By Jim Stanford, Canadian Auto Workers

My home province is once again playing host to one of those knock-em-down, drag-em-out confrontations that give industrial relations a bad name: the strike, now into its ninth week, by journalists and print technicians at the Calgary Herald.

For some reason, Alberta seems to experience a disproportionate share of these classic labour battles, despite its status as Canada’s least-unionized, most business-friendly province. The Herald strike follows in the tradition of similar conflicts, such as the long Gainers meatpacking strike in the 1980s, or the illegal walkout by Calgary hospital workers earlier this decade. Perhaps counter-intuitively, the anti-labour stance of employment law and economic policy in Alberta may actually contribute to the outbreak of fights like this one.

Alberta’s economy is far and away the richest in Canada, measured by GDP per person. Yet wages in Alberta, strangely, are lower than the national average. The economic pie is bigger, but workers receive a smaller slice of that pie. Indeed, as measured by labour’s share of GDP, only workers in Newfoundland and Saskatchewan fare worse than those in Alberta. Consequently, workers in the province have fared only adequately, even as the provincial economy boomed.

A hostile legal and regulatory climate explains much of the disjuncture between provincial macroeconomic success and the ho-hum economic condition of Alberta’s workforce. Rules regarding union organizing, certification, strikes, and picketing are the toughest in Canada. This is at least as important as the much-vaunted "free enterprise" culture of the province in explaining the low level of unionization. Canada’s lowest provincial minimum wage (just $5 per hour) also helps keep wages from getting out of hand.

In this context, economic progress for working people will not descend upon their heads like manna from the free-market heavens. Workers will get what they demand and what they fight for. All of which brings us to the Herald strike.

It’s no accident that this bitter strike is occurring in Alberta. The issues being confronted by the strikers will rear their heads across the country, as the Southam chain is restructured and reoriented. Indeed, if the strikers lose, the employees of newspapers elsewhere in Canada can expect to face demands for the elimination of seniority protection and other concessions. Calgary is a great place for Southam’s management to test-drive its new policies.

In this sense, then, Alberta’s anti-union institutions clearly promote the sorts of bitter conflicts that they are purportedly designed to prevent. A tilted playing field does not stop workers from fighting for their rights; it only makes those struggles more difficult and violent than they need to be. The determination of the Herald strikers is simply more evidence of that historical finding.

Jim Stanford is an economist with the Canadian Auto Workers, and author of Paper Boom (published by James Lorimer & Co.).

For further information on the Herald strike check out the support sites at www.heraldunion.com and www.savetheherald.com.