Technically, I shouldn’t refer to it as a strike, given that as soon as Unifor 549, the union representing approximately 700 refinery workers, greenlighted strike action, their employer locked them out. That was on Dec. 5, and so began one of the more acrimonious labour disputes we’ve seen in Saskatchewan in the last few decades.

Unifor 549 hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with its strategy. Ontario-based union leaders haven’t been able to read the landscape in Saskatchewan, which is detrimental to their success given that today’s labour action is almost entirely an exercise in public relations.

What Unifor’s national president, Jerry Dias, hasn’t been able to come to terms with is that labour culture in Saskatchewan has been degraded so significantly that the front line isn’t just a battle with the employer; it’s a battle with a surprising number of Saskatchewan people.

The entire concept of strike action has been degraded by the Sask. Party government to the point of being breathtaking, if not somewhat ironic. Ironic, because the Sask. Party’s early attempts at destroying workers’ rights resulted in the opposite. It ended up entrenching those rights through the Supreme Court, which ruled against the changes the Sask. Party tried to make.

It didn’t matter much, however, because the PR campaign that went along with that battle was the real catalyst for what we ended up with — an overall movement away from organized labour. Incredible, given that once upon a time, unions more or less owned this province. They kept the provincial NDP propped up in the late 1990s through 2003, or until the threat of the Sask. Party doing exactly what it did — systematically dismantling labour — was no longer enough to hold them off.

That said, the fact the Sask. Party, not long after forming government, bought off the extraordinarily powerful Saskatchewan Union of Nurses (SUN) with a pay increase of something like 30 per cent, didn’t hurt. SUN immediately did what it was supposed to do — take the money and run — leaving a huge void where that once-powerful labour voice used to be heard.

That left unions like the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (which lately insists it’s not a union, which should tell you something), government workers and others out in the cold to fend for themselves. You could say the labour front in Saskatchewan went into hibernation for a decade.

That’s all changed recently, first with the short-lived but punchy Crown strikes, which notably affected SaskTel and SaskPower the most. In the end, one could argue nobody really won, in part because local Unifor leaders knew that their members’ appetite for striking was extremely limited. It did, however, punch a few holes in that wall that’s been suppressing labour in Saskatchewan for the last 10 years or more.

Then it was followed by the polarizing Co-op Refinery strike, which as of the end of January is getting increasingly aggressive, culminating with an ominous dispatch of Regina police officers to arrest striking workers. If you’ve ever seen an episode of The Handmaid’s Tale or consumed any other dystopian work, you know the optics and messaging associated with rows of uniformed officers menacing ordinary citizens fighting for their rights (whether you agree with them or not) is ominous at the very
least.

What also seems to be botheringSaskatchewan people, especially those old enough to remember the formation of co-ops, is that this strike appears to fly in the face of the cooperative values the company was founded on. Today’s Co-op management argues those values are too expensive to remain sustainable in the marketplace, but it’s not like Co-op has ever been the cheapest place to make a purchase. The dividend Co-op pays to members was supposed to offset the pain at the till.

Since Co-op remains profitable to this day, it’s somewhat difficult to believe that it needs to reduce refinery workers pensions. On the other hand, Co-op has demonstrated that, unlike Unifor’s eastern leadership, it understands what it takes to win public support in Saskatchewan, pouring millions into aggressive ad campaigns highlighting bargaining factors like an 11 per cent pay increase.

That messaging makes it difficult to sympathize too much with striking workers, especially for the other Unifor-represented Crown workers who were forced to settle for zeroes just a few weeks earlier. It will be interesting to see what, if any, impact the last few months of varying degrees of labour unrest will have on Saskatchewan politics.

Both the Sask. Party and NDP have remained unsurprisingly low key throughout it all, which definitely wouldn’t have been the case 10 years
ago when both parties would have been desperately using the job action to polarize Saskatchewan residents to their positions.

The fact that Premier Moe has only cautiously waded in, encouraging all parties to get back to bargaining, speaks volumes. Perhaps Saskatchewan people, no longer enjoying the same record-breaking profits and private-business highs that they once were, are again seeing merit in job security and the other perks of union membership.

Like so many other things affecting the ever-evolving Saskatchewan landscape and cultural norms, only time will tell. In the meantime, let’s hope that the Co-op Refinery strike/lockout can eventually be resolved in a manner that minimizes any further pain and hardship for everyone involved.

-Tammy Robert