An important local anniversary passed virtually unnoticed, as per usual, about a month ago.

When Canadians hear "General Strike," they likely think of Winnipeg. Few realize that the storm of labour unrest that swept across Canada 85 years ago touched down in Edmonton on May 26, 1919 in one of the largest walkouts in the country. Today it’s hard to imagine Alberta, currently the least-unionized province in the nation, as one birthplace of the largest mass mobilization of workers in Canada’s history.

The seeds of dissent

By January of 1919, a series of strikes had crossed the country: from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, miners, streetcar drivers, telephone operators and housemaids refused to toil until working conditions improved. Their demands: an eight-hour workday, one day off a week, and the right to belong to a union.

The militancy that erupted across Canada and parts of the United States and Britain. The growth of industrial unions meant that for the first time organized labour welcomed women and "ethnic" workers. Previously excluded because few held "skilled" jobs, these workers responded enthusiastically when the unions called for support. A new kind of union leader emerged too–one more radical than those who had led traditional trades and craft unions. Many linked their organizing efforts with demands for the redistribution of wealth and power in Canadian society. Workers were ready for that message: they had grown angry as they watched the profits spiral ever higher while unemployment and inflation drove their own purchasing power down.

Trade unionists rode this angry wave, achieving modest electoral success at all levels of government, with the help of supporters like Edmonton’s mayor, "Fighting" Joe Clarke. Addressing a royal commission launched by an anxious federal government to determine what was causing the unprecedented series of strikes, Clarke listed 29 grievances, including a defense of workers’ rights to bargain collectively, the 8-hour day, price controls, and workers’ rights to hold public office.

Governments and capitalists weren’t the only ones alarmed by the activity. Also anxious were leaders of the international unions, who advocated gradual reform. In his essay The Edmonton General Strike of 1919, Eugene Plawiuk recalls how our city’s trade union movement was polarized when Western unions led a movement to create a radical alternative to the Trades & Labour Congresses (TLC).

On 13 March 1919, regional delegates of several unions gathered at the Calgary Labour Temple (where you can still eat Chinese food) and formulated plans to form the One Big Union (OBU). They were tired of the American Federation of Labor’s (AFL) domination of the Dominion Trades and Labor Congress in Eastern Canada. Following the Calgary meeting, thousands of workers, mostly in western Canada, voted overwhelmingly to secede from the TLC. The Edmonton Trades & Labour Council (predecessor to today’s Edmonton District Labour Council) was not pleased, but its efforts to impede the process would be overtaken by events.

Edmonton steps up

Even the OBU was caught off guard on May 15, when, after negotiations broke down between management and labour in the building and metal trades, the Winnipeg Trades and Labor Council called a general strike. The strike shut down virtually all shipping and communications between Eastern and Western Canada. As word spread across the country, workers in other locales declared solidarity with the Winnipeg strikers, with sympathy strikes called in Brandon, Calgary, Edmonton, Saskatoon, Prince Albert, Regina, Vancouver, New Westminster, Victoria, and as many as 20 other towns.

In Edmonton, despite the recent animosities, all unions quickly responded, with the ET&LC calling for a strike vote on May 25. The newspaper headlines carried City Council’s optimistic messages that a strike was unlikely, given the good relations Edmonton workers had with their employers, not to mention the deep rift that had been exposed within the trade union movement in recent weeks. Mayor Clarke told his Council colleagues that they were deluding themselves. The headline in the Edmonton Bulletin on May 24 read "Council Sure Labor Is To Be Trusted. City Fathers in Special Meeting Refuse to Believe in Strike."

On Sunday, May 25, 39 of 45 unions voted, with a majority in favour of a city-wide strike. Only four unions were totally opposed; the individual members voted 1600 in favour of a strike, with only 500 opposed. On Monday morning, Edmontonians woke up to find no streetcars or taxis operating, city hall closed and police and fire patrols limited. Plawiuk recalls there was no telegraph service, trains or restaurants operating. City employees shut down utilities except for essential services to hospitals. There were no phones. The Strike Committee ran the city, with the Mayor concentrating his efforts on negotiating for the maintenance of essential services. The Edmonton Journal predicted the strike would not last for more than three days. Sixteen days later it reported that 36 of 45 unions were still out. They stayed out in support of their brothers and sisters in Winnipeg until the end, on June 27, after the federal government broke the Winnipeg strike by force.

The Alberta disadvantage

In 1919, labour felt besieged by governments and employers, but rather than organizing less, as was hoped, it redoubled its efforts to organize. It can be argued that workers in Edmonton face a similarly hostile environment in 2004, but the prospect of anything like a general strike seems remote.

Some might believe that unions aren’t even necessary any more. After all, the results of the efforts of those workers from 85 years ago are still with us. We have the right to bargain collectively and to union recognition, legislation covering hours of work, and occupational health and safety laws.

Others have a different view, tempered with a healthy dose of realism.

Just forming a union is difficult in Alberta. First, 40 per cent of the affected membership must offer their signatures in favour of unionization. Then the employer is notified and a certification vote is scheduled. In many Canadian jurisdictions, a union must be certified when 50 per cent plus one of the workers sign up. In Alberta, however, certification votes are mandatory even if 100 per cent of the workers sign up. The time between the application to the Board for a vote and the balloting provides employers with an opportunity to manoeuver against the union by demoting, harassing and even firing workers who are assisting in the organization efforts. In most provinces, certification is mandatory if an employer is found to have illegally interfered in a vote; in Alberta, the maximum penalty for such an infraction is an order to hold another vote.

Even after certification, employers aren’t required to bargain with the union. Alberta is one of only three provinces where the Labour Relations Board cannot impose a collective agreement when an employer refuses to bargain. This was one of the main reasons Economic Development Edmonton could let the Shaw Convention Centre strike drag out for five months in 2002, and that last year’s bitter strike at A-Channel lasted so long.

UFCW 401 Negotiator Tom Hesse, who negotiated for the Convention Centre workers, sees a painful irony in the legislative restraints on Alberta unions. The lack of mandatory first agreement arbitration allows employers to adopt ridiculous bargaining positions that force their workers to go on strike, he says.

"The same people who portray unions as monsters are the same ones who oppose legislation that would prevent strikes. They forget that there were strikes even before there were unions, and they were nasty.

Unionized public sector workers in Ralph Klein’s Alberta aren’t much better off, of course. In recent years, the provincial government has passed legislation which has run the gamut from stripping health care workers of their right to choose the union to which they belong, to Bill 27, which allows employers to go straight to the Labour Relations Board for a final ruling on contracts. Following passage of the bill, United Nurses of Alberta President Heather Smith said, "The LRB has unprecedented power to make rulings on agreements and even to intervene in the internal functioning of unions. Wielding this kind of power is not only unfair, it is unnecessary."

Something’s different

Teachers, too, have had enough. Following province-wide strikes in the spring of 2002, former Alberta Teachers’ Association President Larry Booi reacted angrily when teachers were ordered back to work through Bill 12: "This is an arrogant abuse of power. It’s also a black day for public education and for democracy." The government’s imposition of arbitrated settlements appears to have backfired: teachers continue to hold fast for improved classroom conditions. They recently voted 93 per cent in favour of holding a strike vote next month.

"Any strike is always a last resort," said Karen Beaton, President of the Edmonton Local of the ATA, "but workers and people that ‘don’t own the shop’ have to have some power. In a democratic society we have a right to strike and unless things change drastically I can see the need for and a general strike looming on the horizon."

The types of government intervention that workers face now proved to be no more than an irritant in the months preceding the strikes of 1919. Labour’s experience then, as now, with legislation and government-imposed arbitration was largely unfavourable and workers became convinced that governments consistently and unfairly sided with employers in disputes.

But today it’s hard to conceive of Edmontonians forfeiting their own livelihoods to benefit everyone, including strangers in a different province. We know that the eight-hour day, the six-day work week, public health care, the right to bargain collectively weren’t handed out by the powers of the day, that rather ordinary people took to the streets and demanded them. And yet in the face of the forcible erosion of the rights of organized labour, it seems working people are content to just nibble at the edges.