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  • Western Canada’s oil-exporting economies have come to rely on migrant labour as a cornerstone of economic development. A global division of labour intersecting with the constellation of Canada’s migrant worker programs has shaped the contemporary political-economic character of many Canadian provinces, including Saskatchewan. These programs have worked to construct bifurcated labour markets for growing low-wage industries that exist alongside high-wage resource-sector employment. Although a majority of these migrant workers end up employed in non-unionized workplaces, foreign workers who secure occupations in health care, construction, warehousing, and manufacturing are often represented by a union. The study explores union attitudes and union-member engagement among migrant labour through the lens of union revitalization, in an attempt to confront claims that migrant workers are without an affinity to organized labour and avoid participating in union business and the collective-bargaining process.

  • In 2019, Regina’s Co-operative Refinery Complex locked out the 730 members of Unifor Local 594 amid record profits in an aggressive drive for significant pension concessions. Marred by sweeping antipicketing injunctions, an enormous scab operation, police repression, and general public enmity, the lockout suggests two overlapping trends. First, the union’s adherence to co-operative and conciliatory bargaining had left it ill equipped to confront—either in the workplace or the public sphere—management’s costcutting agenda in the centre of Saskatchewan’s now hegemonic petrostate. Second, a marked tension developed between community outreach efforts and the circumstances in which legal industrial action was ineffective and civil disobedience emerged.

Last update from database: 4/19/25, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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