The Year of Bargaining Diplomatically
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: [...]
Labour
Labour
Meet the Minister: Christina Gray
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 [...]
By Evan Osenton
Essential Workers’ Right to Strike
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 [...]
The Gig Economy
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 [...]
By Andrew Cash
Not Your Father’s Union
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 [...]
By Jason Foster
The War on Workers
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 [...]
Alberta’s Most Unsafe Workplace
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 [...]
Welcome to Alberta
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 [...]
Cut to the Bone
If you eat Alberta beef tonight, odds are it was processed by one of the 2,300 workers at the sprawling XL Lakeside Packers facility just outside of Brooks. The plant is the largest slaughter [...]
More than Wages
When Willa Gorman began working in the fibres area at Celanese in Edmonton in 1965, the chemical plant employed over 1,000 workers. “We worked with chemicals with absolutely no safety as we know [...]
By Alvin Finkel
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The Gig Economy
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 already worked that morning and he really didn’t want to do the “graveyard shift” too—but then, who ever does? You do ...
Listening to Stones
Some of the world’s most enduring ways of knowing have staked their beliefs on a foundation of dreams cloaked in mysticism. Those that have dared to venture outside the canons of religious faith and scientific convention have often returned with fantastic visions and stories to tell.”—to the text after the ...
Thug Life
The month after Chris Crane’s 18th birthday was a blur. The Alberta Warriors gang member spent most of it drunk or stoned, blowing $16,000 on alcohol and marijuana in just three weeks. His first month of official adulthood ended with an armed robbery, a drive-by shooting at a house frequented ...