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

The spate of fawning eulogies to the late premier Ralph Klein, the ongoing dominance of Conser vative governments, and a potential veer towards even more right-populism in the Wildrose Party, suggest the publication of Working People in Alberta might serve as a necessary corrective to mass media amnesia that portrays this province as a neoliberal nirvana. The true story is, as we suspected, more complicated as generations of working-class Albertans long struggled for a measure of fairness and justice for themselves and their families. More often than not these efforts to secure a living wage or an equitable workplace met with set backs or outright defeat. Yet people, individually and collectively, persisted and it was this sheer determination that yielded positive results. In response to the question of whether unions are still needed in a 21st-century milieu of right-to-work initiatives, this survey offers a practical rejoinder.

Working People in Alberta is a thoroughly engaging social history and should stand as a model for any similar provincial surveys. Timed to commemorate the 2012 centenary of the Alberta Federation of Labour the book is issued in large format with copious illustrations – it is an all-round, top-notch production by Athabasca University Press in conjunction with the Alberta Labour History Institute. Eschewing the traditional union history approach for a broadly defined social history of all working people, the book is attentive to race and gender, as well as class. Notably, the first two chapters: “Millennia of Native Work” and “The Fur Trade and Early European Settlement” examine carefully the region that would become the province of Alberta before European contact and through the period of initial colonization. This account of Aboriginal culture is as much a national story as it is one of Alberta, and its insights should be applied to any Canadian survey course. The remaining eight chapters mostly trace a chronological line leading to the contemporary era. Synopses of Alberta’s intersections of class with gender and race are addressed in separate chapters near the book’s conclusion. Given that Working People in Alberta is a collaborative effort it is not surprising that there are stylistic variations and content overlap between sections, but the overall result is reasonably integrated.

In his introduction Alvin Finkel sets out to dispel the impression that Alberta is a “rich, placid province where the streets are paved with gold,” (3) and that this affluence has yielded a one-class, one-party conservative ideology that undermines the salience of social class. To this end, the book succeeds admirably along the lines of other celebrated alternative histories such as Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, (New York: Harper and Row, 1980) or the American Social History Project, Who Built America? (New York: Pantheon, 1989). While much of Alberta’s historical record is well documented by various scholars, this contemporary synthesis should make this history even more accessible. The book incorporates some of the two hundred interviews collected by the Alberta Labour History Institute and these first-hand accounts add considerably to the texture of the story.

So what might constitute a labour and working-class history of Alberta? This ranges from early examples of Aboriginal participation in the fur trade as it coalesced under the aegis of the Hudson’s Bay Company, the plight of railway navvies constructing the three transcontinental roads that traversed Alberta, coal miners, teachers, agricultural labourers and harvest excursionists. Pragmatic and exclusionist craft unions sought to represent segments of the emergent skilled workforce, while the Industrial Workers of the World championed the undesirable “bindle stiffs.” Notable strikes include a 1903 conflict between craft and industrial unionists as the United Brotherhood of Railway Employees sought to organize the entire Canadian Pacific Railway. This audacious gambit was crushed in no small part by the lack of solidarity on the part of the most skilled workers and the running trades. Although such rivalries and lapses in class consciousness remains a consistent...