Alberta strikes at highest level since 2002

Did you know that the Government of Alberta published data on the number of work stoppages in the province every year?

The ministry of jobs, economy, trade and immigration updated the legal work-stoppages report early last month with data up to October 2025.

I thought I would extract that data and compare the information we have for work stoppages over the last 25 years.

First, let us start with strikes.

In the first 10 months of 2025, Alberta saw 9 strikes.

Of those, 7 were over 5,500 education support workers employed by public school districts in the Calgary and Edmonton areas. Plus, the two strikes listed for 2024 were for nearly 1,000 education support workers in Fort McMurray, which started in November of that year, but ended with the other 7 in March 2025.

Another of these strikes—and possibly the most notable—was when over 46,000 members of the Alberta Teachers’ Association went on strike across the province. Even though this strike affected multiple school districts, it counted as just one work stoppage since it involved all the members of the ATA.

The record number of strikes in 2002 were also ATA strikes, but they were individual school districts, and not all school districts were affected, so they were counted as separate strikes. If we counted them as just one strike, then Alberta would have showed only 6 strikes in 2002.

Finally, 265 members of Teamsters Local 987 employed by Sobeys at their retail support centre near Calgary went on strike in September 2025. The strike was still ongoing when this data was last updated; however, these workers have since ratified a new collective agreement and are no longer striking.

This data does not include lockouts, such as when the Town of Coaldale locked out nearly 80 of their municipal workers back in September. They have since gone back to work, but if we include this work stoppage, it brings the total to 10.

The number of strikes Alberta saw so far this year is the same number as all the other strikes in the rest of the time that the UCP has been in power.

The first one since they gained power in the spring of 2019 was in May of that year, when over 40 Wood Buffalo Housing & Development workers went on strike for 5 months. Concrete workers employed Lehigh Hanson Materials went on strike that September.

This was followed by 1 strike the next year and 2 strikes in each of the following 3 years.

Showing the number of workers on strike tells a different story.

Here you can see the significance of the teachers’ strike this year, which made this year the highest over the last 25 years. This time, adding up the previous 5 years under the UCP government comes nowhere closet to the nearly 52,000 we have seen on strike in 2025 so far.

The next highest was in 2002, during the other teachers’ strike I mentioned, followed by 2013, which was dominated by the strikes of more than 8,700 Superstore workers.

To finish off the comparison, here is the combined duration of the strikes.

Keep in mind that not all strikes included duration data.

For example, the Lehigh Hanson Materials strike I mentioned previously, as well as a strike by Coca Cola workers, did not include duration data. Both of these were in 2021, which shows a combined duration of 0 in the chart.

Even though we had over 50,000 workers on strike this year so far, the number of missed days is relatively low because most of them were involved in a single strike, which lasted less than a month.

Most of the strike days were attributed to the education support workers I mentioned earlier, which amounted to 250 calendar days combined.

The year with the longest duration was 2020. That was the result of just one strike. Workers employed by CESSCO and members of Local 146 of the Boilermakers went on strike in June 2020, and that strike lasted until June 2022.

You can find the data I compiled and my charts here.