The Alberta Labour History Institute collects, preserves, and disseminates the stories of Alberta’s working people and their organizations. This website includes full transcripts, podcasts, and profiles of our interviewees. It also includes videos, booklets, themed essays, annual calendars, and a link to a book created by ALHI. To learn more about us, visit About. For help with navigating the site, visit How To Use This Site.
What’s New?
New and updated worker profiles: Glynnis Lieb. Vince Westacott; Evelyn Gilbert; Frank Reaume; Glen Walker
New theme: Precarious Workers in Alberta; Hunger March (1932)
Booknotes: A Fight for Justice: The compelling story of temporary foreign workers & human rights by Joe Barrett
Meatpacking Workers in Alberta
By Jason Foster
Interviews Related to United Food and Commercial Workers in Alberta
With its vast grasslands and thriving cattle ranches Alberta has long been the centre of Canada’s meatpacking industry. From the province’s first plant in 1890 to Edmonton’s thriving Packingtown in the 1950s to today’s massive industrial plants in High River and Brooks producing 70% of Canada’s beef products, meatpacking has been an important source of employment and economic activity. And where there are meatpacking plants there are meatpacking workers fighting for their rights. Given that meatpacking is dangerous, physically demanding and fast-paced work there are good reasons for meatpacking workers to fight.
A number of plants opened in Edmonton and Calgary in the first decade of the 1900s. Early attempts at unionization were not successful. Workers at Burns Meats in Calgary went on a failed strike in 1920 for union recognition. In 1937 workers at three Edmonton plants staged sitdown strikes to win recognition but these also failed after employers shifted production to other plants, brought in strikebreakers to assault striking workers and engaged in anti-union rhetoric in the media.