The presentation I gave at the Parkland Institute conference

Today, I want to talk about the state of labour legislation and bargaining in the province, specifically for the public sector.

Before I do that, however, I want to talk to you briefly about how The Alberta Worker got its start almost 5 years ago, in March 2020, as I think this story is related to this topic and may answer the question, “Who is this guy and why is he up there?”. 

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 it into a story and published it on my blog. 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 or providing context to cherry-picked media releases. 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.

Since the UCP took power in 2019 under Jason Kenney, they’ve introduced several pieces of legislation that have made things more challenging for workers. The first change was actually introduced in their second bill, the so-called Open For Business Act, which took effect in the summer of 2019.

This bill lowered the minimum wage for student workers under 18 from $15 an hour to $13 an hour. This meant teenagers doing the exact same job as adults were paid less for the same work. On top of that, they haven’t changed the adult minimum wage the entire time they’ve been in office, and now it’s the lowest minimum wage in the country, for the first time in over a decade, tied with Saskatchewan. This is the second longest period since 1965 that Alberta minimum wage workers haven’t seen a wage increase.

The bill also changed overtime pay rules. Prior to this bill becoming law, workers were able to bank their overtime hours at 1.5 times their worked hours. So, if someone worked 3 hours, they could bank those 3 hours, and then when they wanted to take it as time off, they could take 4.5 hours off instead of 3 hours. This was in line with paid overtime in Alberta, which was at 1.5 times. After Bill 2 was passed, employers could give the banked time as straight time, which encouraged them to pay out overtime, rather than allow workers to take the extra time off.

Finally, Bill 2 reduced statutory holiday pay, particularly for part-time and casual workers. Prior to the bill, workers received holiday pay regardless of whether they worked the holiday and regardless of whether the stat holiday fell on a scheduled workday. After the bill was passed, workers could only receive holiday pay if the stat holiday fell on a day they normally worked, which, of course, penalizes those who don’t have a set schedule.

The following year, the UCP government introduced Bill 32, otherwise known as the Restoring Balance in Alberta’s Workplaces Act. This new legislation required unions to now get explicit consent from its members before they could use revenue collected from dues for social or political causes. This increased administrative burdens on unions, which meant additional costs, and it restricted their ability to use funds for advocacy for the broader working class.

In that same bill, the UCP introduced changes to make it harder to unionize. First, they more than doubled the certification process timeline. Before, workers could hold a certification vote just 10 calendar days after they applied to the Alberta Labour Relations Board for certification. Now, they have to wait 20 business days, basically an entire month. This gives employers more time to unionbust. As well, prior to the bill, employers had limited opportunity to dispute a certification application, usually just whether a worker was eligible to participate in the certification vote. Now, they can challenge procedural or technical issues on the certification process itself, such as minor errors in the application, supporting documents that were filed incorrectly, timing of the application, scope of which job titles are included in the proposed bargaining unit, and whether the union used coercion to gain support among the workers.

Later that year, the UCP government also introduced Bill 77, the Ensuring Safety and Cutting Red Tape Act. Keep in mind that red tape is simply a business-friendly euphemism for deregulation, which is nothing more than the removal of regulations. Most regulations fall into 3 camps: protect workers, protect the public, and protect the environment. Removing these regulations means increasing risk for workers, increasing risk for the public, and increasing risk for the environment. That should give you an idea of the motive behind this legislation.

Specific to workers, it undermined workplace safety. Prior to the bill, joint health and safety committees were mandatory in workplaces with 20 or more workers and worksite health and safety representatives were required at worksites with between 5 and 19 workers. Under the new bill, the requirements shifted to being risk-based, being mandatory only in workplaces with higher risk of accident, injuries, or exposure to hazardous conditions. This resulted in fewer workplaces having workplace health and safety committees. Also in Bill 47 was a change to training for health and safety committee members. Prior to the bill, all members of the committee had to have adequate training, no matter how big the employer was or what industry it was in. Now, some workplaces can provide less training, which can lead to less experienced representatives in charge of safety practices in the workplace.

That same bill also changed the worker’s right to refuse unsafe work. The bill moved away from workers having a presumptive right to refuse work that seems dangerous, which employers had to then fix and were unable to discipline the workers for refusing that work. Now, the work must present undue or immediate danger, which makes it harder for workers to justify refusals and even discourages them from refusing unsafe work in the first place.

Now that we’ve reviewed how the UCP government has made things worse for workers broadly, from a legislation perspective, I want to discuss other efforts they’ve taken to undermine public sector workers specifically.

First, let’s talk about the size of the public sector.

In their first budget, which they released in the autumn of 2019, the UCP government reported that in the 2018–2019 budget year, there was the equivalent of 210,407 people working full-time in the public sector in Alberta. That includes government workers, teachers, nurses, and so on. In their 2021–2022 budget, they reported only 206,728 public sector workers in the previous year. That means 3,679 full-time workers (or their equivalent) lost their jobs in just two years.

Let’s take a look specifically at those numbers for post-secondary education, K–12 education, and healthcare.

	2018–2019	2020–2021	Change
Post-secondary	33,588	32,890	-698
K–12, teachers	37,197	37,226	29
K–12, support	26,452	25,281	-1,171
Health care	80,570	80,570	0

What we see here is that during the first two years of the UCP’s first term in government, they got rid of roughly 700 full-time equivalent positions in the post-secondary system, which could include both teaching and support workers. The number of K–12 teachers increased by only 29, which is about 15 new teachers per year, on average, for the entire province. However, nearly 1,200 support workers in K–12 lost their jobs during the same period—support workers include such positions as librarians, educational assistants, custodians, kitchen staff, administrative support, and so on. Meanwhile, health workers—which include nurses, doctors, technicians, paramedics, administrative support, and so on—saw no increase at all during that first year.

It was clear in the first two years that they were intent on getting rid of not only government workers but also workers in education and health.

Since 2020–2021, however, the number of public sector positions has increased.

	2018–2019	2024–2025	Change
Post-secondary	33,588	33,144	-444
K–12, teachers	37,197	38,988	1,791
K–12, support	26,452	28,350	1,898
Health care	80,570	88,448	7,878

Okay, well, sort of. The number of full-time equivalent positions in post-secondary increased over the last 4 years (or rather they’re projected to), but there’ll still be fewer people working in post-secondary institutions than there were when the UCP took power. The other 3 areas all increased over the last 6 years—I guess the UCP realized we need teachers and nurses after all. In fact, the ratio of these 4 areas to the total public sector has increased, going from accounting for 84.51% of all public sector workers in 2018–2019 to 84.85% in 2024–2025.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that we have the number that we need in those areas. After all, if they drastically cut the number of full-time equivalent positions in all other public sector areas, that would throw off the ratio of post-secondary, education, and health to all public sector workers. A better metric to review is how much these positions increased in comparison to population.

We’re going to ignore positions in post-secondary institutions, since there are fewer than there were 5 years ago, so obviously they haven’t kept up with population growth, but look at the other three areas.

	Change	% change	Pop. increase
K–12, teachers	1,791	4.81%	10.81%
K–12, support	1,898	7.18%	10.81%
Health care	7,878	9.78%	10.81%

Alberta’s population between March 2019 and March 2024 increased by almost 11%, outpacing growth in both K–12 and health care; although health care came the closest. The number of teachers in Kindergarten to Grade 12 education didn’t even grow half as much as the general population. Education support workers in K–12 performed better than teachers, but still came in under three-quarters of increase in population. As I said, health care performed the best, but we still only hired 9 out of every 10 health care workers we needed to keep up with population growth.

Here’s what it would’ve looked like had the number of full-time equivalent positions kept up with population growth.

	2018–19	2024–25 projected	2024–25 adjusted	Difference
Post-secondary	33,588	33,144	37,219	4,075
K–12, teachers	37,197	38,988	41,218	2,230
K–12, support	26,452	28,350	29,311	961
Health care	80,570	88,448	89,280	832

We’d have over 4,000 more people working in post-secondary, 2200 more teachers, nearly 1000 more education support workers, and over 800 more health care workers. And that’s assuming we even had adequate numbers in 2018–2019 to begin with.

Now, let’s talk about wages.

The Alberta government publishes monthly reports called collective agreement wage tables. It lists wages and raises over a 10-year period for each collective agreement. I’ve gone through the most recent reports and averaged the annual increases for several public sector areas since 2019, so you can get a sense at what public sector workers have been dealing with while also having to contend with skyrocketing inflation. Keep in mind that some public sector workplaces have expired collective agreements. I have calculated wage increases at 0% in years not covered by a current collective agreement.

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Educational services	0.65%	0.30%	0.04%	0.19%	1.09%	0.89%
Municipalities	1.31%	1.31%	1.09%	1.50%	1.80%	1.49%
Post-secondary	0.37%	0.00%	0.02%	0.09%	2.59%	0.09%
Agencies, boards & commissions	0.56%	0.11%	0.00%	0.42%	2.11%	0.22%
Healthcare & social assistance	0.74%	0.55%	1.01%	1.65%	2.13%	1.06%

Since the UCP took power back in 2019, the average annual wage increase among all the collective agreements in the educational services sector has never once been above 1%, and it was below half a percent in 3 of those years.

Municipal workers fared the best, with every year seeing an average increase above 1%.

Post-secondary workers were only slightly better than educational services workers with last year being over 2.5%. But the average increase in 2020 was none, with the next two years coming in at less than a tenth of a percent.

Workers employed with government agencies, boards, and commissions were a bit better off, compared to those in post-secondary and educational services, but still had one year with an average increase of 0% in 2021.

Healthcare and social assistance came in with the second best overall performance, with all but two years being above 1% and one year being above 2%.

Now, let’s compare it to annual inflation as of April in each year.

	2019	2020	2021	2022	2023	2024
Inflation	2.2%	-0.5%	3.3%	6.3%	4.3%	3.0%

As we can see, other than in April 2020, the average wage increase for collective bargaining agreements has been below the rate of inflation in nearly every April since the UCP took power. And that’s not even taking into account the several years of wage freezes public sector workers got under the NDP, which lowered real wages before the UCP even won the 2019 provincial election.

Between April 2019 and April 2024, Alberta has seen a combined inflation increase of 18.6%. None of the 5 public sector areas listed managed to hit even half that amount, and 3 of them aren’t even a fifth of what inflation has been.

So, not only are we employing fewer workers in the public sector than we should be, assuming we want to keep up with population growth, but also we’re not paying them enough for them to catch up to the cost of living. That means we’re expecting them to do more work for less pay.

Through legislative changes, job cuts, and reduced funding, the UCP government has systematically weakened labour protections, curbed union power, and constrained public sector growth—leaving essential services, such as education and healthcare, struggling to keep pace with population growth. Meanwhile, wage increases have lagged far behind inflation, eroding real income and diminishing workers’ purchasing power.

If we want a sustainable future for Alberta’s working class, we must address these structural issues, advocate for fair wages, and push for policies that truly support both workers and the vital public services on which all Albertans rely. But we can’t do it workplace by workplace. We must do it in solidarity with one another: unions supporting unions and private sector workers supporting public sector workers—and vice versa. A workplace of 35 workers going on strike for more than a 7.5% combined wage increase won’t be enough to get this government to change its unionbusting ideology. We must be united on a much broader scale.

Improving the material conditions of the working class will only come from workers standing together in solidarity and demanding it. 

We didn’t get the 40-hour work week because one local of one union negotiated it into their collective agreement; we got it after hundreds of thousands of workers went on strike in May 1886 and demanded it.

We don’t have collective bargaining because one group of workers asked their employer nicely; we got it because tens of thousands of workers went on strike in Winnipeg in May 1919 and demanded it.

We didn’t get employment insurance because the government decided to be generous and give it to us one day. It was because thousands of workers boarded boxcars in June 1935 to travel to Ottawa and demand it.

Solidarity.