Alberta Public Sector Workers Rally to ‘Protect Right to Strike’

Supposedly only temporarily banned from starting their legal strike by Alberta’s UCP government, Edmonton Public School workers didn’t show up at work Thursday anyway and instead joined a huge rally by public sector union members on the steps of the Alberta legislature.

This sets the stage for a significant fight between the United Conservative Party, which is openly hostile to public sector unions and appears determined to use legal manoeuvres to prevent any and all strikes in the public sector regardless of court rulings saying unionized workers have that right, and the Canadian Union of Public Employees, a national union apparently prepared to tangle with the government over its response.

When many of the 3,200 members of CUPE Local 3550 Thursday joined the already planned rally by unionized nurses, teachers, health-care support workers, medical professionals and many others to protest difficult contract negotiations with public sector employers and repeated interference in the collective bargaining process by the province, CUPE Alberta president Rory Gill threw down the gauntlet.

“Today, we have made the choice to protect our constitutional right to strike,” he told a cheering crowd of about 4,000 people.

“All of you here, whether you’re nurses, teachers, education workers, municipal workers, social services, whatever you do, private sector workers helping us all out, we’ve all made the choice today that enough is enough! Hear us say, ‘We’ve had it!’”

“We are here for the people of Alberta,” continued Gill, clad in jeans and a T-shirt despite a cold fall wind hard enough to make the protesters’ flags snap. “We know this government is not. We don’t know who they’re for, but it’s not for Albertans!

“All of us here today, the labour movement, civil society, ordinary people, we’ve had enough of disrespect. We’ve had enough of disorganization. We’ve had enough of undermining our precious public services. We’re not going to take it anymore!”

On Oct. 17, 92 per cent of Local 3550’s eligible members voted 97 per cent in favour of striking and the union served strike notice on the school board the next day. The strike was set to commence Thursday.

The local’s educational assistants, who help with the instruction of children with disabilities, are paid an average of $27,000 a year, Local 3550 president Mandy Lamoureux told the CBC. But they have seen pay increases of only about $1 per hour over the past decade. The cost of living has increased 34 per cent in the same period.

On Tuesday, the Alberta government appointed a “Disputes Inquiry Board,” which stalls a legal strike for 30 days, supposedly to help the parties find another way out of an impasse, but historically often deployed to prevent unions from using the only mechanism available to them to bring pressure on recalcitrant employers.

In mid-September, the government did the same thing when CUPE members employed by public and Catholic school boards in Fort McMurray overwhelmingly voted to strike and gave notice, instantly defusing their strike threats to their employers’ advantage.

At the time Gill said he had no doubt if the Fort Mac workers issue another strike notice after the 30-day delay, as they are technically permitted in law to do, the government will find something else to block them from striking.

The belief the UCP intends to block all strikes in the public sector is widespread in the Alberta labour movement, and was part of the reason Thursday’s rally was organized.

Alberta public sector unions like United Nurses of Alberta, the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees, the Health Sciences Association of Alberta and CUPE are also fed up with “secret mandates” provisions inserted into Alberta labour law by UCP 1.0 when Jason Kenney was premier, allowing the government to surreptitiously and probably unconstitutionally manipulate the collective bargaining process.

This is widely seen as part of Kenney’s successful policy of suppressing overall wages in Alberta to ensure the “Alberta Advantage” applies only to private-sector employers, which has been continued by the UCP under Premier Danielle Smith.

A report by economist Jim Stanford published last spring showed how working people in Alberta are experiencing unprecedented reductions in incomes, purchasing power and living standards. “These challenges have been made far worse by deliberate wage-suppressing policies of the Alberta government,” Stanford wrote.

As Gill said at the time the Fort McMurray Disputes Inquiry Board was appointed, “this government does not believe in workers’s rights, no matter what they say about supporting the little guy.”

He pointed to how the UCP constantly hectored the federal government for not interfering in the collective bargaining process in such federally regulated industries as airlines, railroads and ports.

Thursday’s large public protest was billed as a “rally for respect” by its organizers. Negotiations are continuing between employers and AUPE, CUPE, HSAA and UNA for about 250,000 employees in health care, education and government.

In every case where negotiations are underway, the government has been directly involved — either as a covert interlocutor or, in the case of Alberta civil servants represented by AUPE, as the direct employer.

Leaders of all major Alberta public sector unions, plus Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan and national leaders from CUPE and the Canadian Federation of Nurses Unions made brief remarks at the rally.

Gill told the CBC that Local 3550’s decision Thursday to join the protest would be a one-day affair.

Nevertheless, he promised the crowd, “we are going to protect our right to strike, to free collective bargaining. We’re going to protect public services.… Thank you all for being here today – get ready for more!”