 Armine Yalnizyan (left) from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Stephanie Bloomingdale (right) from the Wisconsin state AFL-CIO and moderator Sheila Pratt (centre).
Wisconsin's fight is Alberta's, and Alberta's is Wisconsin's, the Secretary Treasurer of the state's branch of the American Federation of Labour told members of the United Nurses of Alberta at their Annual General Meeting Wednesday afternoon in Edmonton.
"This is about the survival of the middle class," said Stephanie Bloomingdale, who has become well known as the spokesperson for Wisconsin's unionized working people in he fight against Republican Governor Scott Walker's attack on public service unions that brought more than 100,000 people into the streets of the state capital earlier this year.
Bloomingdale was taking part in a lively forum on the relevance and future of unions, chaired by Edmonton Journal journalist Sheila Pratt, with Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in Ottawa.
The simple answer to the forum's formal question about union relevance is that, without them, progressive working people would have no voice. "Do you really believe that without a powerful labour movement, without the United Nurses of Alberta, that you would be able to speak out on behalf of quality care?"
And despite the efforts of the U.S. right to divide unionized working people from non-union workers, and public sector unions from private sector unions, those groups stuck together in Wisconsin and proved that "fighting back matters."
Gov. Walker did not realize "how much non-union people would support the rights of public employees to have a voice in their workplace, that the private sector would stand in complete solidarity with the public sector," she said."
"Together we can restore a healthy middle class and a healthy future for our kids and our grandkids," she concluded.
In the same way, working people around the world can stick together and support one another - as Alberta unions did by contributing t the fight in Wisconsin.
Yalnizyan described the choices facing working people as stark, and the role of unions in protecting democracy as essential.
The aims of anti-union activists like Wisconsin's Walker and the companies in Alberta pressing for radical chances to the provincial Labour Code are the same, she argued. In the face of a worldwide labour shortage, which should help raise working people's wages, "their objective is break the unions before you get a piece of the growing economy.
"What we are fighting about is being able to hang on to our share of prosperity as the boom flows through town," she stated.
Yalnizyan pointed to the abuse of Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada as part of the attack on unions and the rights of all working people. "Think of two-tied construction (jobs) and two-tier health care as they very same thing," she advised.
Yalnizyan added that she sees great hope in the worldwide Occupation movement, which she described as a democratic revolution "occupying the future," and urged UNA members to support its goals. "The Occupy movement is our opportunity to say enough is enough.
Both speakers argued the effectiveness of organized workers is the reason for the intensity of the fight against union rights.
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