By Terry Inigo-Jones, Communications staff
The trouble with history is that we tend to think of it as only about the past. It may be interesting, but it was so long ago it can’t be relevant, right?
Wrong.
“It may seem like old news, but the battles workers fought more than 100 years ago are still being fought today,” says AUPE Vice-President Curtis Jackson. “AUPE members can learn a lot from our history, including how to fight for better working conditions today.”
It’s a particularly important message at this time of year as workers around the world celebrate May Day, also known as International Workers Day. Some people call it the ‘real’ Labour Day.
May Day was founded in 1889 to commemorate hundreds of thousands of workers who went on strike for an eight-hour workday.
The strike began on May 1 three years earlier. On May 3 in Chicago, one person was killed while police were protecting strike-breakers, also called scabs. On May 4, police tried to scatter a crowd supporting the strike.
Someone threw a bomb, and police fired their guns into the crowd, killing four civilians. Later, hundreds of union leaders and supporters were rounded up for supporting the strike. Four of them went to trial and were sentenced to death.
“It may seem like old news, but the battles workers fought more than 100 years ago are still being fought today.”
May Day in Alberta
May Day celebrations only started to take off in Alberta in the 1920s. They grew in size and importance in the 1930s as the Great Depression wreaked havoc with workers and their families. The authorities often disrupted the events with violence.
The 1930 May Day parade in Calgary was broken up by police swinging batons. Four years later, the parade ended with a fight between veterans and police known as “The Battle of Mission Hill.”
May is also an important month in AUPE’s history, noted for what has become known as “The 22 Days in May.”
In the May of 1990, AUPE Local 006 members went on an illegal 22-day strike. Excessive workloads prevented these Government of Alberta workers from providing critical services to vulnerable Albertans.
Vice-President Jackson is a social worker and Local 006 member. He knows how important this action was for the workers and the Albertans they supported.
“The strike set the precedent for reviewing workloads and led to renewed conversations about what workload changes would look like,” he says. “It is a contributing factor to the ongoing work to develop models like the Workload Assessment Model (WAM) that is currently in use."
“While this model is not perfect, it went a long way in showing what the standards for workload should be.”
“AUPE members can learn a lot from our history, including how to fight for better working conditions today.”
In 2023, Local 006 began to use the 1990 strike as a tool to teach members about the power of direct action. About 2,200 of the Local’s 3,000 members took part in activities spread over 22 working days in May.
These actions included wearing red to work and a series of webinars where members heard from leaders who took part in that strike, including President Guy Smith and Vice-President Sandra Azocar.
Hearing how that past strike made those members into present-day leaders is a powerful message, says Jackson.
“We have seen so many new activists since then,” he says. “They’ve been seeking positions in their chapters, in their Local, running to be convention delegates, and they are citing their experience from that initial 22 Days in May campaign in 2023.”
Local 006 will hold a similar campaign this May, something Jackson hopes will become an annual tradition.
“As the chair of the committee that created the 22 Days in May campaign in 2023, I couldn’t be more proud that this work is being carried on by our members, that they see value in organizing and engaging our membership, that they see value in tying into the history of Local 006, which is a history steeped in activism and political justice,” says Jackson. “I’m just excited to see what comes out of it.”