Headlines from around the world reveal that the labour movement is under attack on many fronts – but it's not all bad news for unions, particularly in the Alberta oil sands.

Tea Party Republicans are attacking collective-bargaining rights and public-sector workers in dozens of states, including, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Florida. The moves have included proposed legislation that severely restricts a union's ability to bargain collectively, makes it more difficult for unions to organize workplaces, more difficult to collect union dues and allows for alternate workers to be hired during a strike. Meanwhile, the fight for workers' rights continues in Mexico, Colombia and Egypt, while public-sector workers in the U.K. are facing massive layoffs.

While Republicans in the U.S. may have expected workers to show weakness in the face of these attacks, the opposite has happened – the attacks have galvanized union and non-unionized workers, with hundreds of thousands joining in protests to defend workers and the middle-class lifestyle.

In Wisconsin, about 20,000 new members have joined an organization called Working America since February 15, bringing its total membership in the state to 65,000. Working America is an advocacy organization allied to the AFL-CIO that gives the labour movement an outlet for non-union workers. It has more than three million members nationally.

Working America field organizer Kevin Pape told the Huffington Post: "People are just thirsty for a connection to a labour movement. The effort required to get somebody to join has definitely decreased. This is an avenue to join the labour movement, and they're just jumping at it."

Richard Trumka, president of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), has described Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as "the Mobilizer of the Year" and predicted Republicans would suffer a backlash for their attempts to undermine unions.

In February, faculty at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse voted by a margin of 249-37 to join a teachers' union. One professor at the university told the Huffington Post that Walker's actions galvanized them to form a union. In March, faculty at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls voted 148-16 today in favour of joining the same union.

What does this have to do with Alberta and the oil sands?

Firstly, what has happened in Wisconsin and other states may start to happen here. Attacks on public-sector workers have intensified in Alberta in the last few months and those attacks have included a call to rethink collective-bargaining rights. Meanwhile, the U.S. billionaire Koch brothers, who have spent tens of millions of dollars in the U.S. funding the Tea Party and lobbying for extreme right-wing policies, have made a move onto the Alberta political scene, by hiring a lobbyist to push the Alberta government on economic development and taxation issues.

Secondly, the oil sands appear to be heading for another boom – and that's good news for unions, according to Dave Coles, president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada.

The industrial shift we are seeing from conventional oil and gas operations to the oil sands is an opportunity for labour, says Coles, because oil-sands operations are industrial worksites.

"Organizing field services, drillers is a very complicated, complex issue and our success has been very minimal. But with industrial workers, over time, like any other industrial worker, they end up having a problem with the boss and, in the end, unionization is their only way out."

Statistics Canada figures show that, nationally, just over 4.2 million employees were union members in the first half of 2010, an increase of 64,000 on the same period in 2009 and making a total of 29.5 per cent of the working population.

According to the Canadian Labour Congress, the total rate of unionization in Alberta fell slightly to 25 per cent from 25.3 per cent in the decade after 1999. This breaks down into a rate of 69.5 per cent of public-sector workers and 12.3 per cent in the private sector. Energy workers fall under the Statistics Canada category of Forestry, Fishing, Mining, Oil and Gas. In Alberta, the unionization rate in this category has grown to 11.2 per cent from 8.4 per cent in the decade.

The number of union members working in the energy industry has not changed much in the last few years, says Coles, but as a percentage of the total industry workforce there has been a small drop.

"The industry is growing so fast that you can actually get left behind. It takes us time to catch back up again... We rarely organize a new place in the first year or two," he says.

Bringing a workplace into the union is rarely about wages or benefits. "It's usually more about workplace democracy issues, fairness, occupational health and safety. We have a long record of working collaboratively with the industry ensuring safety ... It's about making sure that everybody, whether they are in a union or management, goes home alive," he says.

"We just have to work harder. We have to be able to communicate, as difficult as it is, with the non-union workers, so that they can engage in a discussion. One of the problems you have with the law in Canada is that they (workers) are captive. They get to (hear) the company's pitch non-stop. They never get to get engaged in any type of transparent discussion about what they'd like to see happen. We have to continue to find ways to engage in a transparent, democratic process with non-union workers," says Coles.

With Tea Party-style attacks filling the headlines, workers appear to have an increased awareness of the vital and positive role unions have played. It is unions, after all, that have done the most to create a middle-class lifestyle, in which you are fairly rewarded for working hard, and where you can build a better communities and better lives for your families. Workers appear to be more receptive to a union message and they understand what's at stake for all workers if the labour movement is weakened.

CEP, for one, is ready to take advantage of the opportunity brought by an oil sands boom and the mood in the workplace.

"We have got plans," says Coles. "We are going to implement strategic organizing campaigns throughout the energy sector in Alberta. It is a priority for us."