1980 - The Alberta Government is hit by a wave of massive strikes by its own employees as well as by newly unionized nurses, which produced some of the first blows against government restraint that prolonged the effect of the wage and price controls introduced by the Federal Government in 1976.

The General Service Strike in the Summer of 1980 was the first major industrial action to be taken by Alberta Government employees, who had been made the object of an experiment in ‘permanent exceptionalism’; i.e., provincial legislation that excluded them from a system of collective bargaining which had been enshrined in Federal and Provincial Acts following the Second World War.

Bill 41, the Public Service Employee Relations Act passed by the Progressive Conservative Government of Peter Lougheed had not only imposed a blanket ban on strikes by provincial employees; it also subjected them to a regime of compulsory arbitration that clearly favoured the employer. Worse yet, many of these workers had voted for Lougheed in 1971, because of a solemn promise that he would restore full collective bargaining rights to all public sector employees.

The Public Service Employees Relations Act, contained several provisions that severely restricted collective bargaining rights of employees of the Government of Alberta, as well as its boards and agencies. It contained severe restrictions to free collective bargaining, the first of which was a blanket ban on strikes on all employees covered by the Act, completely turning back the clock on a national pattern of legislation which recognized that productive bargaining cannot take place in the absence of a right to strike.

Affected workers were ordered to submit differences that arose in negotiations to a compulsory arbitration process that appeared to be totally rigged against them. Arbitrators appointed under the Act, for example, were required to consider "general economic conditions" and other specific conditions that suited the government’s purpose; "to ensure that wages and benefits are fair and reasonable to the employees and employer and are in the best interest of the public.”

The labour relations board (the PSERB) was furthermore empowered to determine which disputed items were arbitral, and which were to be left with the employer to unilaterally decide. These included items that are most central to the historical fight of unions to protect their members; i.e., the organization of work, the assignment of duties and the determination of the number of employees of an employer, systems of job evaluation and the allocation of individual jobs and positions within the systems, selection, appointment, promotion, training or transfer and pensions.

When they were first introduced in 1977, the penalties provided to enforce the Public Service Employees Relations Act were unprecedented in their size and savagery, including fines of up to $1,000/day for trade unions or for persons not in an officer or representative position, and $10,000/day for officers and representatives of a union. Of course, contempt of court proceedings could be and were added to enforcement.
In addition, restrictions on the scope of employees who were eligible for union membership went far beyond those found in most jurisdictions, which normally exclude those exercising managerial functions or employed in a confidential capacity in labour relations matters. The additional list of excluded employees began with persons employed in: the Legislative Assembly Office, the Office of the Auditor General, the Office of the Chief Electoral Officer, the office of the Ombudsman, the Legislative Counsel Office of the Department of the Attorney General, and the Executive Council.

The Government set the stage for a strike late in 1979, when it announced wage and salary guidelines of 7% and 9% for the new 2-year collective agreement that would be negotiated in Spring 1980. Coincidentally, these same MLAs had just voted themselves a salary increase of 47%, but when asked to explain this inconsistency, the Provincial Treasurer simply said, “I think you are talking about apples and oranges.”

Infuriated by this remark, AUPE immediately launched an ‘Apples & Oranges’ campaign that led into the longest strike in its 60-year history as an organization. The ‘wildcat’ began on July 2, 1980, when hundreds of employees of the Alberta Liquor Control Board walked off the job. They were followed five days later by over 1,000 correctional officers across the Province, joined by social workers, tradespeople, health care workers and other personnel in those institutions.

On July 16, hundreds of administrative support workers from Land Titles, Law Courts, Transportation, Alberta Health Care Insurance Commission and other government departments joined the wildcat — by July 18, this number had swelled to over 4,000. Even more government employees join the picket line in towns and cities across the Province after Justice William Sinclair of the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench finds six Correctional Officers guilty of contempt of court on July 22.

Despite dire threat of punishment by government officials, picket lines held firm until the Union told it workers to return to work on July 18. On July 28, President John Booth explained at a news conference that this return signified an expression of faith and a test of government’s willingness to negotiate.

The 1980 strike ended a period of labour history that proved to be a watershed for public sector labour relations. Up to that time, legislative restriction of trade union rights had been primarily directed at public sector workers on a case-by-case basis. However, in 1976, the Liberal administration of Pierre Elliot Trudeau effectively threw into question the whole pluralist framework established for collective bargaining in Canada in the post-WWII days, when he invoked a regime of comprehensive wage and price controls under the infamous Anti-Inflation Board, effectively suspending free collective bargaining for 2.3 million workers in private firms over a certain size and as many as 2 million in the private sector. In many ways, the strike of Alberta Government Employees provided a foretaste of the generation of embittered labour relations that would follow.