Tour examines history of unionized labour downtown

By Justin Seward - Lethbridge Herald on September 3, 2024.

Herald photo by Justin Seward Belinda Crowson of the Lethbridge Historical Society begins Saturday's Labour History tour at the Brewery Gardens with the High Level Bridge in the background, the site being connected to one of the earliest unions with the city's brewery and railway history.

The Lethbridge Historical Society in conjunction with the Lethbridge & District Labour Council hosted a labour history tour through the downtown core on Saturday.

Participants could learn about area’s working class history.

“It really was just stories of workers who made Lethbridge over the years and some of the struggles they’ve gone through, some of the strikes, some of the unions, but even just regular stories of working people,” said Belinda Crowson, Lethbridge Historical Society president.

Lethbridge was home to the start-up of the Alberta Federation of Labour, the first labour MLA in Alberta’s history in Donald McNabb and a labour MLA on city council.

“So we’ve got a lot of labour history to talk about when it comes to Lethbridge,” said Crowson.

“We’ll start seeing after the ’50s and ’60s, like many places across Canada, a lot of our unions will become less powerful. But in those early days, this was very much a union town.”

Crowson said some people got in trouble for putting time into creating a union.

“One of the things that we see quite often is retribution to people who were unionizing,” she said.

Fights also broke out.

“We had a donnybrook when one of the strikes happened and they had workers come into cover the mine. The miners were waiting for them to come home and a fight broke out between them and the police and the miners,” she said.

Anna MacLaren helped the unionization of waitresses in Lethbridge in the 1940s and became the first female president in Canada to run a local labour council in 1954. She was also the first female vice-president of the provincially-run labour group.

“She was breaking things all over in the union world,” said Crowson.

Also talked about was Katie Palen, who arrived here in 1895 from Hungary and was a non unionized contract house keeper that kept herself going for 40 plus years.