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Over the past 20 years, the Alberta-based United Food and Commercial Workers Local 401 have revitalized their union through organizing diverse groups of workers in hard-to-organize occupations, increasing involvement in political and community matters and adopting innovative organizing and representation strategies. They have done so with a stable leadership that exhibits autocratic and populist tendencies. The apparent contradictions of autocratic structures and innovative reforms are difficult to explain using existing explanations of union renewal and concepts of union forms. This in-depth study examines Local 401 in an effort to explain the unexpected patterns. Using a variety of methods, including Critical Narrative Analysis, the study reveals that unions may be more fluid and dynamic than the existing literature acknowledges. The study concludes the business union-social union duality common in industrial relations theory needs to be replaced by a more flexible, more multi-layered conceptualization of union behaviour. Unions exhibit elements of both social and business unionism at the same time because they are organizations created at the intersection between structure and action and are always in flux. The study also highlights a possible third path for union renewal, coined “accidental revitalization”, where local-initiated renewal can occur without planned intention and within a context of stable local leadership. Third, the study explores the role narratives play in resolving apparent contradictions in union behaviour by constructing internal logics and how narratives contribute to the production and re-production of power dynamics within unions.
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This paper uses narrative analysis to explore how Alberta government Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) “constructed” migrant work and migrant workers in legislature and media statements between 2000 and 2011. Government MLAs asserted that migrant work (1) was economically necessary and (2) posed no threat to Canadian workers. Government MLAs also asserted that international migrant workers (3) had questionable occupational, linguistic or cultural skills and (4) caused negative social and economic impacts in Canada. Taken individually, these narratives appear contradictory, casting migrant work as good but migrant workers as bad. Viewed together, these narratives comprise an effort to dehumanize temporary and permanent international migrant workers. This (sometimes racialized) “othering” of migrant workers justifies migrant workers’ partial citizenship and suppresses criticism of their poor treatment.
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This study examines how five unions in the Canadian province of Alberta responded to a sudden influx of temporary foreign workers (TFWs), as part of Canadian employers’ increased use of migrant workers in the mid-2000s. The authors find three types of response to the new TFW members: resistive, facilitative and active. Furthermore, these responses were dynamic and changing over time. The different responses are best explained not by the unions’ institutional context, but by internal factors shaping each union’s response. Drawing upon the concept of referential unionisms, the study explores how unions’ self-identity shapes their responses to new challenges such as the influx of migrant workers.
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In this case study, we examine why the use of Temporary Foreign Workers increased in Alberta, how the former Conservatives government of Alberta encouraged and justified the use of migrant workers, and how a petroleum-based economy affects labour markets and the democratic health of a region. This study also explores how Alberta’s use of migrant workers is consistent with labour-market dynamics in an oil-exporting economy. --Authors' introduction
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