Friday, November 28, 2014

Friday Tunes: Working Girl

Today’s example of working class themes in music is Working Girl (by Cher), which was supposed to be on the soundtrack of 1988’s Working Girl but seems to have been cut. It reprises the basic plot-line: boss rides high on the back of employee much to the worker's frustration (my, how times have changed!).

Alas, I could not find a decent video for the song (probably was a B-side so no video recorded). But close your eyes as you listen and tell me that Michael Bolton’s fingerprints are not all over this song.


She's a working girl

Come Monday morning
You see her waitin'
On the street for her ride
In an hour she'll be working
In a tower made of steel in the sky

She's just a pawn in the struggle
In a never-ending fight to survive
Mama had to play someone else's game
You learn to keep it inside

Working girl, livin' in a man's world
Working girl, you gotta take a stand girl

The boss checks out her body
She's on the phone tellin' his lies
Run and get the coffee
And a smile hides the rage in her eyes

Tonight she's searching for a reason
As she's walking home alone in the rain
Mama had to play someone else's game
Someday she's breakin' the chain

Working girl, livin' in a man's world
Working girl, you gotta take a stand girl

Nobody knows the dreams
She dares to dream
The plans she had made
Or the times she has prayed inside
Or what tears at her pride

Working girl, livin' in a man's world
Working girl, you gotta take a stand girl

-- Bob Barnetson

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Public-service morale is low? You don't say!

Yesterday, Alberta Jim Prentice announced “outside agents of change” will look into why there is such high turnover and low morale in Alberta’s civil service.
“There have been employee surveys that show the morale of the civil service is low, and that there has not been a healthy relationship between elected representatives of government and the civil service. 
“There has clearly been a very high level of turnover and churn, and I actually found the numbers quite shocking,” he said, adding inexperience at senior levels is also a concern.
I don’t claim to have all of the answers about why morale is low and turnover is high, but as a former government policy wonk and observer of the public sector, here are some issues the agents of change might want to look into:
  1. Workload: Alberta has, roughly the same number of civil servants today (with a population of 4 million) as it did when Alberta had a population of 2 million.
  2. Instability: The public service faces a fiscal roller coaster caused by government choices about revenue streams; the public service frequently experiences hiring freezes, inadequate cost-of-living adjustments and the spectre of layoffs.
  3. Interference: Tory politicians often put civil servants in untenable positions. “Can you do X because so and-so is a constituent?” Civil servants can’t easily refuse these demands and it places the civil servant (not the politician) in jeopardy.
  4. Inattention: Politicians have very short memories and often start projects only to lose interest before they can be brought to conclusion, No one tells the workers this and they labour (sometimes for years) on ultimately pointless projects. Add in nearly continuous “red zones” (when nothing gets approved because of a looming election or leadership contest) and you can see why it is pretty tough for public servants to care about one’s job.
  5. Attacks: This past year saw the government violate workers’ labour rights, freeze their pay, and attack their pensions. And morale is low, you say?
When you treat workers poorly, the workers who have options (e.g., highly skilled, not invested in the pension plan) leave. Those who are stuck check out. The solution to low morale and high turnover might involve some systemic reform, but that should start with the tax-structure of the province (which underlies many of these problems), not the civil service.

A better solution would be a government that has the fortitude to stop throwing civil servant under the bus for partisan gain. Basically, Alberta politicians have been lousy bosses. Will “agents of change” be able to change that? Seems doubtful.

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Does temp employment have long-term effects?

There has been quite a lot of popular press around the declining quality of jobs for young workers. These stories tend to centre on identifying elements of employment precarity (e.g., low wages, job insecurity, limited access to employment or statutory benefits and rights) that seem to typify youth employment.

An interesting question is whether such employment conditions affect workers in the long-term. That is to say, is precarious employment a phase or does it affect lifelong work prospects?

The Canadian Review of Sociology has recently published “Lasting disadvantage? Comparing career trajectories of matched temporary and permanent workers in Canada” which offers some answers.  

The crux of it is that workers who start out in temporary jobs start out with lower income than workers in permanent jobs and this affect persists over the following five years. There is also a gendered nature to this effect: it is more pronounced for women.

There is quite a lot of nuance to the analysis (that I won’t try to summarize) as the authors cleverly investigated the effect of employment and job type and security. The overall message is that, looking at a five-year window, temporary employment has lasting and negative effects, particularly for female workers.

-- Bob Barnetson





Friday, November 21, 2014

Friday Tunes: Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)

This week’s installment of labour-related music takes us back to the late 1970’s with Styx’s Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)—it can’t all be Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

Blue Collar Man touches on unemployment and pride during the deindustrialization of the North America. As a bonus, ‘80s fans will notice Larry Gowan rocking the spinning piano (looking a bit like Mike Myers). And I’d say the boys have dabbled a bit in the botox (apparently rock'n'roll's drug culture has changed some over the years...).



Give me a job, give me security
Give me a chance to survive
I'm just a poor soul in the unemployment line
My God, I'm hardly alive

My mother and father, my wife and my friends
I see them laugh in my face
But I've got the power, and I've got the will
I'm not a charity case

I'll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my eye to the keyhole
If it takes all that to be just what I am
Well, I'm gonna be a blue collar man

Make me an offer that I can't refuse
Make me respectable, man
This is my last time in the unemployment line
So like it or not I'll take those

Long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my back to the wall
If it takes all that to be just what I am
Well, I'm gonna be a blue collar man

Keeping my mind on a better life
Where happiness is only a heartbeat away
Paradise, can it be all I heard it was
I close my eyes and maybe I'm already there

I'll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my back to the wall
All that be just what I am
Well, I'm gonna be a blue collar man
You don't understand

I'll take those long nights, impossible odds
Keeping my eye to the keyhole
If it takes all that be just who I am
Well I vow to be a blue collar, gotta be a blue collar,
Gonna be a Blue collar man.

Believe it.

-- Bob Barnetson



Thursday, November 20, 2014

Video: The terrible aftermath of BC's sawmill explosions

Global News recently did a follow-up piece on the rash of sawmill explosions that plagued BC a few years back. This short video powerfully explores the impact of the explosions and subsequent investigations on the workers.



The employers' culpability in these explosions--caused by milling pine-beetle wood--is clearly evident. Yet BC's health and safety inspectorate appears to have turned a blind eye and then arced up two investigations thereby precluding prosecution. A pretty damning indictment of provincial health and safety systems and the broader societal acceptance that people will die on the job.

-- Bob Barnetson

Tuesday, November 18, 2014

WestJet union drives leave textbook authors red-faced

I just finished reviewing a textbook for a publisher and ran across yet another mini-case study of WestJet Airlines. I’ve seen at least four of these in the past year in textbooks and typically they are used to illustrate high-involvement management strategies. Such workplace are said to give workers more autonomy and control and, in return, workers work harder.

Despite the relative paucity of successful high-involvement workplaces (which maybe explain the seemingly endless WestJet cases), most HR textbooks uncritically accept this approach as achievable and desirable. In short, by drawing workers into collaboration, workplace conflict is expected to diminish. (Most HR texts adopt a unitarist view of employment where conflict is viewed as undesirable and avoidable, instead of a structural feature of employment in capitalist relations.)

WestJet uses a number of techniques, including partly paying workers (on a matching basis) in shares in lieu of a pension plan as well as in a profit-sharing plan. This sounds good (“the employees are also the owners”). Missing in these case studies is a critical analysis that would surface issues like share purchases reduce operating costs and externalize risk onto workers. For example, if WestJet went belly up, workers would be out of a job and their shares would be worthless.

The point here is not to trash WestJet. I much prefer WestJet to Air Canada: although Air Canada is unionized, they treat their workers (and their customers) terribly. Rather, the point is that these case studies are very superficial and tend to gloss over the structural conflicts of interest that remain in organizations that adopt high-involvement management strategies.

For example, WestJet has various “employee associations” that represent groups of WestJet employees to the company. WestJet pilots (likely the most privileged group of employees, other than executives) have been considering unionization due to concerns about the quality of the deals their current (non-union) association has been able to procure.

The threat of unionization may have contributed to a new contract offer (which WestJet says is “industry leading”) after an earlier offer was rejected. Flight attendants have also be the subject of two unionization efforts. 

What this suggests is that despite being the veritable Canadian poster-child for high-involvement management strategies, WestJet faces many of the same pressures every workplace does. And that what you read in textbooks is not necessarily the whole truth.

-- Bob Barnetson

Friday, November 14, 2014

Friday Tunes: Working this Job (This Fucking Job)

Next week the Parkland Institute is hosting its annual conference in Edmonton. This year’s theme is People vs Profiteers: Demanding Justice and Equity. The keynote speaker is Guy Standing, who recently wrote The Precariat. His talk will be about the development of an underclass that largely rejects mainstream political establishments.

It is hard to find a tune exactly about that, but Working this Job (This Fucking Job) by the Drive-by Truckers come close. Musically, it is not really to my musical taste but it has an interesting story (wow, a music video with a story!), good acting (wow, acting in a video!) and the music serves more like a sound track to the story. Even with the music off, it makes a powerful statement about contemporary employment relations.



There is a second version of this video with a slightly different ending.

Workin' this job is a kick in the pants
Workin' this job is like a knife in the back
It ain't gettin' me further than the dump I live in
It ain't gettin' me further than the next paycheck

Workin' this job is like lightin' two fuses
Workin' this job is runnin' out of excuses
It's like a dead-end when a road map is useless
Until I'm dead and there's nothin' to show for my uses

Nobody told me it'd be easy
Or for that matter, it'd be so hard
But it's the livin' and learnin'
It makes the difference
It makes it all worthwhile
It makes it all worthwhile

Workin' this job, there's nothin' left but to hate it
I won't get as far as my daddy made it
It aint gettin' me farther for all my strivin'
In the dead-end I live or the piece of shit I'm driven' 

Nobody told me it'd be easy
Or for that matter, it'd be so hard
But it's the livin' and learnin'
It makes the difference
It makes it all worthwhile
It makes it all worthwhile

Sometimes I dream that I had aimed my life in different ways
But there was nothin' to show me a way to get me outta this place
So I just did what my daddy did before me
Only to find the only door I found was closed to me

Workin' this job, I thought it sucked when I had it
Now it is gone and I'm learnin' what that is
I'm tryin' to hang in to the worst of places
But a family can't live on these fast food wages

Nobody told me it'd be easy
Or for that matter, it'd be so hard
But it's the livin' and learnin'
It makes the difference
It makes it all worthwhile
It makes it all worthwhile

Workin' this job
Workin' this job
Workin' this job

-- Bob Barnetson

Monday, November 10, 2014

Where do Alberta farm workers work?

I’m currently co-editing a collection of essays about agricultural employment in western Canada. A chapter I’ve contributed looks at paid farm work in Alberta. The 2011 Agricultural Census identified 37,852 paid farm workers (15,598 year-round and 22,254 part-year) in Alberta who worked 898,452 weeks (73% by year-round workers). Paid farm workers do not include farm operators (i.e., owners or co-owners) or unpaid workers (e.g., family members, unless paid).

Alberta excludes farm workers from most statutory employment rights (e.g., child labour laws, health and safety laws, WCB, collective bargaining) and this is usually justified as necessary to protect the so-called family farm. No Conservative politician ever defines the family farm but usually this language hints at Little House on the Prairie, ma-and-pa operations. As it turns out, virtually all Alberta farms are family owned. But examining where paid farm work occurs is insightful.

Between 1991 and 2011, the number of farms reporting paid farm workers decreased from 22,482 to 12,798, although the number of weeks of employment reported per farm climbed from 34.9 to 70.2 (Alberta 2013a).  This suggests a concentration of paid agricultural work on a subset of farms over time. Data limitations preclude a chronological analysis but examining paid employment by farm size reveals that, as farm size increases, so too does the chance the farm will have employees, the number of employers and the likelihood of having year-round employees.

Table 1. Paid employment on Alberta farms by size, 2011
Acres
% farms
% with paid workers
% of year-round wkrs
% of seasonal/ temp wkrs
% of weeks paid work
% of weeks year-round work
% of weeks seasonal/ temp work
Paid workers per farm
≤599
56.7
17.0
28.6
37.0
28.8
26.6
34.8
0.51
560-1119
16.8
32.7
12.8
9.6
11.7
12.2
11.2
0.71
1120-1599
7.7
42.0
7.4
9.4
6.9
6.8
7.1
0.97
1600-2239
6.2
49.7
8.0
8.8
7.7
7.6
7.8
1.19
2240-2879
3.6
58.0
6.8
7.1
7.2
6.9
8.0
1.68
≥2880
8.9
67.2
36.5
23.6
37.6
39.9
31.1
2.84

Farms of 1120 or more acres (almost two square miles) comprised 26.4% of all farms. These farms employed 52.9% of all paid workers and were responsible for 59.4% of weeks of paid work. The largest category of farms (≥2880 acres) comprised only 8.9% of all farms but employed 28.9% of paid workers and was responsible for 37.6% of weeks of paid work.

A similar pattern is evident when examining paid employment by farm gross receipts. As set out in Table 2, as farm gross receipts increase, so too do the chance the farm will have employees, the number of employers and the likelihood of having year-round employees.

Table 2. Paid employment on Alberta farms by gross receipts, 2011 (Canada 2013).
$000s
% farms
% with paid workers
% of year-round wkrs
% of seasonal/ temp wkrs
% of weeks paid work
% of weeks year-round work
% of weeks seasonal/ temp work
Paid workers per farm
≤49
50.0
10.6
5.8
12.8
3.8
2.8
5.6
0.08
50-99
13.7
25.6
4.9
8.9
4.0
3.8
4.7
0.46
100-249
16.2
42.4
12.5
17.6
11.0
10.8
11.4
0.84
250-499
9.7
59.9
14.5
17.9
14.0
13.9
14.4
1.48
500-999
5.8
76.1
17.2
15.3
17.7
17.7
17.8
2.44
1000-1999
2.7
84.9
16.0
11.2
17.3
17.7
16.2
4.25
≥2000
1.8
76.6
29.1
16.2
32.2
33.0
29.9
10.4

Farms with gross annual receipts above $250,000 comprised 20.0% of farms. These farms employed 67.3% of all paid workers and accounted for 81.2% of all weeks of paid work. The largest category of farms (≥$2 million) comprised only 1.8% of farms but employed 21.5% of paid worker and accounted for 33.0% of weeks of paid work. These farms employed an average of 10.4 workers each.

What this analysis suggests is that the consolidation of farms has created a subset of farms—approximately the physically and financially largest quarter of farms—where the majority of waged farm work occurs and the majority of waged farm workers are employed. While the majority of farms employing waged labour are family owned, their sheer size and total revenue suggests that they are a far cry from the traditional homesteads evoked by the term “family farm”. Really, they are large businesses, just like any other.

The fact that regulation of paid agricultural employment would have little effect on small “family farms” raises the question of what dynamic truly underlies Alberta’s reluctance to extend basic employment rights to farm workers. The chapter goes onto suggest that the interplay between a cost-price squeeze and rural electoral politics is part of the explanation. But that argument can wait for the book to be finished—I just thought the data was interesting.

-- Bob Barnetson