By Naomi Rankin and Dave McKee
In a very positive development, the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL) is pulling unions and workers across the province together into what it calls a “Common Front of Worker Power.”
According to the AFL, “We’re living in what has been described as a ‘Worker Moment.’ Alberta workers know their wages aren’t keeping up. They know that their standard of living is slipping. And, increasingly, they’re saying ‘enough is enough!’ The Common Front is all about seizing this Worker Moment and turning the anger and frustration that working Albertans are feeling into worker action and worker power.”
The federation notes that more than 250,000 Alberta workers are currently at the bargaining table or on picket lines, and it concludes that “the opportunity for coordinated action to build real worker power in our province has never been greater.”
The focus is on unity and solidarity amongst unions, developing a common strategy not just for negotiations but for advocating for government policy. The Common Front initiative contains the outlines of a progressive platform which includes issues like restoring social services and action on the cost of living.
The AFL has its work cut out for it. Alberta has a declining union density, and an obviously strong right-wing movement. But the federation is also affected by Canada-wide labour movement issues like the historic fracture between the building trades and the industrial unions and more recent ones such as the absence of Unifor from the Canadian Labour Congress.
Even if the Common Front initiative gets no further than strengthening the collaboration amongst public sector unions in bargaining, that would be a positive step. But it can be much more than that, and that’s the challenge for the Alberta labour movement.
To be most effective, it will need to be built not just amongst unions currently within the AFL but with those outside and at the margins. Unity around concrete common actions provides an opportunity to reach out and address differences and disunity, hopefully leading to re-unification organizationally. The federation seems to be taking this kind of approach – the Common Front currently involves a wide range of unions in the public and private sectors, including Unifor.
But this cannot be done by just a top-down appeal to union leaders. It will be critical to foment more education amongst the memberships generally to convert the grassroots into a force pushing their leadership towards unity and action.
One of the other big challenges is that the Common Front will need to build and maintain itself around independent labour political action. Time and again in Canada – particularly in English-speaking Canada, union solidarity efforts like this work until an election approaches. Then, they get collapsed down into just supporting the NDP.
In many ways, the real test of Alberta’s potential Common Front is if it is prepared to continue to function as an independent voice of labour during and after an election.
In the meantime, it’s a big step forward for labour in the province – one which should be taken by other federations as well.
[Photo: Unifor]
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