Working People in Alberta: A History
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by edited by Alvin Finkle
AU Press, Edmonton, 2012
360 pp., illus., $41.95 paperback
A double review with Union Power: Solidarity and Struggle in Niagara
by Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage
AU Press, Edmonton, 2012
222 pp., illus., $24.95 paperback
It’s difficult to imagine the working conditions faced by Canada’s first labourers, let alone their struggles to improve wages and conditions. Fortunately, two books in a new series from the Canadian Committee on Labour History provide a unique window into the history of labour in Canada.
Union Power: Struggle and Solidarity in Niagara, by Carmela Patrias and Larry Savage, both from Brock University, details how work has been transformed in Ontario’s Niagara region since the early 1820s. At that time, workers laboured fourteen- to sixteen-hour days constructing the original Welland Canal that connected Lake Erie with Lake Ontario.
By the 1870s, the union movement included skilled trades such as cigar-making. In the 1920s and 1930s, garment workers staged strikes to improve wages and working conditions. In the 1980s, staff walked out at Eaton’s department stores across Ontario.
Working People in Alberta: A History covers a similar period but also brings readers further back to the time of Canada’s First Peoples and the first European fur traders who arrived in the area. The books are comparable in style, but Working People in Alberta benefits from a larger format and includes numerous images documenting the province’s labour movement.
Many of its stories were collected by the Alberta Labour History Institute. Those stories are based on more than two hundred interviews recorded over the past decade. Transcripts of many of the interviews are available on the ALHI’s website, labourhistory.ca. The publication of Working People in Alberta coincided with the one hundredth anniversary of the Alberta Federation of Labour in 2012.
Taken together, these two books provide an excellent look into the history of labour in Canada and how it has changed over time. Most notably, each is an important addition to the struggle to keep labour history in the public eye.
— Joel Ralph (Read bio)
Joel Ralph is the director of programs for Canada's History Society.