"Unpacking ""Alberta beef"": class, gender, and culture in Edmonton packinghouses during the era of na ti on al pattern bargaining, 1947-1979"

"The struggle to establish a progressive American-based industrial union, United Packinghouse Workers of America, in Edmonton's four major packinghouses during World War Two sparked the ""awakening"" of a social conscience in many workers who embraced the goals of strengthening the labour movement and promoting working-class political activism. The impact of this working-class community on electoral politics, however, was limited to a significant degree by notions of gender difference. The most successful politician to come out of an Alberta packinghouse was Ethel Wilson, a seamstress in the laundry department at Edmonton's Bums plant, who rose through municipal and provincial politics to become a cabinet minister in the anti-union Social Credit government of Ernest Manning, while a number of packing men were unable to achieve electoral success.

Drawing on a wide array of sources, including oral interviews, union and government records, and newspapers, I argue that notions of gender difference intersected with class and ethnicity to handicap packing men and women in distinctive ways linked to a national system of pattern bargaining that gave them unprecedented trade union power during the decades following World War Two. During these years workers tended to support male leaders who could be aggressive, even bullying and dictatorial. This masculinist leadership style was most effective in confrontations with the powerful companies that comprised Canada's ""meat trust,"" particularly Canada Packers, and with the province's increasingly right-wing provincial government, but it often marginalized progressive voices in the union and excluded women almost entirely from the most powerful leadership positions. Conversely, in community politics, the aggressive image of packing masculinity was a liability that did not handicap Ethel Wilson, who was able to achieve success by downplaying her union credentials and trading on an image of respectable white Anglo-Canadian femininity."