It was a day early, April 30, but the spirit on the Alberta legislature grounds was the same as International Workers' Day held each year on May 1 in Europe.
The Alberta Federation of Labour knew the significance of May 1 when it organized the legislature grounds event and shipped busloads of delegates from its annual convention at the Edmonton EXPO Centre to join in the demonstration of solidarity.
The Alberta event looked like May Day celebrations in Europe where there is flag and banner waving attended by trade unions, labour organizations and parties, anarchists, communists and socialists.
In Europe, where the day is a holiday in most countries, it coincides with the ancient fertility celebration that is marked by European farmers who celebrate spring seeding.
On International Workers' Day the crowds eat cake as a mockery of the memory of French Queen Marie Antoinette who said of the starving poor who wanted bread, "let them eat cake."
May Day as a workers' day to rally got its start in the United States to commemorate the police shooting of four participants at a rally for the eight-hour day in Chicago in 1886.
The police were retaliating when someone in the mob threw a bomb at them.
The following day in Milwaukee, militia shot seven strikers and bystanders.
The holiday Labour Day in North America is now held on the first weekend in September, but in Alberta the public service unions who make up the backbone of the labour movement in Alberta have just added May Day to the calendar.
"Dignity, fairness and respect" is missing from labour laws that have been passed by past conservative governments in this province, said AFL boss Gil McGowan.
Of course public service unions weren't the only workers at the rally.
"Today we have a government that is prepared to listen," said Martyn Piper of the Alberta Regional Council of Carpenters and Allied Workers. He is an executive of this union and depends for his paycheque on discontented workers who face legal hurdles in organizing private sector unions.
Rachel Notley's government made a clumsy move to unionize farm workers in Bill 6.
Now it is reviewing the labour code.
The changes that are coming will make public sector union contracts costlier. That means more taxes.
For private sector unions, the changes will impose new costs on companies and make it easier to organize unions, especially in the golden-goose oil and gas sector.
Dignity, fairness and respect are stirring words and can be noble objectives.
But they can also be political slogans for privileged and pampered "workers."
Are labour leaders the new political elite, members of Notley's kitchen cabinet?
Changes to the labour landscape in Alberta, if too far- reaching, will be a volatile ballot issue in 2019 when Albertans cast their votes and verdict on the NDP's version of the Alberta advantage.
- Frank Dabbs is a veteran political and business journalist, author of four books and editor of several more.
"Changes to the labour landscape in Alberta, if too far reaching, will be a volatile ballot issue in 2019 when Albertans cast their votes and verdict on the NDP's version of the Alberta advantage."
