Book: Practice of Human Resource Management in Canada

Last week, I finally got a paper copy of a new textbook I co-authored, entitled the Practice of Human Resource Management in Canada. This is an open educational resource (OER) in that students can download and use the pdf version for free. If you want a paper copy, it is $39.99 (about $120 less than commercial texts). The book also offers a more nuanced view of HRM because it tackles how workers’ interests can shape effective HR practices

I first tried to write an intro HR textbook about seven years ago. Despite having a contract with a publisher and a draft written, that effort failed because my then co-author and I had an unresolvable disagreement. That was the second co-authored book project that failed that year (for different reasons) and I swore off writing books.

But then commercial publishers began getting greedy. The price of textbooks went up, including the price of e-texts. One publisher discontinued access an etext in the middle of a course (ack!). Another publisher began discontinuing etexts a year or so after new (generally unnecessary) versions of textbooks came out, forcing unnecessary course revisions.

So Jason Foster and I decided writing an OER was a good option, both in terms of managing our workloads and student costs. We’d previous written Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces together, so I knew we could get a book across the line, even though an intro HR book would be about twice as long.

It took us about eight months to write the book. We then located a publisher, went through peer review, and found funding. And then the publisher ghosted us. After four months of non response (and we still have no real idea what happened), we started again with another publisher (i.e., back through the proposal and peer review stages).

After more than three years of work, I’m pretty happy to see this out in the world and adopted into Athabasca University’s HRMT 386: Introduction to Human Resource Management starting for February (?) enrollments. It is interesting to see AU’s renewed institutional interest in OERs (largely seeking to reduce institutional costs) coupled with very little incentive or support for faculty to author them.

-- Bob Barnetson

Book: Modern Whore: A Memoir

The public library came through last week with a copy of Modern Whore: A Memoir. This 2022 autobiography by Andrea Werhun recounts her career as an escort, exotic dancer, online performer, and a sex-worker advocate in Canada. 

Sex work often brings to mind images of outdoor work. Werhun’s stories offer insight into indoor sex work (which comprises most sex work). Werhun began as an escort working for an agency. Her stories explain, sometimes incidentally, how agencies work and the services they offer sex workers (e.g., screening, scheduling, payment, transportation, security), most of which run afoul of Canada’s present sex-work laws.

An interesting aspect is Werhun’s analysis of how online reviews, which are essential to getting work, give clients a mechanism by which to pressure sex worker to engage in behaviour they otherwise might decline. Werhun also helpfully posts a few of her reviews and then provides her own (presumably more accurate) recollections of those encounters to highlight the discrepancies.

After a break, Werhun returned to sex work as an exotic dancer. Again, she explains (often incidentally) how dancing works, what services the club provides, and the working conditions of dancers. Her stories help explain how these arrangements affect the workers, including what behaviours they permit and incentivize.

Finally, Werhun discusses how Covid-19 affected sex workers and her own efforts to shift to online work in the spring of 2020. This section is the least developed (since it was still ongoing at the time of publication) but highlights how individual circumstances and factors shaped the options available to sex workers during the initial stages of the pandemic.

Throughout the book, Werhun discusses in some depth how sex work (and the stigma surrounding it) affected her, including her relationships and her physical and mental health. She also presents an interest picture of the clients she saw, their motives for hiring sex workers, and their behaviours.

Overall, Modern Whore is well written and engaging andf would be of interest to students in LBST 415. It offers a useful look into contemporary indoor sex work in Canada as experienced by a well educated, white, cis woman from a middle-class background.

-- Bob Barnetson 

Presentation: Science fiction and organized labour

An interesting presentation by Olav Rokne about the the presence and absence of unions in science fiction.

Labour & Pop Culture: Always Brave, Sometimes Kind

I received a recent (2020) novel for Christmas entitled Always Brave, Sometimes Kind that was written by Katie Bickell. The novel is essentially a collection of loosely related short stories that follows a group of people who live in and around Edmonton between 1990 and 2016. All of the characters have what might be described as rough lives, often made worse by the political economy of Alberta.

There are four stories with a clear labour-related element to them. The first story is set against the backdrop of the laundry workers' strike of 1995 and the Klein cuts to the health care and income support systems. Health-care workers struggle to deliver care, the social services system is falling apart (which particularly affects Indigenous characters), and a social worker is laid off.  Overall, an emotionally difficult story to read if you lived through the era.

Later, we meet a social studies teacher who is grappling with the effects of Klein's budget cuts and unfulfilled promises (circa 2002). There is mention of the teacher's strike and frustrations that it left classroom teachers with. I won't spoil the story for you, but he eventually exits the professional and makes ends meet rather creatively. This very much reminds me of my buddy Rob who was an elementary teacher. After getting three layoff notices in successive years and less and less support to deal with increasing classroom challenges, he eventually quit in frustration. The author really captures public-sector despair of the late Klein years.

One of the characters is a camp worker in Fort McMurray who does the long commute back to Sherwood Park (I think). In a pair of related stories, we see the stress that this approach to staffing extraction industries places on marriages and families.

Finally, there is a story set in a hospital where one of the characters encounters one of the many temporary foreign workers recruited to Alberta to work in the service industry during the 2006-2012 period. While the character is not particularly sympathetic to these workers, the author writes the scene in a way that quietly highlights the challenges faced by these workers.

Overall, this was a challenging book to read because of how difficult the lives of the characters were to read about. The author really captures how lower- and middle-class Albertans have struggled, even during boom times, to keep their lives and families together. It wasn't until the last quarter of the book, as the stories start to knit together and multi-generational problems begin to resolve, that started enjoying the book and began to appreciate the gritty earlier stories.  Overall, an interesting window into the recent past.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The Factory Witches of Lowell

Recently, a new novella arrived on my desk. It tells the story of a strike by young female mill workers (“mill girls”) set in Lowell, Massachusetts during the mid 1830s (probably, as a work of historical fiction, the story is vague). Facing severe health effects from the work and a reduction in wages, the workers strike.

As the title implies, workers in The Factory Witches of Lowell are, well, witches. I’m not much for the fantasy genre, but I am interested in representations of union in science fiction. There are slim pickings in the sci-fi genre so I’m like, fine, bring on the dragons and unicorns and whatnot.

Without giving away the plot, the workers use witchcraft to create an unbreakable solidarity among the workers as well as control the production process. This gives them the leverage to hold out against the pressure of bosses.

Overall, the book left me a little flat. Using magic as a proxy for solidarity and direct action was an interesting idea that, to my mind, never really went anywhere. Perhaps, though, I’m just less interested by allegory than I am by more realistic representations of workers exercising power?

I have, however, ordered The Future of Another Timeline, which explores a covert war between rival factions of time travellers over women’s and human rights. The events they attempt to influence include moments in the labour movement.

-- Bob Barnetson

Workers as robots: the entanglement of sci-fi and capitalism

A few years back, a friend and I wrote an article about how unions were represented in contemporary sci-fi. It was an interesting experience in multi-disciplinary research and, for me, a pleasant diversion from the gloomier topic of workplace injury. Over the intervening time, another friend (Olav Rokne) has extended this analysis. He ran an interesting panel with some of the authors whose stories we included in our study.

Last month, Rokne published a fascinating blog post about how sci-fi turned away from early concerns about working conditions and the plight of workers and, since the 1940s, come to accept “broadly accept hegemonic ideas that centre the aims of capital and capitalism. The depiction of workers was replaced with stories that centred industrialists, non-working-class inventors, and the military.”

Rokne then examines some of the historical mechanics by which this change came about, including editorial preferences and the emergence of agency-less robots as a metaphor for the working class. Robot/workers as mindless slaves complements the tendency of sci-fi writers to frame collectives (as a proxy for unions) as monstrous antagonists (e.g., Frankenstein, Cylons, Borg).

-- Bob Barnetson, Worker 889398

Barriers to implementing OERs

Barriers to implementing OERs
Council of Alberta University Students
20 November 2019, Edmonton

I recently had the opportunity to discuss Open Educational Resources (OERs) with student leaders from across Alberta. Their interest in OERs focuses on the cost savings. I was asked to discuss barriers to OER implementation.
--
Two quick notes to start.

1. I was asked by the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations to talk about the barriers to OER adoption from a faculty perspective because I’ve written and adopted three OER textbooks in my courses. That said, just to be clear—I’m here as a professor and my views are not necessarily CAFA’s view.
2. I’m also going to use the terms OER and textbook interchangeably. I acknowledge there are other forms of OERs than just textbook analogs. But, for the most part, OERs essentially serve in place of textbooks, so I’m going to use the terms interchangeably.

So why is OER adoption so slow? I see basically three main issues.

First, in my experience, there are no OERs available for most courses (that is changing but slowly). And the OERs that are available tend to be a mixed bag in terms of their quality and suitability. For example, I teach an intro HR course. There are OERs but they often tend to be niche-focused (e.g., introduction to HR in the tourism sector). And many are pretty mickey-mouse, which may create accreditation problems. So I don’t use them, even though I would like to use an OER in that course.

The limited number of OERs reflects that there are few to no resources available to write and produce OERs. While OERs can be cheaper to produce than commercial textbooks, they still do cost money. Right now, post-secondary institutions almost entirely rely upon commercial texts because these texts externalize the cost of production to students. If we’re going to want to increase the breadth or number of OERs, then we need to address the economics of it. And, bluntly, someone needs to fund it.

And that doesn’t just mean one-time funding. Commecial texts are attractive to profs and institutions not just because they are “free”, but also because they are periodically updated at no cost to the academics or the institutions. If there are few to no resources to write new OERs, then there are even fewer resources to update OERs periodically. This is more urgent in some disciplines than others, but producing a one-off book with no prospect of updates makes profs reluctant to use the book. Again, this comes back to funding.

This is one of the OERs I’ve written. It is a health and safety textbook. It costs $30 in paper and is a free as a pdf. This is the main commercial health and safety textbook. It costs $150—five times the costs. Now a certain amount of that difference is profit for the publisher and royalties for the author. And a certain amount of the difference has to do with production costs—my OER is very bare bones: black and white, text heavy, no pictures or other pretty filler material.

But, at the end of the day, both books have certain sunk costs associated with writing, editing, peer-review, and production. My OER cost about $40,000 that we got as a government grant. That was $30 grand for 52 days of course release to write plus $10 grand for production costs. Both of those amounts under-represent the true cost of production—my institution absorbed those extra costs. I would guess they were in the neighbourhood of $25k. So this one book cost about $65k to create.

A second OER that I wrote I did without any funding. I found the time by displacing my own research (which entails a certain career cost to me) and I used my own money to cover some of the production costs (the remainder were covered by institution). I’m currenting mooting writing an OER HR textbook, but it simply requires money and time that I don’t at present have.

A second issue is that most OERs are digital products—which is why they can be provided for free. My experience is that most profs and a large proportion of students don’t like electronic textbooks. I’ve actually moved away from commercial etexts in two courses because I got tired of the complaining from students.

These complaints generally swirl around etexts being hard to read and hard to annotate. E-texts (even ones stored in the cloud) can also disappear or become inaccessible at the end of or in the middle of a course. And there is some evidence that students retain less of what they read using etexts, when compared to print books. These are not trivial drawbacks associated with digital OERs.

One option is to provide print on demand books or a choice between a print and an e-text. These are good solutions but they entail additional complexity on the production and distribution sides. Institutional bookstores may be reluctant to engage multimodal offerings, especially since OERs are about minimizing cost (and thus drive down bookstore revenues). Using alternative distribution channels dramatically increases the hassle for profs. We use campus bookstores not because they are awesome or fun to deal with, but because they are easy: send in an ISBN and textbooks appear.

A third issue is that OERs are less attractive to instructors. Most commercial books have websites, canned assignments, lecture notes, power points, and test banks. They may even have pro-programmed learning management systems that handle all of the hassle of assignment marking and grade tracking and just export a list of final grades at the end. So commercial texts (like this Kelloway one) is basically plug and play for an instructor.

By contrast, an OER is likely to have none of this material because even basic stuff (like multiple-choice tests) is very laborious to create and, of course, there is no money for OERs. So profs who think about OERs are also thinking about the additional work they are creating for themselves if the adopt an OER.

So, to summarize, the basic barrier is funding related: OERs are not free to create and maintain but their nature (as free to students) means there is no obvious revenue stream to fund their creation and maintenance. A secondary issue is that professors and institutions may have a vested interested in using commercial texts that are respectively related to workload and revenue. And, of course, students don’t necessarily like digital texts.

So what can be done?

Basically there are two challenges: creating adequate OERs and getting profs to adopt them.

Creating is probably the easier issue to deal with. There won’t be an appreciable increase in OERs without additional funding. So where could money come from? Well, you could get new cash from the government, you could get institutions to divert cash from some other project, or you could come up with it from your members. The latter is probably the most likely to happen

Getting profs to adopt OERs is probably harder. One pathway would be to find the 20 highest enrollment courses at your institution, look for OERs for them and, if your find them, go meet with the profs and show them. Explain the cost implications for students and ask them to use them. If they say no, ask why not (as that might inform what you do next).

An easier but likely less effective option is to ask the government to include a performance measure in its new funding model that measures of accessibility based upon the percentage of courses that contain OERs. This might incent some institutional behavioural change. It also gives you a pretext for later on asking the government to specifically fund the creation of OERs.

-- Bob Barnetson

Unions & Sci-fi: Hunger Makes the Wolf

I recently finished two sci-fi westerns by Alex Wells in which a union made an appearance. Hunger Makes the Wolf (2017) and Blood Binds the Pack (2018) follow the adventures of Hob Ravani as she leads a group of outlaws (the Ghost Wolves) on the bone-dry corporate planet of Tenegewa.

Tenegewa is dominated by the TransRift Corporation (which controls interstellar travel). TransRift has established a number of corporate towns (both mining and farming), which harken back to Appalachia in the 1930s (or 1970s!).

The heavy-handed tactics of TransRift are sometimes collectively resisted by the miners, who might call a day of rest and thereby reduce production. Over the course of the two novels, the situation faced by the miners deteriorates and they become more militant.

While I don’t think they ever refer to themselves as a union, the miners employer a number of traditional labour tactics, including striking. They are also subjected to numerous traditional employer tactics, include infiltration, starvation, and violence.

Ravani’s bandits eventually work in collaboration with the miners to undermine TransRift and give the distant government a pretext for more involvement (there is a power struggle between the government and TransRift over space-travel technology).

Overall, the books do a decent job of portraying the process of organizing workers. I found the books a touch long but hung on to the end.

-- Bob Barnetson

New book: Canada's labour market training system

If you're looking for a last-minute Christmas present, I’ve just released a new book entitled Canada’s Labour Market Training System. You can buy the book for $30 or download a pdf version for free.

The book examines how the labour market training occurs in Canada and whose interests it serves. We often hear complaints that the system—post-secondary institution, government policies, community agencies and workplace training—is failing at producing the right number of workers with the right skills.

The book suggests that the “system” is not one in the sense of it being a machine that turns out widgets. But, rather, it is a system in the political sense, where different stakeholder groups seek to advance their interests. The outcome of the system tend to reflect the relative balance of power between stakeholders.

This book is the main text in a new course that we’ll be opening in January: EDUC 210: The Canadian Training System. The course should also be available as an open course (i.e., you can learn the material without doing the assessments or receiving credit) shortly. We’ve done something similar with IDRL 308: Occupational Health and Safety that Jason Foster and I wrote Health and Safety in Canadian Workplaces.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Frankenreads

Next Wednesday (Hallowe’en!), the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences is hosting a half-day symposium (entitled “Frost and Desolation”) as part of broader celebrations of the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein.

One of the more interesting interpretations of Frankenstein is as a metaphor for the working class, one created by the bourgeoisie (in the form of Victor Frankenstein) which then tried to kill him. There are a couple of interesting essays about this available online—I like this one by Luisa Umana.

[T]he monster is a symbol for oppressed people. He is the proletariat that revolts against the bourgeoisie in class struggle. … [H]his very composition is symbolic of the laborers who were composed of many different types of people, larger in numbers, physically stronger, and less dependent on luxury than the upper classes.

I don’t think that there is much of a historical case Shelley writing with this metaphor in mind. Yet, as perhaps the foundational text of the sci-fi genre, Frankenstein’s framing of collectives as terrifying and monstrous (e.g., the Borg, Cylons, the bugs in Starship Troopers) may help explain the near absence of positive representations of collectives (e.g., trade unions) in the genre.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Unions in SF redux

A few years ago, a colleague and I published an article about the absence of unions in science fiction. A few weeks back, this topic came up at World Con 76 (the annual convention of the World Science Fiction Society) when a friend moderated a panel discussion of authors, including a couple whose books we’d looked at in the article.

Based upon Olav’s tweets, the session was a success, with standing room only and some participants expressing a desire for more sessions with this kind of meaty approach. For me, the tweets provided a nice list of new things to read.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The Irregular

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is the 2017 novel “The Irregular” by H.B. Lyle. The setting is London in 1909 and the main character is Wiggins (I’m not sure we ever learn his first name). Wiggins is an adult version of one of Sherlock Holmes’ Baker Street Irregulars—a group of street urchins periodically employed by Holmes in his cases.

The novel is historical fiction, mixing facts with fiction to create a fairly decent thriller. Wiggins is recruited by the government to form what will eventually become MI5 and MI6 (he becomes Agent 00). His task is to unravel a spy ring in a munitions factory that is leaking secrets to Germany. There is a separate plot line about Wiggins seek to avenge the death of one of his friends at the hands of Russian anarchists.

Unions and workers form part of the backdrop of the story. London in 1909 is a pretty nasty place for the working class. There are rallies and protests (not covered by the press), with Marxist revolutionaries mixing with workers wanting 8 hour work days and decent pay and suffragists wanting the vote. The government’s response is to try to suppress demands demands made by the working class, often with the police.

It is interesting that the workers are painted with a fair bit of sympathy by the author--particularly with regard to the immigrants who came to London from all over the world. Indeed, Wiggins is clearly of the lower class, in his appearance, manners, and values. Yet his main job is to save the empire—which treats his fellow workers so shabbily. It will be interesting to see how this conflict plays out in future novels.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Defying expectations: The case of UFCW 401

My colleague Jason Foster has recently published a book entitled Defying expectations: The case of UFCW 401. You can download the book for free at the link above.

This book examines how UFCW 401 (a very scrappy Alberta union) has navigated the past 20 years. The first three chapters provided a good, accessible, and very interesting history of 401. (This was really an enjoyable read.)

The second half of the book examines UFCW’s transformation in light of what we know about union renewal. The academic argument Foster makes is that union renewal can emerge through contingent decision-making. This deviates somewhat from most of the literature on union renewal, which tends to focus on carefully planned renewal efforts.

The book also opens up the internal workings of 401 somewhat, which is unusual. Unions are typically opaque organizations to outsiders (and often insiders!) and this case provides insight into decision-making, power structures, and the inner thinking (or narratives) that emerge from and then drive behaviour.

UFCW operates in a very centralized way and relies heavily on the mystique of and trust in its president. An important question Foster raises is what happens when Doug O’Halloran eventually retires? Will the growing diversity within the union membership trigger a move towards greater internal democracy? Or will we see another strong (wo)man take over?

Reading about 401 is important for a number of reasons. It is one of the few unions (two?) unions that engages in a meaningful level of organizing and it does so among private sector employers who often resist having exploitative employment practices challenged. It is not afraid to strike and, recently, it has been winning strikes. And UFCW is responding (albeit it in mixed ways) to the growing cultural and linguistic diversity among Alberta workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: King of the Road

This week’s installment of Labour and Pop Culture is “King of the Road” by Roger Miller. The song is about a hobo who rides the rails and generally enjoys his freedom. There’s not a lot to this song beyond someone who has basically rejected the strictures of capitalist society.

But this rootless lifestyle has become the basis of a huge book series centering on Jack Reacher. A former army MP who travels around the country solving crimes and hooking up, Reacher is the creation of author Lee Child (a pen name for Jim Grant).

Some writers speculate that Reacher (who left the army after downsizing) was inspired by Child’s own sacking from Garanda Television (after which he wrote his first Reacher book). Child’s, a former union rep, hated injustice and perhaps this explains why the itinerant Reacher always wins against the bad guys.



Trailer for sale or rent
Rooms to let fifty cents
No phone no pool no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah but, two hours of pushing broom
Buys a eight by twelve four bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road

Third boxcar midnight train
Destination Bangor Maine
Old worn out suit and shoes
I don't pay no union dues
I smoke old stoogies I have found
Short but not too big around
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road

I know every engineer on every train
All of the children and all of their names
And every handout in every town
And every lock that ain't locked when no one's around
I sing trailers for sale or rent...

Rooms to let fifty cents
No phone no pool no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah but, two hours of pushing broom
Buys a eight by twelve four bit room
I'm a man of means by no means
King of the road

Trailers for sale or rent
Rooms to let fifty cents
No phone no pool no pets
I ain't got no cigarettes
Ah but, two hours of pushing broom

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Company Town

A few months back, Mark McCutchen and I published an article examining the presence and (mostly) absence of unions in science fiction. A book that came out between finishing that research and having it published is Company Town by Madeline Ashby (Tor, 2016).

Set on an oil-rig/town near Newfoundland in the near future (where oil is in decline), this cyberpunk novel focuses on Hwa, who is a (female) bodyguard for the United Sex Workers of Canada. Selling sex has been decriminalized in this future and sex workers have developed a hiring hall of sorts, which provides services, including security, pensions, and a client database.

The novel quickly becomes much more complex (leading to an ending that felt somehow rushed and a bit hard to follow). In this novel, the union essentially serves as part of the novel’s setting and has little to no impact on the plot. This fits rather neatly into the typology Mark and I developed about how unions are treated and used in SF. Unusual among SF treatments of unions, though, Ashby frames the union positively.

More broadly the book is largely in keeping with capitalist realism. Capitalist realism is

a pervasive atmosphere, conditioning not only the production of culture but also the regulation of work and education, and acting as a kind of invisible barrier constraining thought and action (Fisher, 2009, p. 16).

It produces a business ontology that privileges corporate business as the model for all other activities, from political governance to family life, to the extent that “the lack of alternatives to capitalism is no longer even an issue. Capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable” (Ibid, p. 8).

Capitalist realism not only “[claims] to have stripped the world of sentimental illusions and seen it for ‘what it really is’: a Hobbesian war of all against all, a system of perpetual exploitation and generalized criminality,” (Ibid, p. 11) it also insists on everyone’s “‘realistic’ acceptance that capitalism is the only game in town” (Ibid, p. 15) and leaves little room for collective efforts to negotiate limits on exploitation.

To be fair, the United Sex Workers of Canada does make some efforts to regulate the working conditions of its members and thereby buck the system. But it does so within an essentially hypercapitalist system.

This isn’t meant as a criticism of the novel (which is good), but rather as an observation about the tendency of SF (as a genre) to situate stories within a capitalist framework and thereby constraining how we think about the future.

-- Bob Barnetson

Book: Unions in Court

This summer I tried to actually take my vacation and not just keep working. For the most part, I was successful. I did, however, take time to read Unions in court: Organized labour and the Charter ofRights and Freedoms (2017, UBC Press) by Larry Savage and Charles Smith.

Great read! The book traces the labour movement’s come hither-go away relationship with Charter litigation over the past 30 years. This historical analysis of unions' relationships with the courts provides a nicely nuanced explanation for why unions have, over time, come to embrace Charter litigation. In short

…[W]e have argued that while unions were initially hostile to constitutionalized labour rights for fear of how they might be interpreted by an unsympathetic judiciary, significant sections of organized labour ultimately retreated back to the legal arena, shed their judicial phobia, and wrapped themselves in the rhetoric of “worker rights and human rights” as a response to the growing tide of neoliberalism and the crisis in social democratic electorialism in the 1990s. (pp. 208-209).

The authors then go on to examine the pros and cons of this dynamic, continuing the long-running debate (often between Savage and Professor Roy Adams) around the ultimate utility of framing “worker rights and human rights”. The book also does a nice job of outlining the key wins and losses experienced by the labour movement.

Students in IDRL 309/LGST 310 might want to pick this book up!

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: 1632

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture examines the novel 1632 by Eric Flint. Last fall, Mark McCutcheon and I published an article about the absence of trade unions in science fiction and this is last of the examples of unions I sci-fi that I’ll delve into.

In 1632, Flint throws a small modern–day Appalachian mining town back in time to the middle of Europe’s 30 Years War. A historian and labour activist, Flint gives the local chapter of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) an important political role in the story—providing an organizing structure, principles and leadership cadre as the characters cope with the violent and autocratic world they face.

The selection of an emergency management committee pits former CEO John Simpson against local union leader Mike Stearns:

He [Mike] forced Simpson away from the microphone with his own equivalent of assertive self-confidence. And if Mike's aura carried less of authority, and more of sheer dominance, so much the better. 

"I agree with the town council's proposal," he said forcefully. Then, even more forcefully: "And I completely disagree with the spirit of the last speaker's remarks." 

Mike gave Simpson a glance, lingering on it long enough to make the gesture public. “We haven't even got started, and already this guy is talking about downsizing.” 

The gymnasium was rocked with a sudden, explosive burst of laughter. Humor at Mike's jest was underlain by anger. The crowd was made up, in its big majority, of working class people who had their own opinion of “downsizing.” An opinion which, unlike the term itself, was rarely spoken in euphemisms.

The displaced mining town introduces several democratizing strategies to the early modern society in which it finds itself, strategies like “committees of correspondence” that disseminate democratic principles and distribute social services such as food, education, protection to citizens in adjacent cities, thus creating a democratic insurgency in otherwise autocratic states.

While 1632 frames unionization as a way to democratize society by undermining existing power structures and hierarchies, the ultimate goal of these actions is to facilitate a transition to industrial capitalism to bolster Grantville’s sole strategic advantage in the 17th century. In this way, the progressive social role of unionization identified with enlightened modernity (not to mention American patriotism). Alternative forms of organization (such as co-operatives and credit unions) are hardly mentioned anywhere in the book series and only in passing.

1632 creates an alternative universe wherein trade unions are considered normal and undertake constructive, progressive social functions: the democratic principles and processes that underlie trade unionism become a model for democratizing an autocratic society. That said, 1632 valorizes an avidly capitalistic future, as if capitalism remains an important precondition for political democracy. All Flint’s characters ultimately seek to achieve is to make the political economy of the 17th century world in which they find themselves more amenable to 20th-century middle class values.

You can get a free e-book copy of 1632 on the publisher’s website.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Media representations of Chinese labour mobility

I recently ran across a book chapter entitled “Media representations of investment and labour in Alberta’s resourceeconomy” by Cassiano, Dorow and Schmidt. This chapter examines how two different discourses about Chinese transnational mobility related to Alberta’s oil sands are represented in two newspapers (2007 to 2013), these being direct foreign investment and temporary labour.

The nub of it is that investment = good and labour mobility = bad. The threat posed by Chinese workers and business practices to the social and political fabric of Canada makes Chinese transnational mobility threatening while, at the same time, valourizing Canadian values and practices. The result is a racist othering, primarily of Chinese workers.

-- Bob Barnetson