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  • Increasing discontent among provincial employees in Alberta in the late 1960s and 1970s led to growing militancy culminating in a series of strike actions in 1974 by members of the Civil Service Association of Alberta (csa of a) and the transformation of that organization into the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees. In response to growing labour unrest in the public sector, the Lougheed government created a joint government/union task force with the csa of a on 11 February 1975 to review the legislation governing provincial employees and to recommend changes in legislation necessary to achieve a better system of labour relations. The creation of the task force created a period of labour peace in the provincial public sector leading up to the provincial election in the spring of 1975. However, following the re-election of the Lougheed government, public sector labour legislation was revised with the passage of the highly anti-union Public Service Employee Relations Act in May 1977. Internal government documents of the day suggest the task force process was a cynical manipulation of the union in an effort to defuse public employee militancy and to delay conflict.

  • The labour movement's inability to effectively respond to neoliberalism has resulted in reduced union membership and declining public status and influence of labour unions. This is having a cascading effect on other institutions that are at least peripherally linked with the working class, from the rightward march of social democratic parties to the move away from class as the foundation of labour history. I suggest that the absence of revolutionary unions, those fighting for a future beyond capitalism, is one of the key underlying causes of labour's current malaise. By revolutionary unions, I mean unions that are explicitly pro-socialist and anti-capitalist in intent and that, by their actions and by the response of capital and state to those actions, foster an awareness of the class nature of society, the specific interests of working people as a class, and possibilities for collectively pursuing a better future. --Introduction

Last update from database: 4/18/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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