Labour & Pop Culture: Justice League of America

I ran across a 1964 issue of the Justice League of America (JLA) comic book that appeared to be about unionizing superheroes. The cover shows various heroes picketing, demanding their rights.

The crux of the story line is that The School Master (a particularly lame 1960s supervillain) manipulates the United Nations into prohibiting the use of super powers. This makes the JLA unable to effectively resist a crime spree by a variety of other lame 1960s supervillains (Tattoo Man?).

The JLA is so law abiding that they decide to comply while peacefully picketing. Picketing proves totally ineffective so they turn to direct action. In this case, crime fighting without using their super powers.

Which is a bit of a major plot hole because the impetus for this was that the non-super-powered heroes couldn’t effectively fight these super villains. After many tedious pages, The School Master’s plot of revealed and the injunction is lifted.

Overall, this was pretty disappointing. Some interesting points include the government being manipulated into helping out greedy supervillains, picketing being framed as ineffective, and the heroes turning to direct action.

-- 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 and Pop Culture: Frankie Drake

I recently had the… opportunity?... to watch a few episodes of CBC’s Frankie Drake Mysteries series. The series centres on an all-female detective agency in 1920s Toronto (so kind of a flapper lady Matlock dealie). The series is available on Amazon Prime but perhaps also the CBC website.

Episode 2 of the first season (“Ladies in Red”) sees Frankie hired to investigate an attack on a factory owner. The owner is convinced the attack was the work of communists in his plant (that manufacturers some kind of confusing glass window product). The show makes reference to the 1919 Winnipeg strike as well as the 1920 Wall Street bombing (which may have been the work of Italian anarchists or communists… or maybe not) to explain the owner’s concerns.

The detectives’ investigations turns up a group of communists (or red sympathizers) in the plant. But their interest is mostly in world peace and perhaps in better working conditions. There is a subplot around sexual harassment and, in the end, the real villain in the plant manager who is skimming, sexually exploiting, and trying to deflect blame onto the workers.

If you can get past the many inconsistencies (e.g., the show is pretty race blind until race is a useful plot point) this episode has a positive portrayal of collective action by workers and highlights the plight of working women in urban Canada after the first war.

I have to admit, by the end I was on my phone googling. But my impression is that the episode ends with Frankie cajoling the plant owner into raising the women’s wages. This seemed very out of character and pretty Pollyanna.

-- Bob Barnetson

Minister's massive over-time misdirection

Alberta’s An Act to Make Alberta Open for Business (Bill 2) is presently before the Legislature. If passed, Bill 2 will allow employer to avoid paying over-time premiums if workers choose to (or are forced to) take overtime as time in lieu (instead of as wages).

Minister of Labour Jason Copping recently tweeted that paid over-time does not change under Bill 2, asserting that his “math” had been “verified by (unnamed) academics and experts”.



This tweet is partially correct: Bill 2 does not change the overtime pay earned. But the tweet is also deeply misleading in that Bill 2 reduces workers’ ability to realize their over-time pay.

This reflects that Bill 2 creates a loop-hole, wherein time in lieu is paid at straight time. (While, in theory, taking OT pay as time off is agreed to between workers and employers, that isn’t how it works in practice: employer basically just impose it.)

This tweet triggered a flurry of responses basically calling bullshit on Minister Copping. The most data-drive response was by ND staffer Matt Dykstra who used Statistics Canada data to estimate the forgone weekly OT payment per worker by industry if employers forced workers to take time off (instead of paying out OT).

Full disclosure: Matt asked me a couple of weeks back to verify his approach to this calculation, which I did.

For workers who work overtime, Bill 2 creates potential average weekly OT wage loss ranging from $55 to $320 (depending upon industry).

If everyone who worked OT in a week was forced to take their OT as time off, this would create a net reduction in employer wage costs of approximately $63.5 million per week (412,200 workers x $153.80 saved per week). Annually, that works out to $3.3 billion in potential OT savings for employers.

Obviously, this estimate overstates the size of the effect because the estimate does not account for employers that will not force workers to take all of their OT as time off at straight pay (there is no good way to estimate this as far as I can tell).

The value of the estimate is that it illustrates that Bill 2 is a potentially huge gift to employers by the Kenney government. The cost of this gift is borne by workers. 

Further, there is no evidence I can find that this change will result in more hiring. Indeed, what it does is incentivize employers with seasonal variation in demand to work their existing workforces harder during peak period rather than hiring more workers.

The Minister suggesting that paid OT does not change under Bill 2 is an astounding act of misdirection. And his tweet tells us that we should be highly skeptical of anything UCP MLAs say.

-- Bob Barnetson

Presentation: Dead men tell no tales

Dead men tell no tales: Reporting and distorting occupational injuries
Bob Barnetson, NASH 81 Conference, Calgary, January 4, 2019

Introduction

Hey, I’m Bob. I teach labour stuff at Athabasca University. What I’m here to talk about today is how newspaper reporting about occupational injury is misleading and how that ultimately distorts public perceptions and public policy.

So let's start with some basic injury stats in Canada. The best data we have—but its not necessarily very good—comes from provincial and territorial workers’ compensation boards. These WCBs accept claims from injured workers who are seeking medical aid and wage-loss replacement.

Anyone want to guess the number of fatalities in Canada in 2016? Officially 904, of which 542 were from disease and 312 were from physical injury.

The problem with workers’ compensation data is that tends to under-report injuries. About 15% of folks are not in the ambit of the system so their injuries are not reported. Many of claims get rejected—like the 250 cancer claims at the GE plant in Peterborough.

Some fatalities also fall outside the narrow rules of WCBs. For example, if you are traveling to work and get killed, you don’t get counted, even though the injury would not have happened but for your need to go to work.

People who kill themselves due to work stress are mostly excluded. People who are killed due to occupational incidents but who are not workers (such at the residents of Lac Megantic when the tanker train derailed and exploded) are excluded.

Most numerically concerning are occupational illnesses that are not reported. Cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease are two of the biggest sources of these deaths. They tend not to be reported because of long latency periods, worker ignorance of relevant occupational exposures, and murky causality.

All in, the annual death toll from work-related causes in Canada is 10 to 13 times what the official statistics show. So 10,000 deaths a year is a good solid number. That is a small city or the whole north shore of PEI killed every year by work.

Interestingly, fatalities are actually fairly uncommon. Other forms of injury are much more common. We have Canada-wide data on lost-time claims—basically an injury where a worker couldn’t go to work the next day so they “lost time”. Anyone want to guess how many lost-time claims there were in 2016? 240,682. Those claims represent about 60% of all lost-time claims—so the real number is over 400,000 serious injuries per year. So that’s like everyone in Saskatoon and Regina—kids, parents, grandparents—getting seriously injured each year.

Do those stats surprise you? Yeah, so what those stats tell us is that work is very, very dangerous. So let’s turn to newspaper reporting of workplace injuries and see what we find.

How accurate is reporting of work-related injury?

My colleague Jason Foster and I have been examining newspaper reports of injury. We’re going to look at national data in this next set of slides, but the results are pretty consistent nationally, by province, and between urban dailies and rural weeklies.

The most obvious finding is that newspapers report a minority of all injuries and fatalities. We can’t confidently estimate how much under-reporting there is but it’s fair to say that fewer than 1% are reported. And that’s understandable: not every injury is newsworthy. But an interesting question is, which injuries are newsworthy? Any guesses?

So we started by recording the ratio of fatalities to lost-time injuries in newspaper stories. We then compared that ratio to official statistics to get a sense of whether newspaper reports over- or under-emphasized injuries or fatalities.

Approximately 61.2% of newspaper reports (on the left) were about fatalities (which is the green part of the pie). When you look at official stats (on the right), you can see that fatalities actually comprise 0.4% of all serious injuries. So, basically, newspapers vastly over-report fatalities. Or, put another way, fatalities are much more newsworthy than injuries.

We then decided to look at the gender distribution of newspaper injury reports. Anyone want to guess what percentage of reported occupational injuries are actually experienced by women? Nationally, it was 37.1%. Anyone want to guess what percentage of newspaper injury reports were about women?

About 4.4% of newspaper reports (on the left) featured women (who are yellow). Official stats on the right show the true percentage is much higher. Basically, newspapers vastly over-report injuries to men. Or, put another way, injuries to men are apparently more newsworthy than injuries to women.

We then looked at what kind of injuries were reported. Newspapers are again green and official stats are yellow. Key take-aways are newspapers over-report fractures and traumatic injuries while entirely ignoring the most common kind of injury—a strain or sprain. Basically, if you got blowed up, or crushed, or burned to death, you made the paper. Otherwise, your injury wasn’t newsworthy.

We then looked at which industries received the most coverage for injuries and compared that to official stats. On the left we have the industries with the most newspaper report. On the right, we have the most injurious industries. You can see that that newspapers basically mis-represent which industries are most injurious. This pattern is likely a knock-on effect from the kinds of injuries that get reported, which are fatalities to men caused by a catastrophic event. 

Finally, we looked at who reporters quoted in their stories as a way to try and quantify who were the key sources. Reporters talked to government representatives and first responders most often, followed by the employer. They almost never talk to workers or their union representatives. 

So, if you relied on newspapers for your information about workplace injuries, you’d likely think injuries are fatalities caused by violent physical events that happen to blue-collar men. This is, of course, profoundly misleading.

How is work-related injury framed in newspapers?

Now while aggregate analysis of newspaper coverage tells us some interesting things, we can also learn a lot by looking at specific stories. The thing that jumps out when you start to read dozens and dozens of these stories at one time is that they all start to sounds the same. In fact there are three basic story templates (or frames) that reporters use when writing about workplace injury.

The first is what we call under investigation and it almost always reads like this example. The reporter notes a worker has been killed and the authorities are investigating. About 55% of all newspaper reports of injuries and fatalities look almost exactly like this—literally you can just swap out the proper nouns and, voila, you are a PostMedia journalist—your layoff notice is in the mail!

The key message in this frame is that the authorities have the situation under control. The passive voice (“the employee has been killed”) focuses attention on the victim rather than on what killed the worker or who was responsible for the death. Rarely do we see follow-up stories—instead the even, like the worker, just passes on.

This report is atypical in that it also names the injured worker and where he lived. Normally, the worker is described in generic terms such as “a 33-year-old carpenter”. Such sparse descriptions tend to dehumanize the victim by framing them as a nameless job-holder rather than in a more relatable way.

The second media frame is very similar and we call it before the courts. It comprises articles reporting charges filed or resolved under provincial OHS laws. They usually look a lot like this one and recount the facts of the case (similar to other court reporting) and the penalty(s) imposed. The reports use technical and passive language. 

While the issue of cause and blame can’t be avoided in these articles, they narrow the focus to legal culpability, thereby downplaying how the employer’s action (or inaction) killed or maimed a worker—in this case, a preventable electrocution due to employer inattention. Typically, the matter is discussed as simply a regulatory violation that’s addressed via a fine—a violation little different than being fined for speeding or jaywalking. What really happened here was involuntary manslaughter.

Finally, we have the human-tragedy frame. These articles typically recount the life story of a dead worker and most often appear around the National Day of Mourning in April. They often include an abbreviated summary of the incident followed by reminiscences about the worker’s interests, character, life history or social roles as told by a family member, friend or co-worker. These reports are highly idiosyncratic but the broad message is that the worker’s injury or death was a tragedy.

There are two key aspects of this frame. The first is that the “tragedy” is often accompanied by the word “accident” and implies the incident was unforeseeable and unavoidable. In this way, the human-tragedy narrative elides any discussion of wrongdoing, cause, or culpability.

Second, the tragedy in these articles is the personal loss and emotional suffering of the families. Focus is taken away from the workplace and put on the workers’ loved ones. In this way, the human-tragedy frame encourages readers to think of the worker, not as a worker, but as a father or son with interests and families--drawing out sympathy but, in doing so, removing the workplace context. Consequently, this frame discourages the reader from linking the human elements of the incident to economic, political, and structural factors giving rise to whatever caused the “tragedy” in the first place.

While each of the three media frames construct a different understanding of workplace injuries, taken together these frames create a meta-frame that guides readers’ understanding of workplace injuries. The four elements to the meta-frame are that injuries and fatalities are (1) isolated events (not part of a pattern) that (2) happen to “others” (generally blue-collar men) for which (3) no one is responsible (except maybe the worker), and thus (4) we ought not be concerned about them.

These conclusions are not true. Injuries are not one-off events. As we saw at the beginning of this talk, they are commonplace. A recent study Jason Foster and I completed found that 1 in 5 workers in Alberta had some kind of workplace injury in 2016 (~400,000 major or minor injuries). And 1 in 11 workers had a serious injury—where they need time off or modified duties.

Injuries don’t just happen to blue-collar men, although they do. They happen to all kinds of workers. We just tend to ignore injuries that happen to white-collar workers and to women because they are less likely to be newsworthy event. Think about the kinds of injuries that that serving staff get—burns, lacerations, chemical reactions, stress, and for women sexual harassment and problems caused by inappropriate footwear. That kind of injury almost never makes the paper.

Injuries all have causes. Typically, an employer structured work in a way that resulted in the injury. These kinds of root causes are often difficult to see. For example, Kelly may have slipped on the wet floor but the real question is why was the floor wet? Did Kelly’s boss lay off the person who maintained the hoses or cheap out on the fittings? That’s the root cause of the injury.

The only time we talk about the cause of injury is to blame the worker, often implicitly: For example, consider this article.



Basically, the newspaper parrots the employer’s assertion that, while the cause of a worker’s death is technically unknown, neither equipment nor training was at fault. The implication here is clearly that the worker made a mistake.

Finally, the meta-framing says we should probably not be worried about work-related injuries—the government has injuries under control. Even though that another injury happened is clear evidence that the state doesn't havinjuries under control.

So what factors explain these patterns of reporting? Well, we asked some reporters and editors just that.

What factors contribute to reporting of work-related injury?

Reporters use frames for four main reasons: three practical and one political.

The first reason is accessibility. A frame helps readers understand the story by presenting it in a familiar way. “A worker died on 50th street today and OHS is investigating” is a well known frame and we hardly have to read the rest of the story to get the gist. It saves the reporter and the newspaper time and space that a more complicated or nuanced report would require. That contributes to the template-style of reporting.

The second is limited knowledge. There are, essentially, no labour reporters left in Canada (the Toronto Star would be the sole exception). Generalists have little knowledge of labour issues and few contacts. So they are highly reliant upon government press releases for notification and information. The government tends to issues releases only when there is a fatality or an injury that dramatic (e.g., explosion or fire). That contributes to the distortion we see in what kinds of injuries are reported at all as well as who the reporters rely upon.

The third is time pressure. Reporters are pushed to get an initial story up online as quickly as possible. Rewriting a press release is the easiest way to do that. They say they have no time to investigate or go to the scene and talk to people. Exceptions are when there are multiple fatalities, such as when two saw mills exploded within a month of each other in BC. Instead, reporters crank out a story and then move onto the next. Only when there is some really unusual event—like the mil explosion—do stories persist through multiple news cycles.

These three factors reflect the work intensification in modern news room. Basically, newspapers are driven by the profit imperative (although you wouldn’t know it if you were a Postmedia shareholder!) so the managers are trying to increase productivity to reduce labour costs to increase profitability.

This leads to the fourth factor that explains the use of templates: newspapers are employers and they an have an interest in maintaining the stability of capitalist social formation. Specifically, they have no desire problematizing workplace injury because it reveals the effects of the profound power imbalance between employers and workers and how employers use that to maximize profitability by externalizing cost on workers in the form of unsafe workplaces and injuries.

Now, occasionally you’ll see an expose that reflects reporter’s personal interest in workplace injury—like we did here in Alberta in the summer of 2015. But day to day, there is rarely condemnation or even note of the injury epidemic in the workplace. Rather, newspapers use stories injuries to sell papers but make sure that there is no link between the stories or delving into the what all of these injuries say about employment.

In the end, though, does any of this matter? Does it affect the public discourse about injuries? The answer is yes.

What effects does reporting have on public discourse?

Before we go into this last section about research we’ve just completed, we need to briefly sort out the idea that the world as socially constructed. The basic nub of social construction is that there is an infinite amount of stimulus in the social world. We select some of it to pay attention to and then we interpret what it means. And what we pay attention to and how we interpret it depends upon our beliefs, values, and experiences.

For example, you’re a female student, you go visit you male prof in his office to ask a question, and he closes the door after you enter. How do you interpret that? Is it a bit a creepy? Or is he just trying to protect your privacy? There’s not really an objective interpretation based on the facts I gave you. How you interpret closing the door depends on your beliefs, values, and experiences.

We typically have two main sources of information about the world. We have our experienced reality—the things we and our friends and families experience personally. And we have symbolic reality—things we know about from the press, government, and other institutions (lobby groups, Wikipedia). We use symbolic reality to supplement our experienced reality to create a shared reality.

If the symbolic reality we are exposed to is biased, it may bias our shared and thus skew what stimulus we select and how we interpret it. For example, most of us have no personal experience with the macro-economic effects of increasing the minimum wage. But we hear from employer lobby groups and conservative politicians via the media that wage increases kill jobs. So we probably view increase in the minimum wage with at least some trepidation.

The reality is that historically there has been virtually no relationship between minimum-wage increases and job losses. But you’d never know that unless you looked very carefully at the academic research (which no one ever does). The point being, media distortions of facts have the potential to skew public perception and impact what public policy options are considered appropriate and acceptable.

So lets come back to injury. Newspapers provide demonstrably distorted coverage of workplace injuries. So it is possible they are skewing public perceptions. That said, the widespread nature of injury also means that most of us have at least some personal experience with injuries. So, that may offer a corrective to offset the distortion. We decided to test this with a survey of 2000 Alberta worker sin 2016. We asked them four questions about the level of injury in Alberta. We then compared their results with government statistics and we compared the answers of those who were injured with the answers of those who weren’t.

We started by asking respondents to estimate the number of serious injuries in Alberta—disabling injuries in WCB terminology. We asked this because most work-related injuries are not reported by newspapers. What we found was that 97.6% of respondents under-estimated the number of serious injuries. Most vastly under-estimated the number of serious injuries. On average, respondents estimated there were 5,545 serious injuries annually (which is about 11 or 12% of the official number) and almost no one estimated higher than 20,000 injuries. 

Personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates so doesn’t appear to be acting as a corrective.

We also asked respondents to estimate the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. We asked about this because newspapers tend to over-report fatalities. The official ratio of was 1 fatality for every 384 serious injuries in Alberta. By contrast, newspapers report three fatalities for every serious injury.

What we found was that the vast majority of respondents over-estimated the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. Respondents’ average estimate was 1 fatality for every 44 serious injuries. This estimate is not as extreme as newspaper coverage but it is still way out of whack with reality. And, again, personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates.

Our third question asked respondents to select from a list of 9 industry groupings the 3 most injurious industries. We asked this because newspaper coverage centres on industries with relatively low injury rates. 

There was significant agreement among respondents (right-hand column) about the most dangerous industries: 91% selected construction, 72% selected mining and petroleum development, and 65% selected agriculture and forestry.

These were the exact same industries that newspapers reported on the most and almost in the same order.

However, the industries with the highest disabling injury rates in Alberta (left-hand column) were entirely different from those selected by respondents and reported on by newspapers. Again, there was no significant difference in the responses between workers who were injured and those who weren’t.

Overall, what these three questions suggest is that workers’ views of injury tended to align with newspaper reports and diverge from the realities of workplace injury. And there was also no evidence that workers’ personal experiences with injury served as any sort of corrective.

The only exception we found to this pattern was in the fourth question, wheh we asked respondents what proportion of all serious injuries were experienced by women. The correct answer in Alberta was 32.7%. 

Overall, the mean answer given by respondents was pretty much bang on the money (33.8%) and men and women were about equally accurate in their estimates.

When you disaggregate the respondents’ answers a bit more nuance appears. There was quite a spread in responses. Only about 17% of respondents estimated the correct percentage (+/-5%). Inaccurate estimates were split evenly between estimating too high and too low.

While respondents weren’t particularly good at estimating the correct percentage, they were more accurate than newspaper reports. Workers’ more accurate estimates may simply reflect that Alberta newspaper reports were so extremely skewed towards injuries to men (91.7%) that workers pretty much couldn’t help but be more accurate.

The upshot of this research is that workers tend to view injury in ways that are consistent with distorted media reports. We can’t infer causality from correlation, but given the theory around social constructivism, the results are strongly suggestive of causality.

Conclusions

So what are the take-aways?

First, media reports of occupational injury paint a distorted picture of how gets injured and how. Second, the frames that are used serve to downplay that this issue is not being effectively regulated by the stat. Third, it is likely that these distortions are skewing the public’s view of injury.

More conjecturally, the absence of accurate information is likely undermining the political verve this issue should have. This takes the heat of policy makers to take meaningful action and allows employers to continue to organize work in unsafe ways—something they do because it is generally more profitable to do so than to make the work safe.

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: Office Drug Testing

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture revisits The Office to look at how employers handle drug use in the workplace. This skit is relevant given that, on October 17, cannabis consumption in Alberta (and elsewhere in Canada) will become legal (with some, still emerging, restrictions).

Alberta’s framework for regulating cannabis use is available online and includes a brief (and vague) discussion of cannabis use by workers:

Impairment in workplaces
Workers who are impaired on the job – whether by alcohol or drugs – are a danger to their coworkers and themselves. Alberta already has rules and programs in place to address impairment on the job and keep workers safe, but we are exploring options to better address all forms of impairment in the workplace, and will continue to work with employers, labour groups and workers to ensure the rules continue to address impairment issues. This may include developing additional regulations, education or training programs.

Employer efforts to randomly test workers for drug use and/or impairment have been a long-standing source of conflict in Alberta. For example, Suncor’s decision to randomly test workers has yielded an extensive amount of litigation since 2012 and the issue remains before an arbitration panel. An overview of this litigation can be found here.

Drug testing entails serious and competing interests. It is often framed as a contest between workers’ right to privacy and employers’ obligation to keep workplaces safe (although the evidence that random testing has any safety effect is basically zero).

The debate about drug testing is often tinged with an underlying moral judgment. It goes something like this: since drug use is illegal, workers who use drugs (on their own time) deserve to experience the workplace consequences associated with testing because they are criminals.

This dynamic is, in part, the premise of the joke in The Office skit above. The legalization of cannabis use undercuts this moralizing and it will be interesting to see how employers handle this change in the law.

-- 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: In Dubious Battle

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture looks at the novel “In Dubious Battle” by George Steinbeck (1936). This books looks at an agricultural workers strike and follows two communist organizers who orchestrate it. It precedes his better-known works such as Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and Cannery Row. James Franco recently released a film adaptation that was poorly received.

Jim Nolan is a new organizer, being shown the ropes by Mac McLeod. They become fruit pickers and jolly along a strike that is brewing because the owners have cut the fruit pickers wages. A more interesting aspect of the novel is watching Mac teach Jim how to mobilize workers through a combination of education and manipulation.

The owners respond in typical ways, using economic pressure, vigilantes, the police and the state (in the form of health regulations) to undermine the strike. The death of a worker at the hands of a vigilante galvanizes the flagging strike.

The owners then up the ante, by shooing Jim, burning buildings, and kidnapping allies of the strikers. Jim is eventually killed, sacrificing himself for his principles (or perhaps the party). Mac uses Jim’s death to further advance the interests of the workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Media influences on worker perceptions of injury

Bring out your dead: Media influence on worker perceptions of injury

Canadian Association for Work and Labour Studies Conference
1 June 2018, Regina
Bob Barnetson, Jason Foster and Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull

What I’d like to talk to you about today is some research I’ve done with my colleagues Jason Foster and Jared Matsunaga-Turnbull. We recently conducted a survey of 2000 Alberta workers that, in part, explored their views on workplace injury.

This research was funded by the Government of Alberta’s OHS Futures Research Grant Program.

We were interested in workers’ views of injury because, over the past few years, several studies have found that Canadian newspapers profoundly mis-represent the frequency and type of workplace injuries that occur as well as which workers experience injuries.

Specifically, newspapers tend to over-report fatalities, they over-report injuries to men, they over-report dramatic injuries, and the over-report injuries in the construction, agriculture, and mining and petroleum industries.

Here’s an example. On the left, you have newspaper reports of workplace injuries in Canada from 2009 to 2014. It shows that 61.2% of reports addressed fatalities. On the right, you have WCB injury stats—which we acknowledge are not perfect stats—that show the fatalities comprise only 0.4% of all serious injuries.



This pattern is replicated in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and BC. It is also consistent in both daily papers (which tend to be urban-based) and weekly papers (which tend to be rural).

An important question this research raises is whether the over-reporting of dramatic injuries to blue-collar men affects the public’s perceptions of injury? If the answer is yes, this has public policy implications because it may negatively affect injury prevention efforts.

One conceptualization of the construction of reality is that we combine our experienced reality—which is our personal experiences and those of our friends and families—with the symbolic reality we’re exposed to—basically what we hear from social groups, institutions, and the media.

That information is combined in our heads to create a shared reality. In that model, the symbolic reality helps flesh out what we know from our personal experiences. Symbolic information containing significant bias might well skew our eventual views on an issue. At the same time, our personal experiences may potentially act as correctives to such bias.

Our suspicion was (and is) that reporting that contains profound biases would skew individual’s perceptions and that their personal experiences might not act as an effective corrective.

To get a sense of whether our hunch was right (and thus warranted further research), we added four questions to an unrelated survey of 2000 non-managerial Alberta workers in the spring of 2017. These questions were designed to determine the degree to which workers’ views aligned with or diverged from media reports. We also queried workers’ gender and personal experiences of workplace injury to see if those experiences had any effect on their answers.

The upshot was that (1) respondents’ views of injury broadly conformed to media representations and (2) the answers of respondents who had experienced injury in the past year were no different from those of workers who had no personal experience of injury.

We started by asking respondents to estimate the number of serious injuries in Alberta—disabling injuries in WCB terminology. We asked this because newspapers report only a tiny minority of all serious injuries.

While it isn’t possible to ascertain the exact number of newspaper articles published about workplace injuries each year, it is possible to locate all that articles that daily and weekly newspapers submit for indexing with FPInfoTrax. In Alberta, that was on average 32 articles per year between 2009 and 2014. By contrast, in 2016, there were 44,543 serious injuries in Alberta.



What we found was that 97.6% of respondents under-estimated the number of serious injuries, most vastly so. On average, respondents estimated there were 5,545 injuries annually (which is about 11 or 12% of the official number) and almost no one estimated higher than 20,000 injuries.

Personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates.

We also asked respondents to estimate the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. We asked about this because newspapers tend to over-report fatalities. The official ratio of was 1 fatality for every 384 serious injuries in Alberta. By contrast, newspapers report three fatalities for every serious injury.



What we found was that the vast majority of respondents over-estimated the ratio of fatalities to serious injuries. Respondents’ average estimate was 1:44.

Again, personal experience of injury had no significant impact on worker estimates.

Our third question asked respondents to select from a list of 9 industry groupings the 3 most injurious industries. We asked this because newspaper coverage centres on industries with relatively low injury rates.



There was significant agreement among respondents (right-hand column) about the most dangerous industries: 91% selected construction, 72% selected mining and petroleum development, and 65% selected agriculture and forestry.

These were the exact same industries that newspapers reported on the most and almost in the same order.

However, the industries with the highest disabling injury rates in Alberta (left-hand column) were entirely different from those selected by respondents and reported on by newspapers. Again, there was no significant difference in the responses between workers who were injured and those who weren’t.

Overall, what these three questions suggest is that workers’ views of injury tended to align with newspaper reports and diverge from the realities of workplace injury. And there was also no evidence that workers’ personal experiences with injury served as any sort of corrective.

The only exception we found to this pattern was in the fourth question, where we asked respondents what proportion of all serious injuries were experienced by women. The correct answer in Alberta was 32.7%.



Overall, the mean answer given by respondents was pretty much bang on the money (33.8%) and men and women were about equally accurate in their estimates.

When you disaggregate the respondents’ answers a bit more nuance appears. Only about 17% of respondents estimated the correct percentage (+/-5%). Inaccurate estimates were split evenly between estimating too high and too low.

While respondents weren’t particularly good at estimating the correct percentage, they were more accurate than newspaper reports. Workers’ more accurate estimates may simply reflect that Alberta newspaper reports were so extremely skewed towards injuries to men (91.7%) that workers pretty much couldn’t help but be more accurate.

Our findings have three main implications.

The first is that workers’ views of workplace injury tend to align more closely with what the media says about workplace injury than with government injury data. Practically speaking, this means that workers’ views of injury frequency and the hazardousness of specific industries are wildly inaccurate.

The second is that workers’ individual experiences of injury appear to have no impact on their perceptions. This sits awkwardly with the usual assumptions about how we construct reality. One possible explanation for this seeming disconnect is that a workers’ personal experience of injury may not have any particular nexus with their estimates of the frequency of injury or the most hazardous industries. That is to say, workers may not generalize from their personal experiences when they consider the risk of injury.

If that is true, workers may then rely heavily on media reports (or some other source of information) to inform their perceptions of injury risk. We think some additional exploration of how workers conceptualize injury and formulate their views of risk would shed some light on that possibility.

Thirdly, that workers have inaccurate views about injury may have public policy implications around injury prevention. For example, if workers, who routinely experience or see workplace injuries, have an overly rosy picture of risk, are the views of the public, employers, and policymakers similarly inaccurate? If so, does this help explain the tendency for governments to underfund and disempower inspectors?

Again, we think some additional research might be fruitful here. Historically, Alberta politicians have tended to downplay the risk of injury, suggesting workplaces are safe and getting safer. It is less clear if the present government holds those views. It is also unclear what government health and safety bureaucrats actually think about injury. And there is simply very little data about public perceptions of workplace injury risk.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Worker-generated memes

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture looks at worker-generated contributions to pop culture—specifically memes. Workers have always generated cultural artifacts (paintings, handbills, poetry, songs, graffiti) about their work.

Social media has given these forms of cultural expression wider circulation. Consider this example, from the Ontario Federation of Labour in response to Tim Horton’s miserly reduction in paid breaks to offset increases in the minimum wage.

The backlash caused (in part) by online campaigns like this one included protests against the franchise across the nation.

The more interest memes are those generated by individual workers. While they are less polished, they often do a good job of conveying a complex idea. For example, consider this criticism of employer efforts to restructure work:

This pretty clearly illustrates that, whatever their mission statements may say about valuing workers, employers' true interests lie in making profits.

More complex dynamics can also be teased out. For example, one way to view health and safety regulations is that they determine the acceptable level at which employers can trade workers’ health (and lives) for profit. When you say it like that, most people roll their eyes and think “communist”. But you can make the same point like this:

This meme clearly conveys the double standard in employment. The state allows employers to main and kill workers (up to point) by setting levels of exposure to hazardous substances. But if workers did the same the same thing to employers, the workers would go to jail. This kind of presentation often resonates with workers and causes them to re-evaluate their views.

Worker generated memes also have the potential to change the minds of employers. For example, employers often complain about and/or undermine (e.g., by stalling) the operation of the grievance process. Filing an unfair labour practice against the employer is one option. Another is to start posting memes such as this in the workplace.

This highlights to employers that there certainly are alternatives to complying with the grievance process. But they aren't necessarily the most desirable options for employer, all told. Overall, I'm very encouraged by the potential utility of memes in labour education.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Darth Vader's Performance Review

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is an audio-skit entitled “Darth Vader's Employee Evaluation. I’ve been incorporating pop-culture representations of human resource management functions into a revision of the intro to HR course that I coordinate because comedy often reveals unspoken truths about the workplace.



The key joke in the skit is the HR advisor asserting that Vader’s constant force-choking of his subordinates is harming the operational effectiveness of the Empire. The advisor’s suggestion of a more encouraging-management style (“maybe give them a pat on the back?”) is greeted with a very honest reply from Vader: “I don’t understand. How would that kill them?”

The workplace dynamic that this skit hits on (although perhaps not intentionally) is that performance management is essentially one arm of the employer trying to get employees to act in a way that is completely illogical to the worker given the broader structure of rewards and penalties in the workplace created by another arm of the employer.

Specifically, the advisor ignores that Vader’s behaviour is a reaction to the pressures of his job. Vader’s own boss does not tolerate failure by his subordinates. Consequently, Vader cannot tolerate failure among his subordinates and behaves accordingly.

Further, punishing space admirals shifts blame for failure (from Vader to them), there are always junior officers available to replace dead space admirals, and punishing employees is way easier in the short-term than working with them to improve their performance.

HR’s unwillingness to recognize the reasons for Vader’s behaviour means that Vader is unlikely to accept their suggestions. An interesting question is what happens to the HR advisor when he subsequently tries to discipline Vader for continuing to force-choke his subordinates?

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Media constructions of migrant workers

Source: http://www.cpcml.ca/OPF2011/OPF01009.HTM

A new study of media representations of migrant workers was recently published in the journal International Migration. “Putting “Canadians First”: Problematizing the Crisis of “Foreign” Workers in Canadian Media and Policy Responses” examines how Canadian newspapers covered migrant workers during a so-called crisis in 2014 (that resulted in a moratorium on migrant workers) and afterward.

Examining 49 front-page articles between January 1, 2015 and August 31, 2016, the article thematically analyzes coverage and identifies two main themes: temporary foreign workers (TFWs) as unwanted and TFWs as vulnerable. Other themes included government mismanagement of the TFW program.

Looking at the articles temporarily, 2014 saw a preponderance of articles exhibiting negative views on TFWs. Essentially, up to the moratorium, newspapers provided an us versus them framing of TFWs. TFWs were specifically framed as replacing Canadian workers, in part by being willing to accept conditions that Canadians would not. Employers were also criticized for offering conditions that they knew no Canadian would accept in order to hire TFWs.

There is a pronounced shift in 2015 (which included the federal election) towards more positive coverage of TFWs. In part this reflected the media turning on the then-Harper government for imposing a moratorium on the basis of super lousy data. Newspaper also began examining the exploitation experienced by TFWs from employers and recruiters.

The study examines how media frames can shape public perceptions of issues as well as how reframing can occur in response to different stimuli.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Mining for Gold

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Mining for Gold”, most famously performed by the Cowboy Junkies. The very haunting song speaks to the human cost associated with mining (specifically hard rock mining).

This song is timely given the death of Barrack Gold founder Peter Munk at the end of March. Munk was widely lauded as a visionary business leader, with lofty ambitions and visionary goals. A look at the record of Barrack Gold is sobering.

And as the company’s mining empire expanded, so too did the social criticism, with accusations of abuse at mines in Papua New Guinea and Tanzania drawing protests and reprimands. 

But Munk was unapologetic, and held fast in his convictions that the company was overall a source of good as part of a globalized world of capitalism. 

“Someone has got to create and generate wealth,” Munk said at his last annual general meeting in 2014.

What the Toronto Sun is avoiding talking about in detail are the gang rapes and shooting of workers at various Barrack mines in the developing world. But at least he generated shareholder value. 

The Beaverton pretty much nailed it with its headline “Barrick Gold entombs fifty foreign miners in Peter Munk’s pyramid so he’ll have workers to abuse in afterlife”

“He was such a generous man,” said a Barrick Gold VP, about the ex-chairman whose company is responsible for dozens of atrocities throughout the world. “He would insist on Barrick Gold giving our miners more violence, more heavy metals in their groundwater, more sexual assault. It’s only fair that in return these fifty men be forced to accompany him to paradise.” … 

In addition to Munk’s compulsory entourage, he will also be buried with a thousand barrels of industrial cyanide so he can poison the hereafter’s freshwater sources, a bulldozer for tearing down the homes of heaven’s indigenous population, and a few hundred million dollars in case he needs to bribe God to look the other way. 

“I thought Peter was crazy when he said he could get away with killing hundreds of people if he also dug up a shiny rock once in awhile,” said one longtime friend and member of the board of directors. “Boy is my face red, not to mention my hands!”

We are miners, hard rock miners
To the shaft house we must go
Pour your bottles on our shoulders
We are marching to the slow

On the line boys, on the line boys
Drill your holes and stand in line
'til the shift boss comes to tell you
You must drill her out on top

Can't you feel the rock dust in your lungs?
It'll cut down a miner when he is still young
Two years and the silicosis takes hold
and I feel like I'm dying from mining for gold

Yes, I feel like I'm dying from mining for gold

-- Bob Barnetson