Working People in Alberta: A History by Alvin Finkel (review)

Coinciding with the hundredth anniversary of the Alberta Federation of Labor (AFL), Working People in Alberta seeks to tell the often overlooked history of Alberta’s men and women from the time before Europeans made contact with the First Nations to the present. Alan Finkel, with a bevy of contributors, utilizes excerpts from oral history interviews with over two hundred employees, ranging from management to the rank-and-file, to tell “a social history of working people, including both unorganized workers and the trade unions” that fully encapsulates the struggles of labor over time (4). In doing so, he sets out to dispel the traditional characterization of Alberta as a one-party province with no clear ideological distinctions between the top and bottom rungs of the social ladder. Instead, he argues that the everyday laborers of Alberta fought long and hard for their place in society against a conservative government uninterested in the plight of the worker.

Finkel sets out his study as a chronological and methodological update of an earlier work, Warren Caragata’s Alberta Labour: A Heritage Untold (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd., 1979). Because Caragata worked under the AFL, Finkel argues that the work suffers from an unconscious censorship that played down the role of communists and socialists in the AFL. Working People in Alberta, by contrast, looks at the voices of all labor participants, without direct union involvement, in order to craft a richer and (in his view) more accurate picture of the labor movement. The book traces the history of workers in Alberta from pre-European contact times to the present, followed by two coda chapters that deal specifically with the roles of women and minorities within Alberta’s labor movement.

Finkel and his contributors give a good overview of the history of work in Alberta, but because of the obvious limits of space, it is impossible for them to fully go into the details of what he notes is 13,000 years of history. Therefore, the bulk of the study focuses on the twentieth century, but even this at times feels rushed. And while Finkel claims that this is not specifically a history of organized labor, much of the focus still tends to be on the struggles and activities of labor unionism in both the private and public sectors and organized workers’ encounters with conservative government officials looking to cut back the influence of the labor movement. While many of the topics cannot be explored in depth within the scope of the book, as a general overview it still works well.

The more than two hundred interviews that Finkel and his associates utilized came from the archives of the Alberta Labour History Institute, a volunteer association that collects history from the perspective of working people. Finkel and his coauthors incorporate these oral histories in two ways. First, the views of laborers are woven into the larger narrative that focuses more on the actions of the government and employers. This allows for the reaction of employees to be seen as events unfolded chronologically. Second, the authors create numerous asides within each chapter with a longer excerpt of an interview on a particular subtopic related to the overarching chapter content (such as the impact of losing health care benefits, accidents on the job, and ideological splits between communists and conservatives).

In addition to the printed interviews, Finkel and his contributors include a wealth of visual items to supplement the oral history accounts. Dozens of full color photos of factory and field conditions, union rallies, and worker protests help the reader visualize the tensions that continually marked the relations between labor and government. Additionally, labor pamphlets, picketing materials, newspaper headlines, and political cartoons perfectly capture the atmosphere of these confrontations and bring the reader more fully into the world that the authors describe.

If Working People in Alberta has one drawback in...