The threat of an industry-wide strike in the oilsands this summer sobered a province giddy with the world’s largest cluster of capital projects.

The overwhelming strike vote by 25,000 electricians, boilermakers, millwrights, plumbers and refrigeration mechanics (possibly to be joined by 13,500 carpenters and general labourers) — which, by the time you read this, will have either resulted in job action or an unseemly contract agreement (the offer the electricians rejected featured a 24% wage hike over four years) — is only the capper to what has been a year of labour unrest in this usually restful province.

The trouble hasn’t come from the usual suspects: the teachers’ and food-processing unions. Instead, it’s been transportation workers at Greyhound, CN and CPR; transit drivers and paramedics in Calgary; and casino and brewery workers in Edmonton.

Most commentators and politicians put events down to the inflationary spiral in which ordinary Albertans find themselves. In June, the consumer price index was running at a 6.3% clip year-over-year. Home prices jumped between 35% and 50% in both Calgary and Edmonton in 2006 (they spiked earlier in Fort McMurray, Alta.) and continue to rise by double digits. Reports keep coming out of the rental market of even greater increases; the Stelmach government recently restricted rent increases to one a year, although with no ceiling. And with anything labour-intensive, from installing a new roof to fixing your car, the negotiations revolve around sheer availability, not price.

I suspect, however, that there is something more at play in Alberta labour’s sudden and unaccustomed show of strength. It’s not, as some local xenophobes may think, all those migrants from more class-conscious jurisdictions beginning to outnumber the blue-eyed farm kids on the rigs and building sites. Those people came here to work, after all, not walk a picket line.

No, it’s more about the changing nature of the workplace. In the Alberta of the 1960s and 1970s, you literally worked for your dad, baling hay or driving a truck from one drill site to another. By contrast, the so-called “unconventional” resources extraction prevalent today — whether it’s oilsands mining and upgrading, in situ techniques, resources “plays” or coalbed methane — require huge capital outlays. The largest oilsands operations are usually joint ventures of two or more companies, the scale such that even Big Oil must share the risk and return.

So, instead of working for their dads, uncles or a guy at least seen on the job from time to time, members of Alberta’s workforce today increasingly earn their paycheques from a monster energy company or, more likely, one of the equally big engineering, construction or oilfield-services firms hired to do the heavy lifting. They are, to borrow a Marxist phrase, alienated from the fruits of their labour as never before. It is no coincidence that Fort McMurray, the epicentre of the current boom, is the one place in the province where you’ll see T-shirts inscribed: “This is what a union town looks like.”

Although Alberta remains the province with the least unionized labour force in the country, the labour movement has the potential to make real inroads here in the coming years. The investment community should not view this as an unmitigated disaster, however. With a greater share of Alberta’s gross domestic product going into employees’ pockets, both union and non-union, companies active in other sectors of the Alberta economy are poised to cash in.

Ironically, some of the biggest beneficiaries of the oilpatch’s windfall profits between 2004 and 2006 were union pension plans from other provinces. Henceforth, a greater share of Alberta’s economic miracle will stay close to home. IE