The Return of the Wildcat Strike?
In a Canadian tradition as old as maple syrup, governments of all stripes have long leveraged the law to curb strikes, turning what were once exceptional interventions into routine practice. The history of criminalizing workers’ resistance stretches back well over a century, with unions facing criminal conspiracy charges, injunctions, fines, and even jail time for acts of collective resistance.
Against this backdrop, it was unsurprising when Jobs Minister Parry Hadju directed the Canada Industrial Relations Board (CIRB) – chaired by former Air Canada legal counsel Maryse Tremblay – to order striking flight attendants back to work and impose binding arbitration.
What was surprising to many, however, was the refusal of more than 10,000 striking workers to comply with the Act. Air Canada CEO Mike Rousseau admitted to being “amazed by the fact that CUPE is openly not following the law.” This moment highlighted a critical tension: the abstract right to freedom of association enshrined in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and recurring government efforts (and employer reliance) to restrict those rights when exercised in practice. In other words, workers’ practical exercise of collective power often faced direct restrictions, regardless of what the law ostensibly promised.
The Courts
Canadian trade unions have long relied heavily on legalistic strategies, turning repeatedly to the courts to defend or advance their rights. The International Labour Organization (ILO) provided an early forum through which to contest the actions of Canadian governments, but this was of limited effectiveness. The adoption of the Charter in 1982 opened up some new avenues, but these have evolved unevenly and with limited success.
In some instances, courts have rebuked governments for overreach, but in others, they have validated restrictions on collective action. Rarely, however, have these legal strategies expanded protections for non-unionized workers or revitalized wider workers’ movements. Understanding the law can provide knowledge and some leverage, but legal victories seldom translate into meaningful bargaining power. Knowing one is being exploited offers little comfort if there is no practical means to challenge it.
Historically, the most durable gains for workers have come through collective action rather than legal or individualized maneuvering. Labour disputes are fundamentally struggles over the distribution of wealth and profits, where worker solidarity and organized resistance often matters far more than the law. But illegality and legitimacy should not be conflated; throughout history, breaches of legal norms – sit-down strikes, factory occupations, and blockades – have often paved the way for the expansion of rights we now consider basic.
Several wildcat strikes highlight this dynamic: the 1872 Printers’ Strike fought for the Nine-Hour Workday and inspired Canada’s first Labour Day; the 1945 UAW Ford strike helped establish the Rand Formula; the 1965 Postal Workers’ strike expanded public-sector bargaining rights; the 1974 Elliot Lake miners’ walkout set a Canada-wide precedent for occupational health and safety; and the 1999 Saskatchewan nurses and 2005 BC teachers’ strikes spotlighted issues of underfunding, gender pay gaps, and workplace discrimination.
More recently, the Ontario government invoked the controversial notwithstanding clause to impose a contract on 55,000 education workers and strip them of the right to strike, while threatening steep fines and jail time for noncompliance. Workers defied the law, drawing broad public support and sparking rumours of a general strike. Under pressure, the government announced it would repeal the Act in exchange for CUPE returning to the bargaining table. The OSBCU agreed, and about a week later, the two sides announced they had reached a new agreement, though not without its critics.
The ongoing difficulty unions face in securing fair wages and better working conditions through conventional bargaining strategies raises the question of whether wildcat strikes may become more frequent, particularly in the face of rank-and-file rebellions.
For forty years, as worker productivity increased, real wages declined. Low-wage workers are increasingly being pushed out of cities, as minimum wages no longer cover the basic costs of food, housing, and transportation. Today, one in three Canadians report financial hardship, and over half of all workers say they feel burnt out due to unreasonable workloads, long hours, and understaffing.
Meanwhile, top CEO pay doubled, corporate profits reached a sixty-year high, and Canada’s Big Five banks posted record profits of $61-billion, triple their earnings a decade earlier. Increasing labour precarity and the stagnation of workers’ wages are structurally linked to the concentration of income and wealth, reflecting mutually reinforcing dynamics within contemporary capitalist economies.
In this context, Canada’s “productivity crisis” cannot be separated from its distributional crisis: declining productivity is tied directly to the degradation of job quality across sectors, where work is increasingly insecure, low-paid, and offers limited prospects for advancement or skill development. Supply-and-demand models fail to adequately explain this disconnect.
Canadian corporations continue to comparatively reinvest far less in research, development, and new equipment, opting instead to hoard cash, boost dividends, and stock buybacks. Canada’s economic structure – heavily reliant on resource exports and foreign investment with a modest advanced industrial sector – exacerbates these challenges.
Labour advocates have long maintained that boosting output through investments in technology, upskilling, and strategic industrial policies provides a foundation for higher wages, improved living standards, and better public services, as reflected in campaigns for a four-day work week.
The experiences of OSBCU members and CUPE flight attendants offer critical lessons for workers. They demonstrate that strategic, organized resistance, rooted in mobilizing coworkers and communities, can achieve results in the face of restrictive legislation. These efforts emphasize the importance of centering worker-led organizing, rather than relying on lawyers, union staff, or political parties (as important as they are) to enact change. Internal organizing builds confidence, fosters solidarity, and allows workers to shape the struggle on their terms, rather than being passive participants in bureaucratic procedures that individualize grievances.
Governments of all political stripes have systematically beaten down workers through a range of legal and regulatory tactics: making it harder to form or join unions, easing decertification processes, narrowing the scope of collective bargaining, outlawing strikes, imposing contract terms, introducing burdensome reporting and tax requirements, and enacting free-trade agreements that contract out “good jobs” and privatize public services. These attacks have been reinforced by wage freezes, layoffs, surveillance and infiltration of unions, ideological campaigns that promote entrepreneurship while demonizing unions, and special exemptions that undermine protective worker legislation
Without Illusions
Despite nearly half a century of evidence to the contrary, it remains difficult to believe that continued government hostility toward workers’ rights will somehow ignite a new labour revolt in Canada. As Gramsci warned, the challenge of modernity is to live without illusions – and without becoming disillusioned. The decades-long assault on labour under the banner of “neoliberalism” has not provoked an explosion; any transformative rupture will require a rebellion from within the labour movement itself. The notion that governments will one day push workers too far, and then face the consequences, is at best wishful thinking – or worse, peddling illusions.
Hiring lawyers to navigate collective agreements or mount Charter challenges may protect rights on paper, but these systems are designed to reinforce employer advantages. Reliance on formal grievance procedures individualizes collective issues and removes workers from the process of securing meaningful change. It is unsurprising, then, that many workers view unions as insurance mechanisms rather than instruments of collective power. Union leadership often prioritizes avoiding strikes over cultivating a culture of resistance, reinforcing the constraints of the industrial relations system. Left unchecked, unions may struggle to develop internal organizing capacities, highlighting the importance of worker-led initiatives within and outside formal union structures.
Unions and organized labour are not synonymous. Many unions are not actively organized, and many organized workers operate outside union frameworks. The experiences of OSBCU and Air Canada workers demonstrate that worker resistance – whether against employers or governments – matters. The worsening conditions faced by workers show that the current reality is neither inevitable nor permanent. Collective action, strategic organizing, and solidarity remain essential to reversing decades of declining wages, increasing inequality, and the erosion of workplace rights. Time will tell whether or not this recently rediscovered worker “emboldenedness” remains. •
This is an expanded version of an article first published in The Hill Times.
