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Spring 2008
The theme of our Fall poster series is ‘The Making of Our Movement.’ It profiles key events in Alberta’s history that galvanized the labour movement and its supporters. The focus for the first poster in the series is the Gainers strike, one of the most bitter strikes in Alberta’s history.
At midnight on May 31st 1986, over 1,100 members of United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 280P at Edmonton’s Gainers meatpacking plant went on strike. The main issue for the union and its members going into the strike was wage parity with other meatpacking plants in Canada, while Gainers’ owner Peter Pocklington was calling for wage rollbacks.
Almost immediately after the strike began Pocklington followed through with his threat to bring in replacement workers. Strikers prevented busloads of scabs from entering the plant the first day of the strike, but the following day Gainers was granted an injunction to limit the number of pickets. Strikers and their supporters defied this restriction of their rights. The Edmonton police were called in to intimidate and arrest the picketers. In response, UFCW with support from the Alberta Federation of Labour and others broadened their tactics. For example, they organized rallies, including one on June 12th at the Alberta Legislature that drew an estimated crowd of between 8,000 and 10,000 people. One of their most successful tactics was a national boycott of Gainers’ products. A survey in November 1986 revealed that prior to the strike three-quarters of Edmontonians bought Gainers’ products; six months into the strike, less than one-quarter still did.
Over the course of the strike those involved moved from seeing their struggle as something just between themselves and their employer to seeing it as part of a larger struggle. The following excerpt is from an Edmonton Examiner article in November 1986: For long-time employees like (Steve) Haluza, John Jong, Walter Eleniuk and Peter Kamstra who have worked at the plant for more than 30 years, this is a battle they won’t easily give up. All of them are hoping the public will not forget about the strikers and what they are fighting for. As Kamstra, 60, says with steely-eyed determination: “We are fighting for the rights of all workers…Our fight is everyone’s. If we lose, they lose. If this company wins, another company will do the same thing and roll back wages if they can get away with it.”
The strike lasted for six and a half months. The agreement reached between the union and Gainers included no wage increase but no rollback either. One of the biggest gains from the union’s perspective was gaining control of the employee pension plan. Perhaps most important is the fact that not one worker crossed the picket line during the entire course of the strike. |
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