I've only really read Alberta and Saskatchewan but the differences in Wildcat penalties are striking. In Alberta every individual involved is fined $10,000 a day, in Saskatechewan its between 5.00$-$1,000. Pretty interesting stuff. In Alberta the LRB claims you can't organize a contract without a no strike clause, this has caused some serious hesitancy within our branch to even register at all.

What's "Registering" consist of in Alberta?

I was told, at least in Ontario, that union's aren't required to 'register' with the government like they are in the UK and USA, but when you organize a shop and go through the election process (or card check if you're in construction) and win that's when you're granted union recognition - but only for that shop.

Saskatchewan is going through some pretty major changes to their Labour legislation right now, I haven't got too indeepth with looking at it but there's lots of articles on the http://laborstart.org website.

If anyone has further information on labour law in various provinces that would be appreciated.

Ugh I have article but it won't paste correctly I'll see what I can find out here. I think 'registering' in Canada is what legally allows you to strike, at least in Alberta unregistered unions striking is considered illegal.

What about non-union workers? Do they have the right to strike in Alberta / other parts of Canada? What would be the difference between workers in an unrecognized union striking and workers who aren't union members?

if it's anything like non-union workers striking in the Uk you're essentially fucked unless you pull off an absolute blinder (as recently happened in northampton, btw).

I think we're a lot closer to what Ince is talking about. I know Saskatchewan is the same, so it would lead me to believe this is common across Canada. If you strike you must do so after a labour relations board certified election, and you must give the employer notice. These certified elections are only performed as a service to certified bargaining agents who have registered all of their officers, bylaws and finances with the government- so they know who to go after if there is a violation. In Alberta you also have to give 48 hours notice, and the government can impose a cooling off period of up to three months (the cooling off period I know is only Alberta cause we are so, um, awesome). There are two ways you can get away with not going through this process, I've participated in small walkouts at letter carrier depots that were only 30-50 workers, and have seen bars strike over safety issues that involved about 30 or so people. In this case they were too small for the LRB to notice/bother. The other is being so big you can pull it off, what Ince was referring to again in Brittain. But even then 10,000 workers wildcatted in Alberta in defiance of the LRB and the leaders of that movement are in serious trouble now being blacklisted in the patch and facing massive fines for illegal work stoppages. As opposed to the American system which is based on an adversarial relationship Canadian labour laws uses carrots, and massive sticks to make unions as collaborative with bosses interests as possible. I really think that if we work through this system we will either remain radical and fail to build a workplace presence, or we will jettison our radicalism and become a smaller crummier business union.

This is interesting stuff. I have tons of questions, I hope you don't mind. 1. Re: the small walk-outs with the 30-50 people, could the gov't still impose those penalties if they chose to (like say the boss's kid was in law school to become a union busting lawyer and happend to know the law etc)? 2. Does it matter if the people worked in a unionized vs non-union shop or is the legal status the same? 3. Maybe this just restates question 2- is this a law against union members striking without giving notice or is it a law against any workers striking without giving notice? 4. Could workers without a union give notice that they intended to strike? FW Ince, one for you as well - what's the legal situation for workers who stop work in the UK w/ out a union authorization (either union members' wildact or non-union workers stopping work)? The fines in Canada sound like the gov't actively stepping in to help stop that kind of activity. In the US it's technically illegal to fire people for work stoppages but the law is a joke so it happens. What really makes the difference here is how much the workers can impact production etc due to being organized and all that. What's different here I think is there's no fines for individual workers for striking without authorization. There are fine for unions (like when the New York transit workers struck) but I don't think they apply to individuals, I'm not clear on the law on that kind of stuff.

One interesting thing is I've been searching for articles about fines being imposed on workers and unions in Ontario, and despite fairly regular wildcat strikes I've been unable to find evidence that fines have been levied against workers or unions in Ontario.

Take the 2006 Toronto Transit wildcat, that shut down the city's public transit system for a day and caused millions in lost productivity.

However, I could find no fine being placed on any worker or the union by the provincial or federal government.

The City of Toronto did sue the union in civil court for damages, but they ended up settling out of court with the union.

In the end the Ontario Labour Relations Board did order the the strikers back to work, and the union leadership did recommend their members return to work in the face of that, but there was no fine.

Now if the union had disobeyed that order it could have been a whole different situation.

I'm still not clear what the provisions for fines are, but it appears that they would only come into play if the strikers / union defy a back to work order from the OLRB.

Finally, while I appreciate UK and US wobs commenting on the law in their respective countries, if you could refrain from doing so in this thread I'd appreciate it as the different laws in the various Canadian provinces is confusing enough. Perhaps you can start a US or UK labour law thread.

There's some more dicussion of Canadian labour law over here, and some interesting stuff has come up. Mostly it centres around the ability of unions to sign a contract without a no strike agreement in Canada. http://libcom.org/forums/libcom-wobblies/no-strike-ontario-lra-25012008 So just out of curiousity what would we see the role of a contract playing in our organising, how heavilly should we rely on the law, what sort of role should it play in our organizing.