Labour

I’ve gone around and around fields for a week cutting winter rye and winter wheat. Divining my thoughts are earth’s invisible coils about my head. From “Swather As Threshold” in Afternoon [...]

A thousand angry Albertans gathered on the steps of the Legislature in late 2015. They weren’t the usual protesters—longhaired peace activists or radicals of any kind. They were solid, salt of [...]

Last year the government of Alberta faced a mountain of public-sector contract negotiations. A whole mountain range, actually. Collective agreements covering roughly 180,000 employees expired: [...]

  AV: Far more Albertans are workers than employers, but our culture really celebrates “the entrepreneur”—the job creator, the employer. What do you think about this? Well, we need both. A [...]

  Marni Soupcoff says workers have no right to strike. It’s true. I don’t think essential workers should have the right to strike. But before I go any further with my case for why, you [...]

When Edmonton rock radio station The Bear planned to broadcast an all-night Halloween contest from a graveyard, they wanted 22-year-old student Andy Ferguson to work the shift. Ferguson had [...]

When Maria Lemus arrived in Canada from El Salvador in 1987, becoming a vocal union supporter was the farthest thing from her mind. She had just narrowly escaped being kidnapped in a place of [...]

On Friday, April 26, 2013, corrections officers at the Edmonton Remand Centre began a wildcat strike. The root cause of the illegal strike, they say, was government inaction on safety concerns [...]

On June 18, 2006, Kevan Chandler entered a grain silo on the Tongue Creek Feeders lot, near High River. Grain had encrusted the sidewall of silo number seven—a building 90 feet high and 30 feet [...]

When Gonzalo Camacho left behind his wife and young daughter in Colombia to come work in Brooks, in February of 2008, the weather wasn’t his only shock. “I was a married man and suddenly I was [...]