant changes in work processes, job descriptions, and scheduling. Initially, bargaining took place in parallel across the three provinces, but this would break down as the process entered its final stages.

Local 401 designed an intricate four-stage campaign that integrated internal organizing among members with internal and external communications strategies, launching it months before the strike. Under the slogan “Bargaining Strong Together!” stage one began before bargaining was opened and focused on educating members and soliciting their views on the proposals. Postcards sowed the soil for the coming conflict by providing basic information, including what a union contract was, the role of proposals, and how members could get involved. Buttons were distributed to inform members of the coming negotiations.

In the spring of 2013, stage two began with the launch of the external communications, which demonized the employer. A website named greedygalen.com after the company owner, Galen Weston, linked Loblaws to the Bangladesh factory fire that had killed almost eleven hundred workers just weeks before, since the factory was one of the places where Joe Fresh, a Loblaws clothing line, was produced (Shaw 2015). While this message was officially external communications, it was also aimed at Superstore workers, in particular those with connections in Bangladesh, to stir up anger and send the message that the union cared about social justice.

In stage three, the focus returned to the members and the lead-up to the strike vote in August. A series of eleven handouts was produced and distributed, with each one highlighting a Superstore worker, including a photo and a blurb about the individual and why he or she was voting for a strike. The handouts demonstrated the wide range of backgrounds of the workers, especially the age and ethnic diversity, and represented different store departments. Local 401 had employed this strategy in the past to draw a divergent workforce together, allowing workers to see themselves and their issues being represented, and to personalize the union. The ensuing strike vote garnered 97 percent support in Edmonton and Calgary and 93 percent in the rest of the province.

Notably, the campaign replicated the multilingual and diversity-oriented communications strategy that had proved effective at Lakeside. A union member commented on the potency of this strategy:

They translated a whole bunch of the documents into different languages, like Tagalog, . . . Chinese, Punjabi, and they had these to hand out to members so the members could actually participate more. Also in their posters, in their leafleting and those sort of things, they would use women, they would kind of get their target category. One of the posters that made a big impact was actually of an East Indian woman, and it was one we were to hand out during the actual strike, and it said something to the effect of, I am a person. And it hit home. People would actually say, from the East Indian crowd, say, you know, that’s one of us on there. (member, 3)

Multiple interviewees pointed to the effectiveness of the internal communications at building awareness, educating, and mobilizing.

Stage four returned attention to pressuring the employer. O’Halloran described one set of ads during this stage of the campaign:

We ran a full-page ad in every major newspaper, which cost $450,000. And people say that was a waste of money, but, you know, we didn’t run it for the average citizen, we ran it for Galen’s friends. We ran it in all the business sections of the papers. . . . It didn’t attack him directly, but it really called into question his morals and his conscience. You know, you are out here with President’s Choice charity and all these things, but if you get the concessions you are looking for, your workers are going to have to go to charities to survive. It was targeted at other businesses, his buddies that play polo and stuff would phone him up and say, Galen, what the fuck you doing? And as it turns out, [of] everything we did, that made them the maddest.

A second set of ads focused on potential customers, advising them of the impending strike and asking consumers to boycott Superstore if it occurred. These ads also profiled pictures of a diverse range of Superstore workers.

A second component of the fourth stage was a day of action—a new tactic for Local 401. Called Fairness Day, the local took a page from retail workers in the United States and organized a flash mob in an Edmonton store. One staff recounts the events: “We did the flash mob in the west end Superstore. We went in with probably five thousand purple balloons.” The balloons the employees carried read “Greedy Galen” on one side and “It’s About Fairness” on the other. “We basically handed them to kids and they walked around the store, and we walked in with literally thousands and thousands of helium balloons and let them go inside the store. Basically to create the feeling of, look, here is a group of retail workers who are actually standing up to their employer and saying, we are not going to take this anymore (staff, 9).”

The action sparked an angry reaction from the employer’s lead negotiator. Undeterred, O’Halloran informed him that they planned to do similar stunts every day until a settlement was reached. This latter statement, O’Halloran admitted later, was a bluff, since they had no other actions planned. “Companies bluff all the time,” he said. “It was in keeping with what we have done in other situations. With the media, with getting out front. And, you know, explaining what the real issues were—that it wasn’t necessarily a case about money. It was about dignity.”

As the campaign prepared and mobilized workers to strike, negotiations continued. At the beginning of October, days before the planned strike action, the Saskatchewan and Manitoba locals flipped and agreed to the concessions in exchange for a promise by Loblaws to increase the money in a national benefit fund. Following this development, the pressure for Local 401 to settle became quite strong, since the top-up to the fund was contingent on Alberta also accepting the agreement. Staff and members reported that UFCW Canada leaned heavily on O’Halloran to take the deal, warning him to not scuttle the top-up and threatening to take over bargaining. “I have seen many, many conflicts between Doug and the national office,” said one staffer. Yet, in the case of Superstore, they said, they found the situation “to be disturbing, actually—just [that] that sort of pressure would be put on Doug” (staff, 27).

Local 401 forged ahead despite the threats from its own union. Members walked out at midnight on Sunday, 6 October 2013. Membership response was very strong, with almost no strikebreakers crossing the line. McLaren recalled that first strike day:

I was going to tour every store in Calgary. So I started at four o’clock in the morning, headed to Airdrie and worked my way all the way down south. Airdrie was pretty early, so there were not many people. It was four in the morning. But when I hit Westwinds, up here [in northeast Calgary], like it was amazing, huge. It was a sea of people, of picketers, at least two hundred out there on the sidewalk.

The diversity of Superstore’s workforce was evident on the picket line and proved important for persuading customers to boycott the store. One striker talked about how having picketers from different cultural communities made the picket line stronger:

I can’t stop a Muslim family from coming in the store. They will look at me and . . . just walk right past me. But then you have some quiet little Muslim girls with the hijab, and they walk up and say, “Please, no, no, no, don’t shop here. They treat us terribly.” They start talking to them in their language. Huge difference. And not only that, it made them more empowered on their own. . . . It brought a new level of experience that they never had experienced or probably never would without having a union presence. (member, 16)

There can be no knowing if this level of enthusiasm and effectiveness was sustainable, as the walkout immediately sparked a change in tone at the bargaining table. The employer signalled an unwillingness to suffer through a long strike, and by four o’clock Monday morning, twenty-eight hours after the start of the strike, a tentative agreement was signed. The employer had backed down completely on the concessions, and the union won some significant gains, including increased hours for part-timers, benefits for part-timers, and increased rights for stewards. And the national fund top-up remained. On Tuesday, the membership voted overwhelmingly to ratify the agreement, with majorities of 83 percent in Calgary, 85 percent in Edmonton, and 91 percent in the rest of the province (Wright and Crowson 2013).

The union attributes the clear success to its early preparation and to the leadership’s sense that the employer did not really want a strike. A staffer observed that O’Halloran appeared confident the employer would back down: “I mean, he may have sensed that the company was not prepared for a strike” (staff, 27). The dynamics of a strike are never fully knowable, so no one can be sure why the employer capitulated so quickly. Maybe the willingness of the members to actually walk out, something they had not done in the past, surprised an employer expecting a similar pattern of events as had occurred in past disputes. What is clear is that the year, or four years, of preparatory work educating and mobilizing the membership had an effect on the leaders’ confidence that a strike was not only possible but winnable, as well as on the members’ capacity to act in their own interests.

The 2013 Superstore strike may have been Local 401’s most successful action in its history. The results came swiftly and were unequivocal. The success was due to a year of planning, of implementing things learned in previous disputes, and of a growing determination from the members, fuelled by their own anger and ambition: all of this was combined with the good fortune of things the union couldn’t control, such as the employer’s unpreparedness for a strike. O’Halloran knows that it won’t be so easy next time: “We will be more careful next time because they will be more prepared, but that is what it is all about.”

If the story of UFCW Local 401 were to end here, Superstore would be seen as the culmination of the local’s transformation, as well as the ultimate evidence of the success of their efforts. But the story never really ends. The union continues to evolve, as do its members. In the four years since the strike, the union has experienced a period of relative labour peace, but there is no predicting what will happen next. More importantly, the outcomes sometimes matter less than the process, and we have yet to really understand how these changes came to be. How did Local 401 turn itself from a grocery-dominated business union into one of the most militant and diverse locals in Alberta?

The story has already revealed some curious features of Local 401, such as the combination of its centralized structure and its innovative tactics and its unexpected success mobilizing nontraditional workers. Local 401 is an unexpected site for union renewal. Part 2 examines more closely the dynamics behind the events described in part 1 and explores how and why Local 401 developed into the organization it is today. The answers diverge from the usual explanations of union renewal and indicate that something different happened in Local 401.