My remarks to the Confederation of Canadian Unions

The Confederation of Canadian Unions invited me to speak at their conference in Calgary at the end of February. I spoke the erosion of labour power and the importance of solidarity across the working class.

Here are my remarks. You can find accompany slides here.

Hey, fellow workers. My name is Kim Siever. I’m a labour journalist with The Alberta Worker, an independent startup media outlet based out of Lethbridge and focused on publishing content related to the working class, particularly in Alberta but also in Canada. Today, I want to talk to you about the erosion of labour power and the importance of solidarity across the working class.

I thought I’d start out by talking a little bit about The Alberta Worker and how it got to where it is today, as I think this journey is directly related to this presentation topic.

What became The Alberta Worker got its start almost 6 years ago, in March 2020. We were just days into the COVID-19 pandemic, and many of the public spaces had been ordered shut down by the provincial government. At the time, I was a freelancer working in social media management and copy editing. Most of my clients had physical spaces, which means they lost customers. With their own loss in revenue, every one of them eventually cancelled their contracts with me. For the first time in 7 years, I had no work.

I was applying for jobs and trying to find new clients somehow, but in the meantime, I seemed to have had a little time on my hands. One day during this period, I noticed a Twitter conversation about a land deal regarding Crown land in Southern Alberta, and it piqued my interest. I spent a few hours doing some digging and discovered that the land was sold to a family that had collectively donated over $100,000 to the governing United Conservative Party. I compiled what I found into a story and published it on a blog I had at the time. It went viral. In fact, it crashed my website, so I was forced to spend several hundred dollars on a new domain and third-party hosting. About a week later, I wrote another article that was also pretty popular in which I dispelled some myths the UCP kept using to discredit Alberta doctors.

Prior to this, I was writing a few articles from time to time on harm reduction related to the drug crisis. People had signed up as Patreon supporters over the previous few months because they appreciated the work I had been doing in that area, and I was making about $75 a month as a result. Well, this newfound traffic boosted my Patreon subscribers to the point that I realized if I stopped looking for a job and stopped looking for clients and redirected all my time and energy into this, I could get enough subscribers to do it full-time. So that’s what I did. And The Alberta Worker was born. Well, not quite.

When I switched to doing journalism full-time, I actually branded it as Kim Siever News, and I focused on covering politics. The UCP had been in power for about a year, and there seemed to be a lot to write about, with debunking claims they made, providing context to cherry-picked media releases, or even writing the occasional investigative piece to expose what seemed to be shady practices. However, after a couple of years in, I noticed that I started to do more labour focused articles. For example, I would report on the monthly national labour force survey results published by Statistics Canada. It was the most comprehensive coverage offered by any media outlet, especially regarding Alberta’s labour market. Some public sector collective bargaining agreements had expired, so I was covering the bargaining process on some of them. Lethbridge Starbucks workers were trying to organize, and I provided the most comprehensive coverage of those collectivization efforts.

It seemed to me that I was moving away from primarily writing about politics to now specializing in labour news. As a result, I rebranded again in the spring of 2022 to emphasize this emerging focus. And that’s how The Alberta Worker was born. That summer, I also launched the Alberta Worker Podcast, where I interview members of the working class about their life stories and their personal labour journeys.

Now, let’s get to the reason I am here today: discussing the erosion of labour power and the importance of solidarity across the working class. First, let us start with some Canadian labour history.

At the beginning of the last century, union membership was pretty uncommon, but by 1921, it had grown to 16%, which is about 1 in 6 workers. Part of that growth was a result of the 1919 general strike.

Following the First World War, the working class was struggling to make ends meet. Unemployment was high, driven significantly by veterans returning home and lower demand for munitions production. Housing and food were unaffordable due to high inflation.

Between 1914 and 1919, in fact, the consumer price index increased by nearly 63%. Something that cost a worker $100 before the war cost them $163 now that the war was over. Or to put it another way, if a worker spent $100 on goods in 1914, they would be able to afford only $37 of those same goods in 1919.

Workers in Winnipeg, especially those in the building and metal trades, were trying to negotiate with business owners for job improvements, including better wages, improved working conditions, and the right to collectively bargain. After talks broke down, the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council called a general strike on 15 May 1919. Within hours, tens of thousands of workers left their jobs and took to the streets, shutting down factories, shops, and trains. Public-sector workers—such as firefighters, postal workers, telephone operators, and utilities workers—joined them.

Each union linked to the Winnipeg Trades and Labour Council elected members to the Central Strike Committee, which coordinated the strike, bargained with employers, and kept essential services running. Workers across the country walked off their jobs in support of these strikers. The strike lasted over a month, and resulted in two workers killed and 7 strike leaders imprisoned.

Immediate gains were very little, but eventually business owners were forced to recognize Canadian unions and their collective bargaining rights. Once workers’ freedom to associate in a union was protected by the state, it naturally led to an increase in unionization.

We can see this in the following chart.

Unionization rates started to rise in the 1930s, which is not surprising given that the federal unemployment rate had shot up to 30% by 1933 and never dropped below 12% before World War II began in 1939.

Speaking of the Second World War, the percentage of workers who were unionized grew from 17.3% at the start of the war in 1939 to 24.3% when the war ended in 1945. This was driven by a boost in manufacturing and labour scarcity during the war.

That manufacturing continued after the war, fuelling a post-war economic boom and resulting in unionization continuing to climb through the rest of the 1940s and most of the 1950s, hitting 34.2% in 1958. Other than brief declines in the first half of the 1960s and the last half of the 1970s, unionization kept rising. The federal unionization rate peaked in 1984, when it hit 37.9%.

Those among you who are old like me—or older—might recognize the significance of that year. That was the year Brian Mulroney became prime minister. His 9-year stint in that office brought in policies and practices that affected unionization rates across the country. For example, in the 6 years after Mulroney signed his Free Trade deal with US-president Ronald Reagan, Canada lost nearly 335,000 manufacturing jobs. The sector that drove unionization during and following the Second World War lost 1 in 6 of its jobs between 1988 and 1994. In the nearly 40 years since the signing of the Free Trade Agreement, the manufacturing sector’s share of the national GDP has been cut in half, plummeting from 20% to just 10%.

Mulroney also privatized nearly two dozen Crown corporations and government-owned entities while in office, which, of course, employed unionized public sector workers prior to their sell offs.

HIs government, similar to the recent Trudeau government, used back-to-work legislation—including huge fines, wage cuts, and contract concessions—nine times against unionized workers between 1985 and 1992.

The unionization rate fell from 37.8% in 1984 to 33.7% in 1993, dropping 4 full percentage points while Mulroney was prime minister. However his attack on workers continued to affect workers beyond his time in the PMO. Unionization rates continued to fall for decades, bottoming out at 29.61% in 2018, after we had 4 more prime ministers, although the rate of decline softened with the turn of the century.

In the close to a decade since bottoming out, federal unionization rates have recovered to just 30.57%. That is as of last year and is not even a full percentage point.

Things are more dire when we look at private sector unionization rates specifically. In 1997, only 16.33% of private sector workers had union coverage. In the 28 years since then, that share has dropped to 11.34%.

Public sector union coverage, on the other hand, has grown from 17.41% to 19.23% during the same period. Clearly, we can see that the poor unionization rates since 1997 have been driven primarily by the private sector. That being said, a unionization rate of 19.23% in the public sector is not that impressive, and the fact that 4 out of every 5 public sector workers are not unionized flies in the face of common tropes of public sector workers having job protection and gold-plated pensions.

Concurrent to Mulroney’s efforts to undermine the working class were actions by provincial governments trying to make it more difficult for workers to unionize.

For example, in the 1970s, as union rates were still climbing, card checks were nearly universal across the country. Nova Scotia got rid of theirs in 1977. The plus side of the card check system is that all unions needed to do was find support from a majority (usually between 50% and 55%) of the workers at a workplace they wanted to organize, get them to sign union membership cards, then present those cards to their respective labour boards. If the boards found that the union had demonstrated support among a majority of workers, they would certify them as a bargaining unit, and employers were obligated to respect that bargaining unit.

However, the benefit of card check to workers across the country began to change in 1977 but really nosedived starting in 1984. As mentioned, Nova Scotia was the first province, in 1977, to get rid of card checks.

In May 1984, the British Columbia government switched their card check system for a mandatory voting system. Unions could still collect card checks, but the BC labour board had to hold a certification vote, regardless of how many union cards were signed. Alberta embraced mandatory voting 4 years later, followed by Newfoundland in 1994, Ontario in 1996, and Manitoba in 1997.

Mandatory voting is detrimental to the broader labour movement. It leads to not only lower success rates among unionization efforts but also fewer certification attempts.

Naturally, as unionization rates fall, so do job protections. Workers, broadly, will make less, have fewer benefits, work in less safe environments, and have less leverage when trying to improve their own material conditions. As a result, unions over time have a tendency to focus on their own gains rather than gains for the labour movement as a whole. The days of solidarity among unions have been replaced mostly with locals focusing on their own workplaces. Gone are the days of thousands of workers protesting in the streets for their rights and for better pay and working conditions.

Or are they.

Several years ago, our then 13-year-old came home from school and asked me, “What class are we?” I wasn’t sure what they were referring to, so I asked them what they meant. They clarified by saying, “You know, like, lower class, middle class, upper class . . .” I responded, “Ah, well, we’re working class”. I then went on to tell them that there are only two classes—the owning class and the working class—and that the owning class made up the terms “lower class”, “middle class”, and “upper class” to pit workers against each other and erode class solidarity.

The owning class does everything they can to keep us divided because they know if we focus on each other, we won’t focus on them. They divide us based on skin colour so we don’t see they are lobbying governments to take away our rights. They divide us based on gender so we don’t see them robbing us of our wages to boost profits. They divide us based on sexual orientation so we don’t see them turning full-time jobs into multiple part-time jobs. They divide us based on ability so we don’t see them holding back wages while inflation keeps increasing. They divide us based on ethnicity so we don’t see them exploiting cheap labour to avoid paying us properly. They divide us because they know if we’re united, we have all the power.

My struggle isn’t just my struggle. Your struggle isn’t just your struggle. Public sector worker struggle isn’t just a public sector worker struggle. Private sector worker struggle isn’t just a private sector worker struggle. White collar worker struggle isn’t just a white collar worker struggle. Blue collar worker struggle isn’t just a blue collar worker struggle. Service worker struggle isn’t just a service worker struggle. Our struggle is a shared struggle. It is a class struggle.

When I stood with striking postal workers in 2018, it wasn’t because I was a postal worker; it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I stood with picketing University of Lethbridge support workers in 2019, it wasn’t because I was a university support worker; it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I participated in the wildcat strike in front of Chinook Regional Hospital in 2020, it wasn’t because I was a hospital worker; it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I stood with picketing Lethbridge nurses in 2021, it wasn’t because I was a nurse; it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I joined the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association strike in downtown Lethbridge in 2022, it wasn’t because I was a professor at the U of L, it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I joined the picket line of striking PSAC workers in 2023, it wasn’t because I was a federal government worker; it was because their struggle is a class struggle. When I stood on the picket line of rail workers in 2024, it wasn’t because I was a rail worker; it was because their struggle is a class struggle.

But that is just me. We have seen evidence of class solidarity from the broader labour movement as well. First, let’s start with an Ontario example.

In August 2022, the collective agreement expired for over 55,000 education workers in Ontario’s public and Catholic education systems. These workers included educational assistants, custodians, secretaries, early childhood educators, and workers employed in maintenance, libraries, and IT.

The Canadian Union of Public Employees represented these education workers, and they submitted notice to bargain to the employers two months earlier. Several months prior to that, CUPE had engaged with their members directly to gauge priorities going into bargaining. Mark Hancock, CUPE’s national president at the time, said that they “were determined to fight for their first meaningful wage increase in many years”.

Unfortunately, the governing PC Party refused to negotiate in good faith.

They had offered the workers raises of 2% per year for those making less than $40,000 and 1.25% for everyone else. CUPE had countered with 11.7% per year, especially considering they had just received 3 years of wage freezes. The final offer to the workers was a tiny increase to 2.5% for those under $43,000 and just 1.5% for everyone else. That was not enough.

In less than 3 months after serving their notice to bargain, these workers were participating in a strike vote overseen by the Ontario Labour Relations Board. Over 82% of eligible education workers participated in that strike vote, and of those, 96.5% voted in favour of striking.

The workers’ bargaining team tried to leverage that strong strike mandate in negotiations, but the Ford government refused to budge. So, the workers served strike notice, and their strike began on 4 November.

The government introduced back-to-work legislation, including forcing a new four-year contract with inadequate wages and worker concessions, taking away the right to bargain local issues, and making strike action illegal, punishable by $4,000 fines per worker per day and $500,000 per day for the union. On top of that, in a move that would be copied by Alberta 3 years later, the government removed the constitutional right of the workers to challenge the legislation by invoking the notwithstanding clause.

But that was not enough to deter these workers.

They knew that with numbering more than 55,000, they were the ones holding all the power. So they stuck to their guns and went on strike, as scheduled, on 4 November, the day after Ford’s anti-worker legislation received royal assent. And they had a little help from their friends. CUPE leaders across the country pledged support for their union siblings in Ontario, including making plans to join them on the line in Ontario. Union leaders throughout Canada, outside of CUPE, promised logistical and financial support. The Canadian Labour Congress and the Ontario Federation of Labour planned escalating actions in all sectors of the Ontario economy, including a commitment to a general strike. Workers across the province were ready to shut things down to stand up against the Ontario government’s attack on the constitutional rights of workers.

And it worked.

Like I said, the anti-worker legislation went into effect on the 3rd. By the end of the weekend, on the 7th, Doug Ford and his government rescinded their Bill 28, and the union called off their strike action. Negotiations resumed, and the workers reached a collective agreement that gave all workers a $1 annual wage increase, which averaged out to roughly 3.6%.

Another example, this time on the federal level, included CUPE again.

Roughly a year ago, the most recent collective agreement between Air Canada and their flight attendants expired. Even though bargaining between the two parties began two months prior, they were unable to reach a tentative agreement before the previous one expired. In fact, they still had not reached an agreement by last August, 5 months after expiry and 8 months after negotiations started.

There were two main issues that hindered reaching an agreement.

The first was the wage increase. Air Canada claimed they were offering a 38% increase over 4 years, with a 25% increase in the first year alone. CUPE, which represents these workers, claimed that this increase was for all compensation combined, not just wages. Plus, they said it was below inflation, below market value, and below minimum wage.

The second hurdle was unpaid work. For the last several decades, flight attendants in Canada and the United States have been paid when the plane is moving, what is sometimes called “block to block time”. Any labour performed before the plane moves or after it stops, such as helping passengers board and unboard, is unpaid labour. This is sometimes called “groundwork”.

CUPE estimated during a public relations campaign last summer that the average flight attendant employed by Air Canada was performing 35 hours of unpaid labour a month. So, effectively, Air Canada was getting a week’s labour per month out of every flight attendant. For free.

These workers were tired of performing uncompensated labour, and they wanted that changed in their new collective agreement. In Canada, Porter Airlines and Pascan Aviation were already paying their flight attendants for their labour during the boarding process. In the United States, Delta Air Lines, American Airlines, and Alaska Airlines had been paying flight attendants for at least a portion of their block-to-block time, and United Airlines in their contract negotiations last year offered to pay for boarding time labour.

After the two parties failed to reach an agreement and with a 99.7% strike mandate from the flight attendants, their bargaining team served a 72-hour strike notice with Air Canada, which responded with their own lockout notice. Two days later, on 15 August, Air Canada had cancelled 623 of their flights, and all 700 were cancelled on the 16th.

The day before the strike, Air Canada proposed arbitration to the workers’ bargaining team, who rejected it. Air Canada had also begged the jobs minister, Patty Hadju, to use the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to interfere with the workers’ constitutionally guaranteed right to strike, just as the Liberals had done 6 other times since being elected in 2015.

And Hadju was happy to oblige, invoking section 107 of the Canada Labour Code just hours after the strike began and directing the industrial relations board, who was chaired at the time by Air Canada’s former legal counsel, to force arbitration and end the strike.

The next day, the industrial relations board ordered the flight attendants back to work, but they refused, calling the Liberal interference unconstitutional. On the 18th, now two days after the strike began, the CIRB declared the strike continuation unlawful and told the workers they had until noon that day to return to work. In a news conference later that day, Mark Hancock responded to the CIRB threat by saying, “We will not be returning to the skies this afternoon. If it means folks like me going to jail, then so be it. If it means our union being fined, then so be it.”

Unions from across the country stood in solidarity with CUPE’s position to hold the line, including the Public Service Alliance of Canada, the Ontario Public Service Employees Union, the Union of Canadian Transportation Employees, the Ontario Nurses’ Association, Unifor, the BC Federation of Labour, the National Union of Public and General Employees, the Health Sciences Association of British Columbia, the United Food and Commercial Workers, the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, the Society of United Professionals, and—well—you get the idea.

But it was more than just words. Member unions of the Canadian Labour Congress vowed to provide financial contributions to “assist with the legal and other costs related to the Air Canada Component of CUPE’s decision to defy the Minister’s order”, coordinate a fight-back campaign, and disseminate information on demonstrations and other actions to ensure maximum impact, including having the labour movement—using their words—“respond swiftly” to any legal action the government took against those workers.

And it worked. Air Canada came back to the table with a mediator, and after 9 hours overnight, the two parties reached a tentative agreement that the bargaining team for the workers felt that they could present to their fellow workers for a ratification vote. And vote they did.

Over 99% of the members participated in the vote, and of those, over 99% rejected the wage proposal. Bargaining went to mediation and later to arbitration, and the arbitrator ultimately sided with the employer, forcing the very agreement the workers democratically rejected. It sucks that they do not have the collective agreement they deserved, but without pressure from the broader labour movement, Air Canada would not have returned to the table and changed their offer, which included paying a portion of groundwork (70% by the end of the agreement), and the government would not have backed off on making striking illegal and forcing arbitration.

We must remember, however, to not come away from these two examples with the idea that solidarity is a one-time thing. Solidarity brought us wins 100 years ago after years—and even decades—of struggle. And decades later, we have seen these wins eroded away.

Class struggle is an ongoing struggle. It will be there as long as capitalism is the primary economic aspect of our lives. There will be no single win where we can say that the working class has won against the owning class. We may win a battle here and there, but the owning class will continue winning this war. This is why ongoing class solidarity—not just workplace solidarity, or local solidarity, or even union solidarity—will be necessary for the long-term survival, let alone elevation, of the working class.

Capitalism will never solve our material struggles on its own. It’s designed to maximize profit for the owning class. Hiring more workers, paying workers more, improving working conditions, keeping rent low—they all reduce profits for the owning class. These things will only improve for us when we collectively demand them, or the government gets involved. The government has immense power to improve our material conditions. At the snap of a finger, the government can create jobs without waiting for market demand. They can build and staff schools. They can build and staff hospitals. I’m sure everyone here can think of a highway in their own province that can be twinned. Even if you are pro oil and gas, for example, the Alberta government has the power to drill for natural gas and mine bitumen, to refine it, and to convert its products into all sorts of products, ranging from retail fuel to plastics and medical supplies. They have the power to increase worker wages. They’re able to build housing. They can fully fund post-secondary education, eliminating tuition and administrative fees. Not only would we have more jobs, higher wages, and housing, but our education, health, and living standards would improve as well.

But the only way the government will do anything like this is if we stand in solidarity and demand it. The only way the owning class will improve our material conditions is if we stand in solidarity and demand it.

In closing, I just want to express solidarity with striking Pascan Aviation flight attendants, striking Lactanet milk testers, striking hotel workers in Saskatoon, striking care workers in Oakville, locked out factory workers in Windsor, striking Kruger workers in LaSalle, striking Rio Tinto workers, and striking Québec paramedics.

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