Last week, the Alberta Labour Relations Board published their first new applications report for April 2026. In it was an application for union certification.
Local 401 of the United Food & Commercial Workers filed the application on 7 April 2026 for workers employed by WD Processing.
The company is the operational contractor for a milk concentration plant that officially began operations last October near Blackfalds. The plant is owned by Dairy Innovation West, but the processed milk product belongs to Alberta Milk, representing the Western Milk Pool (BC Milk, BC Dairy, Alberta Milk, SaskMilk, and Dairy Farmers of Manitoba).
Workers at the Blackfalds plant use reverse osmosis and ultra filtration technologies to process raw milk directly from dairy farms.
This application is specifically for all workers at the plant except those working in office, clerical, or supervisory positions, which is about a dozen workers.
Interestingly, Local 401 claims that this plant provides milk to Foothills Creamery, which they are also in the middle of trying to unionize.
To submit a certification application in Alberta, workers or unions must demonstrate support among 40% of their coworkers. In this case, that would be just 5 workers.
Should the ALRB approve this application, they would hold a certification vote, during which time, workers will be able to democratically choose whether to unionize with Local 401.
Assuming the 5 workers follow through and vote in favour of unionizing, they would need to convince just 2 other fellow workers to join them if they want to win the certification vote.
The ALRB have scheduled a hearing for this application, which will occur later today. WD representatives will have a chance to present arguments, if they have any, as to why these workers should not be able to unionize with Local 401.
If the workers vote in favour of unionizing, one of their first orders of business will be to form a bargaining committee to begin negotiating their first contract.
Because the ALRB does not archive their new application reports, I have included a copy of last week’s report below for your convenience.
