AUPE Oral Histories

Jimmy Arthurs

Don Bouzek
Don Bouzek, a co-founder of the Alberta Labour History Institute, has created live theatre productions and digital media works on a variety of social issues and on behalf of various progressive organizations in Ontario, Alberta, and Birmingham, UK.

Bill Broad
Bill Broad was the founding president of the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees.

Cecil Cardinal

Gordon (Gord) Christie
Gordon Christie was executive secretary and organizer of the Calgary District Labour Council (CDLC) from 1991 to 2008, and played a key role in building union solidarity and community support for Calgary laundry workers during their strike against privatization of their jobs in 1995. 

Carol Anne Dean
Carol Anne Dean was President of the Alberta Union of Public Employees (AUPE) when she faced off with the Klein-era conservatives privatizing and cutting many public employees’ jobs.

Kathleen Cariaga-Estapa
Kathleen Cariaga-Estapa has been active in AUPE’s local at Chartwell in Edmonton where she first began work as a housekeeper who was a temporary foreign worker.

Larry Connell
Larry Connell’s long nursing career has included stints in industrial nursing, corrections, and orthopaedic nursing.

Cecilia Delfino

Mary Jane Fisher
When she became an LPN, former Jehovah’s Witness Mary Jane Fisher replaced her former religious activities with a struggle, as an AUPE activist, for workers’ rights to a safe workplace.

Nancy Furlong spent her career building Alberta’s labour movement, including stints with the Alberta Union of Public Employees during the Klein-era cuts, the Alberta, Federation of Labour, and the Alberta New Democrats.

Kate Jacobson
Kate Jacobson is an internal organizer for the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) who describes her earlier oppressive working conditions in non-union jobs and her years as a social and environmental militant.

Dennis Malayko
Dennis Malayko created the government’s joint worksite health and safety program, as well as initiating efforts to create both provincial and national union-controlled workers’ health and safety promotion organizations.

Joyce McArthur

Sean McManus

Tanis Pichette

Suzanne Sirias

Karen Sputek

Amanda Whillans
Amanda Whillans is a healthcare aide in a Cold Lake assisted living home where a bitter strike occurred in 2017.

Kevin Wilibnisky
Kevin Wilibnisky is a psychiatric nurse at Red Deer General Hospital and an activist in Local 2 of UNA.

Myrna Wright