Labour & Pop Culture: Frankenstein's Monster and Dracula were union organizers?

I ran across this interesting article last year about the origins of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in the United States (which has merged with the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2012 to form SAG-AFTRA). SAG started in 1933 to prevent the exploitation of actors by movie studios.

Among the founding members was Boris Karloff (most famous for portraying Frankenstein). Karloff was concerned about long hours (including one 25-hour stretch) and dangerous working conditions on set and one of the first SAG meetings took place in Karloff’s garage. He served as a Board member and officer of SAG from 1933 to 1951.

Bela Lugosi (most famous for playing Dracula) was also an early member. Lugosi emigrated from Hungary in the 1920s after engaging in labor activism among actors there. Both Lugosi and Karloff were SAG recruiters, soliciting memberships from actors on the sets of their movies.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Brooklyn 99

Brooklyn 99 is a police comedy series that has just released its final season on Netflix. The first episode (“The Good Ones”) deals with police brutality and the role of police unions in shielding officers from the consequences of their actions. The release of the final season was delayed as the writers sought to write a police comedy in the wake of the death of George Floyd.

Two of the characters (Rosa and Jake) investigate the assault, arrest, and false charging of an African woman by two NYPD police officers (to generate overtime payments, according to their captain). The police union (the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association) bars Rosa and Jake from talking to the officers and accessing bodycam footage that might demonstrate the charged woman is innocent. When Jake and Rosa steal the footage from the union offices, the precinct captain deletes it and explains how the disciplinary system is broken.

The plot and characterization of the police union was interesting in several ways. In no particular order:

• The assault and false arrest is explained as the officers seeking to extend their shift and receive overtime. This may well happen but this explanation seems to ignore the racial context of the George killings.
• The union official is written as a caricature (living with his mom and loving the NYPD and Billy Joel) prepared to overlook any bad behaviour by his union’s members. The union member are also shown as caricatures (making ridiculous complaints, dressing like RWNJs).
• There is collusion mooted between the union and the employer to undermine any discipline the officers might experience. In the end, the only outcome is the charges are dropped against the African woman.

Before jumping into any analysis, it is worth appreciating that Brooklyn 99 is a comedy show that is trying to navigate tricky terrain. And using tropes (e.g., corrupt union officials protecting irresponsible union members) is a common way for television shows to engage with unions (because viewers can much more easily understand the plot).

The precinct captain explaining the officers’ behaviour as economic is a very interesting way to portray how racism (which is the root issue) can be obscured by how the issue is framed. It is way easier for an organization to grapple with time theft than with systemic racism. I wonder if the elision of racism by the framing should have been made clearer? But perhaps I am under-estimating the audience.

The characterization of the police union officials and members was unsympathetic (but funny). These NPCs created an interesting foil for the main characters (who viewed themselves as “the good ones”) and allowed the show to highlight how good intentions often get subverted by systemic pressures. That said, this episode contributes the almost universally negative framing of unions and union members.

Near the end, there is an interesting discussion of how the discipline system works. Essentially, says the captain, trying to discipline the officers will not work. They will simply get a paid vacation, any finding of wrongdoing will be overturned on appeal (because the employer colludes with the union), and the officers will simply return to the job emboldened (while the female captain’s career gets sidelined for breaking the code).

There is a lot to unpack in that one scene. That the police officers would be placed on paid leave pending a hearing seems to be framed as rewarding bad behaviour (and it is certainly far different from most American’s experience of employment at will). Yet, if you think about it, a collective agreement compelling the employer to abide by the principle of innocent until proven guilty is a good thing.

The idea that the employer will collude with the union to prevent the police officers from being disciplined highlights how police unions operate in a far different realm than every other union. One of the functions of police officers is to (essentially) protect private property. In practice, this means that they act against workers on behalf of employers (who own most private property). This makes police officers effectively agents of capital. Consequently, their employer may excuse behaviour that no other employer would.

The position of the captain (who views herself as one of the good ones) is also an interesting study in the conflicted role of middle managers. The captain is basically a disposable tool of the employer (if she does the objectively right thing, her career is over). So, she does the “best” she can, which leads her to fix the immediate issue while, at the same time, enabling the officers’ ongoing bad behaviour.

The captain rationalizes her behaviour, in part, as an equity issue. She is one of the few female captains. Doing the right thing (by a racialized person) will set back gender equity in the NYPD. This was a really fascinating analysis of how racists systems can create conflicts of interests between and among racialized and non-racialized people.

Overall, this episode provided a lot of meat to chew over about systemic racism and the structures and dynamics that perpetuate it.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Dawson's Creek?

So, I was watching Dawson's Creek last week (don't ask) and stumbled across some labour activism in Season 5, Episode 22 ("The Abby"). By this point in the series, Pacey (Joshua Jackson) is working as a cook in a Boston Restaurant (Civilization).

The restaurant is sold and a new manager (Alex) arrives to shake things up. She fires some of the staff, while promoting others (Pacey included) to exert control. 

Just prior to an important dinner, after which the investors will decided whether or not to open a chain of Civilization restaurants, Alex loses her cool and fires a staff member (who is a single mother working three jobs) in front of the entire staff. This alienates the staff, who donate the dinner top a homeless shelter and provide take-out pizza to the investors. The "staff association" then reads out a letter trashing the manager and everyone quits.

Overall, I thought the episode was pretty realistic in how it portrayed the new boss and her control tactics as well as the response of the workers. Specifically, I liked that it showed them reacting spontaneously and voting with their feet. A more nuanced (but likely more boring episode) might have included them getting together, organizing a series of escalating tactics, and holding a march on the boss (or some other job action). But, in the context of the show (and given the many other plot lines that needed to be wrapped up at the end of the fifth season), that would have been a pretty forced narrative and this one-off mass quitting was more appropriate. If you want a show about organizing, the series Good Girls Revolt might be more your speed.

-- Bob Barnetson

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

A Christmas Carol from an organizing perspective

The blog Organizing Work ran an interesting piece last week interrogating how worker organizing could have altered the trajectory of the story in A Christmas Carol (delightfully, using the Muppet version). 

The post contains several astute observations, including that the workers manage to get a day off for Christmas from Scrooge by acting collectively and without the aid of supernatural forces.

What I enjoyed the most in the film was the overt shit-talking about the terrible character of the boss 9see the clip above). While it is easy to excuse a boss's behaviour as a function of structural pressures (e.g., the profit imperative), it is important not to lose sight of the fact that bosses have agency and could behave better than they do if they so wished.

-- 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

Labour & Pop Culture: Damnation Ep 1-5

Rainy summer days are a nice time for TV. I have been working my way through the Netflix series Damnation.

The series is set in the rural America in the 1930s (but filmed by Calgary). It follows local preacher (of sorts) Seth who rallies local farmers facing price fixing by local business folks who are in league with the nasty banker.

The series opens with a producers strike, based on the Farmers’ Holiday Association strike of the 1930s. There was also a producers strike in Alberta in the late 1940s. This idea circulated in Alberta again during the debate about Bill 6.

The bad guys then bring in a strike breaker (Creeley) who kills strikers. While this seems a touch dramatic, it is based upon the strike breaking activity of private detective agencies like the Pinkertons (in the story, Creeley is a Pinkerton).

Episode 1 ends when Seth responds by nailing the dead man up to the bank door with the sign “which side are you on?” around his neck. (Which Side Are You On is a 1931 miners’ strike song from Harlan County—which is also (sort of) covered in the series).

Episode 2 features white supremacists and explores how the newspaper aligns itself with the interests of the local business people. Episodes 3-5 explores escalating conflict over farm foreclosures and an effort to split the farmers up to undermine their strike. A lot of people die in this series.



There are three strong female characters in story (a sociopathic strikebreaker, the preacher's radical wife, and a very cagey prostitute), which is nice to see given the tendency of unions of be viewed as “male” organizations and the limited roles of women in the 1930s. I’m hopeful we’ll see more of them in the second half of the series.

I’m pretty keen to finish this series and see how it plays out. There is some larger conspiracy by industrialists at work in the series that I’m keen to see revealed.

-- 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

Labour & Pop Culture: Tragic

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture features the novel “Tragic” by Robert Tanenbaum. Tannenbaum is a former prosecutor turned crime/court writer and Tragic is the 25th book in a series featuring an ever-prepared New York prosecutor putting away the bad guys.

Much like Tanenbaum’s earlier novel “Absolute Rage”, the baddies in this one are corrupt union officials. This time they are New York dockworkers who are in bed with the mob and also stealing the members’ pension funds (there is also a subplot about workplace injury). (In “Absolute Rage”, the bad union bosses were in bed with the coal companies and stealing the member’s pension funds. In “Trap” (which I haven’t read yet) the antagonist is a corrupt teacher’s union president in bed with skin heads.)

The really bad union president has one of his not-quite-so-bad rivals bumped off to prevent him from demanding a Department of Labour investigation into a rigged election (which is exactly the same premise as Absolute Rage). The difference in this book is that the writing is atrocious and there is basically no tension as the prosecutor (who is basically the author in disguise—the whole series leans a bit towards being a roman à clef) anticipates everything the moronic defense council tries.

Overall, Tanenbaum’s novels seem to pretty much align with the tendency of American media to portray unions as corrupt. As an aside, the Publisher’s Weekly reviews of his books on his website are masterfully backhanded (“…well, if you like this kind of thing, then he’s done it again.”) The author is a bit of a blowhard: consider this quote from his website about one of his own books:

I cannot predict that in the decades hence Echoes of My Soul will be remembered. I firmly believe it will be. And, if it is, it will be analyzed and postured as a splendid reflection of the values that define us.

Barf.

-- Bob Barnetson

Guest post: Lousy journalism and youth unemployment

This weekend, CBC posted an article entitled 'The Millenial side hustle,' not stable job, is the new reality for university grads. CBC is usually the best remaining traditional media source. 

But, as Erik Strikwerda, Assistant Professor of History at Athabasca University points out, not everything CBC publishes is reliable.

-- Bob 

How to write a misleading semi-long Sunday morning read and pass it off as hard investigative journalism.

Step One: Come up with a provocative title that seems true, and generally confirms what many people already think.

“The ‘Millennial Side Hustle,’ not a stable job is the new reality for university grads”

Check.

Step Two: Begin lead paragraph with an anecdotal story that supports the title.

One young man who recently graduated from university with a mechanical engineering degree can’t seem to find a job, despite applying for 250 jobs in his field.

Check.

Step Three: Imply the anecdotal story is representative of a much wider trend by asserting that the subject of the anecdote isn’t alone.

Check.

Step Four: Use completely misleading or irrelevant figures to ‘verify’ that the anecdotal story is representative of a wider trend.

“More than 12% of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed and more than a quarter are underemployed, meaning they have degrees but end up in jobs that don’t require them.”

Check.

This is really meant to be the meat of the analysis. But obvious questions come to mind, even to a casual reader. “Canadians aged 15 to 24” represents nine years. However, most university students won’t graduate with a degree before the age of 21. So fully six years of the 12% unemployment figure aren’t relevant to the story.

Most of the Canadians represented by the statistic, then, couldn’t possibly have completed a university degree.

But 12% sounds like a lot, so, whatever.

How many of the remaining Canadians between the ages of 21 and 24 actually have a university degree? We don’t know, because the story doesn’t say.

But 12% sounds like a lot, so, whatever.

It gets worse.

“… more than a quarter (of Canadians aged 15 to 24) are unemployed, meaning they have degrees but end up in jobs that don’t require them.” Wow. More than 25% of Canadians with university degrees can’t find work in their field?

Wait a minute! Canadians aged 15 to 21 don’t have university degrees because they’re either a) still in high school or b) still finishing their degree or c) aren’t in university at all. How does the article account for this? It doesn’t.

But more than 25% sounds like a lot, so, whatever.

What about Canadians aged 21 to 24? Surely they all have university degrees! Some do, that’s true enough. But many don’t because a) they didn’t go to university or b) they did go to university but left before graduating. How many fit into this category? We don’t know because the article doesn’t say.

Still, more than 25% sounds like a lot, so, whatever.

Step Five: Introduce more statistics that aren’t relevant.

“The latest numbers from Statistics Canada show that the unemployment show rate for 15-to-24 year olds is almost twice that of the general population.”

Check.

Well, this is true enough (even if we don’t bother accounting for the fact that employment statistics are notoriously unreliable, failing to take into account people who have stopped looking for work for example, or ignoring people who aren’t in the job market at all, for a variety of reasons).

After all, the 12% unemployment rate among 15-to-24 year olds is ‘nearly twice’ the current average unemployment rate of all age groups (6.6%).

And surely this 12% unemployment rate includes some people in the 15-to-24 age group with university degrees. But it also just as surely includes many more people who a) are still in high school b) have dropped out of high school c) didn’t go to university or d) didn’t graduate from university.

How does this 12% unemployment rate statistic bolster the story’s premise that having a university degree doesn’t translate into a job? It doesn’t.

But unemployment ‘almost twice that of the general population’ sounds dramatic. So, whatever.

Step Six: Ignore statistics that don’t support the original assertion.

Research from the very Canadian Teachers’ Association report on which the story relies shows that unemployment rates for actual university graduates have been steadily falling, from just under 10% in the early ‘90s to around 4% by the late 2000s.

Further, figures from 2011 show that Canadians with a university degree earn more in the workplace than their counterparts without a university degree, too. University-educated Canadians earned an average of $80,000 per year. High school graduates with no university degree, by contrast, earned less than $50,000.

Step Seven: Having ‘established’ the numbers that don’t back up the story, bury them by piling on more anecdotes that, without context, are completely useless.

Here’s a young woman, featured in the article, with a political science degree working as a bartender, a yoga instructor, and a house-sitter. Is her experience the norm? She says many of her friends are in the same boat, so I guess it must be the norm.

Here’s another women who is a precariously employed contract instructor at a university. The nature of the university contract worker business these days means that she has to reapply for her job every four months. She’s been doing this for nearly 20 years. Is this fair? Absolutely not. But the deeper question is why do university administrators continue to rely on contract instructors rather than offering them job security? Does the article ask this question? Nope.

The contract instructor says most of her students don’t believe they’ll be precarious workers once they graduate. Doubtless this is true. Unfortunately for these students, according to the article, “economic indicators that track employment reveal a trend toward more precarious jobs.” 

The article offers no source for these economic indicators. Nor does it offer any context for the assertion itself. Are these precarious jobs being filled by university graduates, and therefore relevant to the story? We don’t know, and the article is silent on the matter, save the story about the contract instructor.

Check.

Step Eight: Completely miss the opportunity to raise some hard questions about the state of post-secondary education in Canada.

In what ways do universities make available to employers a highly skilled, publicly subsidized workforce that helps their bottom line?

Why are universities increasingly relying on contract instructional labour rather than replenishing the ranks of retiring full-time faculty? Is it in order to cut costs in an era of chronic state underfunding of post-secondary institutions?

What role should universities play in readying graduates for the labour market?

Should universities tailor their programs and degrees for the capitalistic marketplace? Or should they focus on turning out highly skilled graduates with wide sets of knowledge and competencies?

I know traditional media is going through hard times these days but sheesh! This article doesn’t even pass the very basics of logical reasoning, let alone research!

-- Erik Strikwerda

Labour & Pop Culture: Absolute Rage

Over time, I've grown increasingly fascinated by how unions are portrayed in popular culture. Mostly, unions are just absent. But I was wandering through the library with my daughter and picked Absolute Rage (2002) almost at random.

The book is a crime thriller wherein a trade unionist is killed to help another (corrupt) trade unionist steal a union election in the West Virginia coal fields.

The "good" trade unionist is not really good, except in the sense that he actually cares about the workers. Otherwise, he's an abusive drunk blinded by ideology who gets his family killed in the cross fire.

The "bad" trade unionist is evil, corrupt (e.g., in the boss' pocket), greedy, and kind of stupid. He surrounds himself with various dumb and corrupt stooges who do his bidding. These character flaws are his undoing.

The strengths of the book are a good understanding of US labour politics and a realistic portrayal of the  company towns in the coal field. The plot and characterization are consistent with the tendency of all US fiction to represent unions as corrupt or, alternately, a source of disruption (via strikes).

I certainly understand the need for a source of dramatic tension in a novel. What is so striking is how union are almost never framed a force for good and, indeed, are rarely mentioned at all.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The Bar Association

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture focuses on the Star Trek: Deep Space 9 episode “The Bar Association”. I recently coauthored a paper on the absence of unions in science fiction with Mark McCutcheon and this was one of the few examples we found of unions in the (huge) canon of SF.

The crux of the episode is that the workers in Quark’s Bar are treated poorly and decide to fight back by forming a union. The workers go on strike and, eventually, win slightly better pay in exchange for disbanding the union. The use of a strike as plot device is one of the two most common ways unions are represented in fiction of all genres.

There are some interesting bits in the episode. An early exchange between the space station’s doctor and the union organizer Rom highlights the conflicted class position of many workers, who are presently exploited while awaiting their own chance to join the ranks of capital.

The workers eventually decide to form a union. This is anathema to the hyper-capitalist society of the Ferengi and the workers fear repression by the state. Yet the workers decide to unionize anyways because they have nothing left to lose.



The dispute then spills over to the station personnel. The station commander (who is the state in this story) then has to intervene to maintain social stability.



The employer (Quark) then calls in some muscle from his employer buddies to terrify the workers, and one of the workers immediately caves to the pressure. The employer then threats the workers unless they get back to work.



In the end, the workers disband their union and the employer quietly meets their demands. From the perspective of mainstream trade unionism, this is likely viewed as a defeat (the union id dissolved). From the perspective of more radical trade unionists (e.g., the Wobblies), this is a success because (1) the workers concerns were addressed, (2) the workers earned an important lesson about solidarity and how to exercise power, and (3) employer learned an important lesson about the limits of his power (and thus is less likely to be a dick in the future).

Overall, this is a pretty typical representation of unions in sci-fi: the union emerges suddenly because of circumstances and then disappears (reinforcing the view that unions are not “normal” parts of society). In this episode, the state plays a neutral role (which is not the case in other examples) and, by protecting the rights of workers to strike, helps them exert pressure. The state also applies some pressure to the employer in order to encourage settlement.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Click, Clack, Moo

This week’s instalment of Labour & Pop Culture looks at the children’s book Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin. The crux of this fable (which you can listen to below) is that the cows find a typewriter and ask Farmer Brown for electric blankets to warm up the barn.

Framer Brown refuses and the cows (and hens) withhold their labour. Eventually the two sides come to an agreement: the animals get electric blankets and they give up the typewriter. But then the ducks start making demands.



I love Click, Clack, Moo because it highlights (in a very inoffensive way) a number of lessons about labour relations. In no particular order:

Class conflict: Farmer Brown depends on the cows and hens to make a living. When they want better working and living conditions, he balks (presumably because of the cost). Herein lies the crux of class relations: conflict over the distribution of profits arising from the labour of workers.

Collective power: Once the workers (cows and hens) have some way to articulate their class interests and express them to the boss (Farmer Brown), they suddenly have power. Farmer Brown eventually caves. 

Interestingly, the concession he demands is not higher production, but rather that the workers agree to not strike again (by giving up their type writer). What this tells us is that boss’s power depends (in part) on the acquiescence of the workers and he will accommodate worker’s monetary demands as long as he can maintain control over the workplace.

Gender: Note how the workers (hens and cows) are all female while the boss (Farmer Brown) is a man? Note how pissed off and dismissive Farmer Brown gets when the womenfolk get uppity? I wonder how he would deal with a bunch of angry bulls and roosters (who are far more physically threatening). I suspect he’d shoot them.

The Farmer Wins: In the end, the workers go back to their jobs and order (i.e., the employer extracting surplus value from workers) is returned to the barnyard. It is interesting to speculate what would have happened if Farmer Brown dug in his heels and, say, cut off the feed to the animals or turned them out of the barnyard.

Cat’s Out of the Bag: Once the ducks see how successful the hens and cows were, they too start making demands using the typewriter. This speaks to both the universal and enduring nature of class conflict in capitalist societies.

This book also allows us to reframe some of the angst in Alberta’s agricultural community about the possibility that unionized farm workers will (one day) be able to strike. In this book, the workers’ strike for decent living and working conditions looks pretty reasonable (Farmer Brown’s refusal less so). 

So why all the angst when it comes to other humans requesting the same thing? The answer is that it is about power and privilege. Farmers have long been the undisputed masters of their domain (acknowledging the broader economics dynamics of commodity producers in producers have little bargaining power). 

Losing that control on the farm feels like an attack on their authority. Further, giving workers the right to strike compels some farmers to confront the fact that their operations are only economically viable if they can externalize costs onto workers in the form of low wages and poor working conditions.

-- Bob Barnetson