About Us
The Alberta Workers Association for Research and Education is an evolving workers support space focused on research, education and community building to combat lack of information, misinformation, community division, and worker isolation.
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Our evolving workers' support space advocates for precarious workers.
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Precarious workers face discrimination at work and their jobs are often non-unionized. Discrimination can be based on, for example, gender, skin color, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, mental or physical abilities, immigration status, age.
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We are often in competition with each other and isolated, where one group of workers is blamed by another.
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We aim to work to build solidarity across all workers: unionized and non-unionized, citizens, permanent residents, temporary foreign workers, seasonal agricultural workers and undocumented workers, workers of all backgrounds and abilities.
Our Vision
A research and educational space where workers support workers across industries, identities and immigration status.​
Our Story
AWARE started as a group of concerned Albertans, who have for the past decade been working with individual workers facing challenges in settling and managing their precarious working conditions. By far the individuals have comprised of temporary foreign workers and newcomers to Alberta, and more recently an increasing number of undocumented or under employed workers. Seeking help from traditional organizations such as Trade Unions, immigrant support centres and government supports has not been an avenue because the workers were either not allowed to use those vehicles of support by the constraints of the funders/employers or more often because they did not feel safe to approach these resources. The question of who do you go to when you have no one is the voluntary support service we have tried to provide. Our volunteer activities include sometimes providing friendship, or financial support or linking the worker to resources, advocacy or system navigational support and most of the time all of the services.
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Our loose network of individuals has slowly coalesced to develop an organization to formalize our relationship and work. This is due to the capacity issues we are facing as individuals undertaking this work as volunteers and the realization that we are beyond our individual capacity to meet the ever increasing need.
The Alberta Workers Association for Research and Education is a response to all these individual stories influenced by the changing nature of work in Alberta and globally.
Our Work
​We focus on five areas of community work:​​
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Awareness of precarious work and issues related to workers challenges and opportunities for full employment, education and training supporting collaborative and cooperative development of awareness initiatives that are relevant and responsive to community needs;
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Development of educational materials and resources and by advocating for shared and consistent education and training for service providers and community members.
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Addressing the needs of victims of under-employment / unemployment / precarious work
- advocating for increased support to under-employed or unemployed or precarious workers;
- encouraging the development of support mechanisms that promote the safety of workers and facilitate workers active involvement in the employment and community building processes -
Enhancement of government and community responses to precarious work and discriminatory situations
- sustaining commitment to comprehensive dialogue regarding response models that address the challenges associated with diverse communities responding to worker discriminatory or abuse motivated activities enabling Albertans to contribute to solutions through education, training, dialogue, problem solving and community action organizing to reduce gaps and avoid duplication of services by encouraging coordination and collaboration within the broader community, amongst service delivery providers, and government departments providing counsel to policy makers, service providers, educators, media and community advocates. -
Consistent and standardized data collection and the communication of emerging trends, issues and concerns within agencies and their constituencies.
Our Board
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