Calgary & Southern Alberta

Labour Since 1935

When the Social Credit Party swept the 1935 election, farmers and workers supported William Aberhart’s promise of social dividends to every family in the province. Aberhart proceeded to pass the first general minimum wage legislation in Canada and in 1938 the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act gave labour the right to collective bargaining. When Ernest Manning became Premier in 1943, however, the Social Credit Party became more conservative. The Alberta Federation of Labour retreated from militancy and radicalism in the late 1940s. By that time, furthermore, railway workers and miners saw themselves outnumbered by the geologists and white-collar workers of the oil and gas industry. The labour movement found it difficult to organise oil employers. The largest impediment came from the oil companies themselves, which set up company unions with the co-operation of the provincial government. Since the 1950s the largest trend in the labour movement has been the organisation of public sector unions. In 1950, for example, municipal employees established an Alberta joint council that came to represent nearly 3,000 workers by 1954.