The Changing Face of Labor

To organize or not to organize? The question is no longer so simple in worker-hungry Alberta

By Bill Sass

December 04, 2008

For statistics on the labor union movement in Canada and the world click here.

For information Days not worked in strikes and lockouts click here.

Once upon a time not so long ago in Alberta, unions held sway on construction sites. Building trade unions owned about 80 per cent of the Alberta labor market in the early 1980s. Today, reports Statistics Canada, they represent only about one-tenth to 15 per cent of the province’s construction and resource work force.

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Total union representation in all fields is about 22 per cent of 1.67 million Albertans who earn paychecks – and the lion’s share of the organized workers are teachers or health-care professionals. Alberta is the least unionized province in Canada.

Over the course of the past three decades, alternative labor pools for employers have emerged to serve the evolving needs of industry. The trend is especially strong in the resource sector, which recruits thousands of skilled and semi-skilled workers to build the mega-plants that pump out oil from northern Alberta.

One such alternative is the Merit Contractors Association. Its president, Stephen Kushner, says: “We’ve been around since 1986. We are all about providing human resources and services to construction companies whether they’re residential, institutional, commercial or industrial.”

Merit Contractors is not altruistic – just realistic. Rather than conservative ideals such as open-shop visions of labor free trade, this voice of employers says it serves practical needs. “We help companies attract and retain the best quality workers they can. We can help companies be good at that level,” Kushner says. “It’s about being the best employer so that your workers have a tremendous amount of loyalty and respect and feel good about coming to work every day.”

While he accepts traditional unions’ claims that they provide quality workers, he adds that confrontational tactics they sometimes employ have lost their old attraction to many in the modern work force. “There’s been a dramatic move away from unionization by workers in the construction industry. We see that trend continuing. The traditional building trade union model is not serving the vast majority of construction workers very well,” Kushner says.

“We’re seeing a huge number of people comfortable working in a non-union environment – the kind of environment that we’ve been working with our companies to create, a very positive place.”

When the Merit Contractors Association was created, the provincial economy was very different. “The economy in 1986 was in a poor state in Alberta,” Kushner recalls. The ’80s provincial labor scene – wounded like industry by negative federal energy policy, crippling interest rates and slumping oil and gas prices – was a desert of massive unemployment in construction. Wages spiraled downward for years. “Nobody was providing benefits or retirement programs for their employees. It was just not a very healthy state.”

Fifteen contractors got together and decided to take a different approach.

The firms agreed to ensure that all their employees were covered by benefit plans; they believed it was one small thing they could do to improve human resource practices in the industry. “From there, the association has grown from these 15 companies to over 1,300 in Alberta that employ 50,000 people in the construction industry,” says Kushner.

Workers at Merit companies get multiple benefits, ranging from retirement programs to free tuition for all member company apprentices to employee discounts for auto and life insurance, car rentals and job-site essentials from Mark’s Work Wearhouse, Kushner reports.

He also acknowledges contributions to the changed 21st century employment scene by another alternative trade labor source that is making impressive inroads into Alberta work sites: the Christian Labour Association of Canada (CLAC).

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