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 

Climate change and safety: treeplanters and wildfire smoke

A few weeks back, the Tyee ran a story on the effect of increasing levels of wildfire smoke on tree planter OHS. This story is interesting because it looks at the effect of climate change on worker safety.

There are several reasons why this particular hazard and worker group are worth examining:

• Intensity of exposure: Tree planters often work in close proximity to wildfires and their work is physically demanding (increasing respiration and heart rate). Consequently, they are likely to have one of the highest intensities of exposure to wildfire smoke.
• Duration of exposure: In addition to long working days, most tree planters live in camps (e.g., tents) and lack any respite from the smoke in their off hours. This means these workers have a much longer duration of exposure than, say, a worker who might face dust in the workplace but then go home to clean air at the end of the day.
• Lack of specific controls or OELs: There are no specific occupational exposure limits (OELs) for wildfire smoke and general OELs for dust were not designed with wildfire smoke (which has very tiny particles) in mind.
• Latency: Injuries due to inhalation often have long latency periods and murky causality, thus the link between the work exposure and the ill-health can be hard to see.
• Proxy for nonworkers: The exposures experienced by tree planters can be useful in predicting larger population effects caused by increased wildfire effects (essentially the dangerous working conditions experienced by these workers create a natural experiment).
• Compliance: PPE slows tree planting work. Tree planters are generally paid on piece-rate basis. This pay structure basically forces tree planters to trade off their own health against their need to earn an adequate income and almost certainly reduces compliance. Contractors also have production targets, which means they too have an incentive to trade worker safety for profit.

A notable take-away from the article is the complete lack of a regulatory response to the risk posed by wildfire smoke. WorkSafeBC acknowledges the risk but can’t be arsed to issue any directives. Alberta’s OHS minister couldn’t even be bothered to respond to the reporter. This likely reflects regulatory capture of regulators by the forestry industry.

By contrast, Oregon and California require air quality monitoring and the availability of respirators when air quality gets to a specific point. This doesn’t mean these controls are adequate, but they are at least something.

-- Bob Barnetson

Money Shot: The Pornhub Story

Netflix is currently airing a documentary titled Money Shot: The Pornhub Story. This documentary examines, among other things, the way in which this enormous online clearinghouse of porn makes money and its relationship with content providers. The documentary touches on a number of themes that are examined in LBST 415: Sex Work and Sex Workers, including:

• Safety and Control: The documentary highlights that many content providers (some of whom identify as sex workers) find that the subscription services offered by Pornhub dramatically increases their safety and increases the predictability of their work. These beneficial changes for these sex workers are consistent with the benefits that accrue to sex workers from decriminalization of sex work in other jurisdictions, such as New Zealand.
• Who Profits: Like other businesses, Pornhub exists to make money. And, like other businesses, its profitability has often been driven, in part, by some fairly objectionable business practices. The sex workers who participate in its subscription service (essentially as independent contractors) note that their income, when compared to working as an actor for a production company, is often much greater (one example is a threefold increase). Tactics designed to apply market pressure to Pornhub (see below), have forced some to move to other platforms or return to less safe and remunerative forms of sex work.
• Sex Work and Trafficking: An ongoing issue with Pornhub (and other online porn providers) is the sharing of videos that are various ways unlawful (e.g., filmed without consent, containing minors, depicting crimes). Campaigns seeking to regulate such videos often intentionally blur the distinction between unlawful and lawful porn, much like campaigns against sex work(ers) will frame sex work as sex trafficking. The popularity of this tactic speaks to its effectiveness.
• State Regulation: The documentary looks are two efforts to regulate Pornhub. The first is state regulation (akin to the legalization, but not decriminalization, of sex work) aimed at addressing unlawful pornography. These efforts (primarily in the US) had the effect of deplatforming sex workers, cutting their income and forcing some to return to much less safe street-based sex work. The effectiveness of this regulation at eliminating unlawful pornography appears limited. One unexpected effect appears to be that the creators and distributors of unlawful pornography have become more circumspect and difficult to catch. 
• Market Regulation: The second approach to regulating Pornhub (and other such sites) has been through market pressure. Essentially, the financial sector (e.g., credit card companies) has been pressured to restrict billing services. This has disproportionately impacted sex workers whop are dependent upon these billing arrangements. Many have fled to other platforms (such as OnlyFans) which have been (for reasons not well explained in the documentary) more resistant to this form of pressure.

Overall, the documentary was pretty engaging. An interesting twist at about the halfway mark is the backstory reveal around one of the organizations that has campaigned against Pornhub (spoiler: Jesus!) and its actual agenda and activities.

-- Bob Barnetson

Blue-collar work and the Kenney government

CBC recently ran a very interesting first-person account from a Calgary welder about his experiences in the oil-and-gas sector. You can read the piece here. The nub of the account is that working conditions for welders in the sector are poor and are driving workers away. It is an interesting and well-written piece.

I flag it for a couple of reasons. One of the more tedious talking points of the Kenney government is that there is some kind of esteem gap between white-collar and blue-collar occupations. The gist of the narrative is that people (e.g., students, parents, teachers, and workers) think they are too good to do a blue-collar job (so basically it is a worker-blaming narrative, not all that different than equally ridiculous assertion that people no longer want to work).

Like most things Jason Kenney said as premier, there isn’t really any evidence that this esteem gap exists. (The two people I have been happiest to see in my life are an ER doc and a plumber, and not necessarily in that order.) Rather, this putative esteem-gap is just a dog-whistle pretext designed to justify increasing investment in skilled trades training and reduced investment in university education. Why would Kenney do that?

Well, Kenney’s actions as a federal minister suggest he often assists employers to minimize labour costs buy flooding the labour market with workers (think back to the temporary foreign worker deluge of 2008-12). Increasing the number of skilled trades people allows employers to suppress demands for better wages and working conditions because there is always a surplus of workers.

The first-person account of working in a welding shop in the oil-and-gas industry unintentionally highlights a number of structural reasons that workers may be reluctant to engage in blue-collar work (that have nothing to do with people thinking they are too good for that work):

• Job demands: The author flags that the work is difficult, dangerous, and often entails working in unpleasant conditions at odd times. Workers are often unwilling or unable to work in these conditions. This has historically constrained the labour force and driven up wages. Corporations have responded in many ways to reduce labour costs, such as automation, off-shoring, and subcontracting work.
• Insecurity: The oil-and-gas sector has organized work in ways that externalizes risk onto workers (in the form of layoffs and wage cuts) to maximize corporate profitability. The author notes that one new and very skilled worker had soured on the industry after three layoffs in five years. (This insecurity also a key barrier to apprentices completing their training, but note that Kenney’s training announcements never engage with this issue.)
• Restructuring: The author notes that austerity, tax cuts, and rising energy prices had made him hopeful that his job would have more security. This didn’t happen because trickle-down economics (which is what he’s talking about) doesn’t work. Very crudely speaking, if you give wealthy individuals and corporations additional income (through tax cuts), they don’t create jobs with it: they just horde it. By contrast, policies that raise wages for low-income workers do create new jobs because low-income workers spend the money and that creates demand (and new jobs).

In the end, the author acknowledges that working in the industry used to provide a stable living but no longer does. Not surprisingly, he leaves the industry to teach high-school kids welding skills and all but two members of his original crew either quit or were laid off.

So, what can we learn from this:

• Employers care about profit and treat workers instrumentally. If there is a way to increase profit and the effect is to make workers’ lives worse, employers will do so. This is particularly the case when there is a surplus of workers so the workers have little labour market power to exert.
• Governments, especially conservatives ones, are typically happy to help employers create a loose labour market that worsens wages and working conditions. To stifle dissent about policies that are actually screwing the workers who comprise the bulk of the electorate, governments will happily invent or manipulate facts. No one wants to work. People think they are too good for blue-collar work. And so forth. 
• Workers are often unable or unwilling to incorporate this dynamics into their analysis of how the world works. Instead, they will cheer-lead policies that harm their interests (e.g., tax cuts and austerity that destroy the public services they depend upon) in the hope they will see greater stability or a modest wage increase. They will also adopt explanatory narratives that blame workers (people look down in the trades) while ignoring that workers may well be making rational and well-informed choices about what job options are best for them.

Even a modest amount of critical thinking raises some pretty profound questions about these narratives. Why, for example, might workers not be keen to take certain jobs? Is it because they are innately lazy or think too highly of themselves or are misinformed? Or is it because the jobs are organized in ways that make them, relatively speaking, difficult, unstable, and poorly paid, and thus workers don’t see them as a good choice? Are there impediments (such a childcare availability and shift work) that make it impossible or uneconomical for workers to take these jobs?

This kind of questioning is typically taught in the liberal arts, which is the exact kind of education that the Kenney government has aggressively defunded. That is probably not a coincidence.

-- Bob Barnetson

Should I take a job at Athabasca University?

Every year, I receive phone calls from a couple of dozen candidates considering taking a job at Athabasca University (AU). Usually, these folks find me through this blog or word of mouth.

So, as the academic job-hunting season begins, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write down the pros and cons of taking a job at AU. These comments are mostly directed at folks considering a professorial job.

PROS

Working from home: Pre-pandemic, the vast majority of academic staff worked from home offices). Although the majority of staff live in Alberta, recently staff have been permitted to work anywhere in Canada. This means you can stay in your home community. 

At the time of writing, the university’s Board is engaged in an ill-chosen bun fight with the provincial government over the ongoing loss of jobs in the town of Athabasca (where the university’s headquarters is located). The government wanted, at one point, 65% of staff to work from there (despite there being inadequate housing stocks and office space). It is unclear how this dispute is going to play out or how it will affect where academic staff can live. You’ll definitely want to ask about this in your interview.

Setting your own schedule: For the most part, instruction at AU is asynchronous and text mediated. Since you don’t have to appear at a fixed time each week to lecture, you can largely set your own schedule. Start early or late. Work in the middle of the night. Take your kids to school or you mom to the doctor. As long as you get your work done and show up for the small number of fixed meetings, you basically can organize your life however you want.

Good benefits and pension plans: The benefits plan for faculty is pretty good, particularly in terms of vision, eyecare, and drug coverage (although costs are reimbursed, not pre-paid).

The pension plan is also pretty good, although you’ll pay about 11% of your salary into the plan. You can collect a full pension when (1) you are at least 55, and (2) your age and years of services equal 80. A full pension is 70% of your average salary during your five best consecutive years of employment. You can take a reduced pension any time after 55 if you have not yet met the 80 factor.

Tenure and promotion is the norm: The vast majority of hires (>99%) can expect to get tenure and promotion. Based on my 18 years of experience, I’d go so far as to say you have to actively and repeatedly fuck-up not to get tenured. That is not to say you don’t have to work—just that the bar is set at a very manageable level.

Faculty are typically hired with a four-year probationary appointment. After a successful review, you receive tenure. You can choose when to apply for promotion in rank. If you apply for and receive promotion before your tenure review, then you also automatically get tenure. Promotion is also rarely denied although the process is more rigorous than just tenure.

Financial stability: AU is financially stable (despite a history of the administration crying insolvency). In 2021/22, AU posted a surplus of $10.4m on expenses of $150.6m. This was the sixth straight surplus and ninth surplus in 10 years. AU has an accrued surplus (i.e., cash in the bank) of $46.9m.

Government funding of AU has been stable over the past few years. Only about 35% of institutional revenue comes from grants (the largest chunk is tuition based). Enrollments have been falling (about 9% per year for last two years) but the nature of AU’s business model is that the costs of revenue losses due to declining enrollment are borne mostly by the tutor pool (i.e., permanent, part-time academics with variable teaching loads).

CONS

Poor wages: Overall, wages are low and have fallen significantly behind inflation. The table below compares the compounded cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) to faculty wages and Alberta inflation from 2013 to 2022. Basically, the purchasing power of staff wages at AU has dropped by ~20% over 10 years.

Going forward, the COLA for adjustment for 2023 will total between 2.75% and 3.25%. Unfortunately, inflation is presently running about 8%, so expect another big loss in purchasing power.

Compounding the erosion of purchasing power is that starting salaries in nominal dollars are roughly the same as they were in 2007. There is also evidence of a gender wage gap (but zero interest by the institution in addressing it). While the institution will often say that salaries are negotiable, in practice that is not the case.

Poor Treatment and Low Morale: The treatment of staff by the university is, in a word, awful. I’ve been on the union grievance committee for a decade. While I can’t tell you everything I’ve seen, here are a few illustrative examples of how individual staff have been treated:

• AU knew it disciplined staff member improperly but took no action to fix. 
• AU accused a staff member of faking sick leave while his spouse was dying of cancer 
• AU forced a staff member to delay maternity leave or lose their sabbatical. 
• AU terminated nurses’ market supplements during a pandemic with no notice and then denied they were doing so. 
• AU dissolved a promotion committee with no cause 
• AU re-opened its campuses with no effective COVID protocols in place

Over the past five years, the employer has twice driven collective bargaining to impasse and the verge of a strike by demanding huge concessions. In between those rounds of bargaining, the employer also tried union busting with an effort to carve two-thirds of the union’s members out of the bargaining unit (and thus out of the pension plan).

The most recent survey of staff (Spring 2022) by the faculty association finds only 20% of staff trust the senior executive and only 39% agree with the statement that “my morale is high.” The employer no longer does staff surveys because the results were so consistently bad.

Workloads have also gone up, particularly for administrative staff, due to COVID. More subjectively, I’m seeing a widespread withdrawal of citizenship behaviours and effort by my colleagues. Essentially, they are realizing AU doesn’t care for them and are (understandably) reciprocating in kind. The upside is the union is tenacious, fights hard, and has strong member support.

Isolation: Working from home with essentially no in-person contact with co-workers or students is extremely isolating and may not be for everyone. Further, AU has no functional orientation process for new staff and most of the institution’s processes do not operate in the way that the various policies and procedures (often decades old) say that they do.

COVID has limited the opportunity for staff to meet socially (which is how we used to cope with the isolation and get our questions answered). In theory, more experienced colleagues in your area should provide you with an orientation and social introductions. In practice, the experiences of new hires is very uneven.

So, with those thoughts and the poor state of the academic job market in mind, one approach to a job offer might be:

• if you have no other option, take the AU job but stay on the market, and
• if you have other options, give the pros and cons of AU very careful thought.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Documentary on 9-to-5 Movement

Netflix is presently showing a documentary entitled 9to5: The Story of a Movement. This documentary traces the development of the 9 to 5 social movement that began foregrounding unfair working conditions for women office workers in the United States (initially in Boston) in the early 1970s. This movement was the inspiration for the 1980 comedy of the same name (which holds up pretty well and, sadly, is still topical, 40 years later).

One of the narrative arcs of the film explores how the 9 to 5 movement transitions from a social movement into a union (Local 925) as the workers sought to formalize and entrench the gains they had made. This includes following a union organizing campaign (in Cincinnati I think, but it may have been Seattle) through an initial defeat and subsequent victory. It also examines how the attack on labour by US business and government in the 1980s affected Local 925.

-- Bob Barnetson

Sugaring and sex work

A few years back, Briarpatch magazine did an interesting piece on sex workers working around the closure of online sites to connect with clients by American legislation, such as the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act. One website that continued to function was “Seeking Arrangements”, which connected sex workers and clients in longer term arrangements (often called sugardaddying/babying).

One interesting aspect of the article is that it explores this form of sex work in the content of precarious work (or the gig economy), noting how the criminalization of sex work intensifies the exploitability of these workers. The framing of sugarbabying as “dating” is also used to reduce the income of these sex workers.

“I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but sugar babies should just hook,” [said] … . “They make less money than escorts. I want them to make more than they do.”

Essentially, argues the article, clients seek to manipulate sex workers into taking a lower wage. And the atomizing nature of sugaring sites means it is difficult for sex workers to share info about wage rates or unsafe clients.

-- Bob Barnetson

Working conditions in meat plants

John Oliver recently did an interesting piece on working conditions in meat-packing plants. These working conditions are broadly similar to those in Alberta plants.

These conditions are an important factor in the repeated outbreaks of COVID at these plants. Close proximity, relentless pace, and no breaks are pretty common. Workers get injured often and seriously and receive inadequate medical care. Many workers are vulnerable workers, whose residency in the country may be at risk if they get fire. Others have few options for comparable jobs.

 

Alberta’s response to COVID outbreaks in meatpacking plants have basically been ineffective (kind of like Alberta’s broader response to COVID). Which is why we’ve seen outbreaks in plants High River, Calgary, Red Deer, and Brooks. The High River outbreak was one of the largest outbreaks in Canada. Workers and their family members have died. There has been community spread due to ineffective workplace controls.

 

-- Bob Barnetson

 

 

The paradox of small business

I'm not much for podcasts but the Alberta Advantage podcast (basically lefty political economy analysis out of Calgary) is often worth a listen. This episode provides an interesting analysis of the role of small business in society. 

Specifically, the episode examine the valourization of small business and how that is used to run cover for capitalists. For example, when big business advocates for lower wages, they get pilloried as greedy. When small business advocates for lower wages, the conversation is almost always framed around helping "job creators" in the local community stay afloat.

The episode also interrogates the actual track record of small businesses with regard to workplace safety and wage theft (spoiler: lousy, often made worse by the precarious employment that they offer). And it explores how the media flips the narrative on things like wage theft by bosses to time theft by workers in order to obscure how shitty some employers are.

Finally, the episode (like most of their episodes) spends a few minutes calling out the provincial NDP for their opportunist boosterism around small business, generally to the detriment of the interests of workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

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

Labour and Pop Culture: The A-Team.

No, not that A Team.

This week we start our first enrollment in LBST 415: Sex Work and Sex Workers. One of the topics that the course touches on is the roll that addictions can play in the decision to engage in sex work.

While there are lots of depictions of sex work in pop culture (e.g., Pretty Woman), a particularly nuanced one is Ed Sheeran’s “The A Team”. The song is about a sex worker (named Angel) who is addicted to cocaine (a class A drug in the UK, hence the A Team) and was living at a homeless shelter when Sheeran met her.

White lips, pale face
Breathing in snowflakes
Burnt lungs, sour taste
Light's gone, day's end
Struggling to pay rent
Long nights, strange men

And they say
She's in the Class A Team
Stuck in her daydream
Been this way since eighteen
But lately her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us
'Cause we're just under the upper hand
And go mad for a couple grams
And she don't want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland
Or sells love to another man
It's too cold outside
For angels to fly
Angels to fly

Ripped gloves, raincoat
Tried to swim and stay afloat
Dry house, wet clothes
Loose change, bank notes
Weary-eyed, dry throat
Call girl, no phone

And they say
She's in the Class A Team
Stuck in her daydream
Been this way since eighteen
But lately her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
And they scream
The worst things in life come free to us
'Cause we're just under the upper hand
And go mad for a couple grams
And she don't want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe she flies to the Motherland
Or sells love to another man
It's too cold outside
For angels to fly
An angel will die
Covered in white
Closed eye
And hoping for a better life
This time, we'll fade out tonight
Straight down the line

And they say
She's in the Class A Team
Stuck in her daydream
Been this way since eighteen
But lately her face seems
Slowly sinking, wasting
Crumbling like pastries
They scream
The worst things in life come free to us
And we're all under the upper hand
Go mad for a couple grams
And we don't want to go outside tonight
And in a pipe we fly to the Motherland
Or sell love to another man
It's too cold outside
For angels to fly
Angels to fly
To fly, fly
For angels to fly, to fly, to fly
For angels to die

-- Bob Barnetson

Film: American Factory

Netflix has recently released a new documentary entitled American Factory. This film chronicles the opening of a branch plant of Fuyao Glass America in economically depressed Dayton, Ohio by a Chinese billionaire. The location has previously been the site of a General Motors plant that was closed, putting thousands of workers out of a job.

The documentary (which notably includes no narration) tracks the first two years of the factory's operations and the clash of cultures that it entails. A trip to China for American workers--and the failure of the management strategies that they tried to bring back--was particularly striking. The vulnerability of the local workforce to exploitation and their awareness of their vulnerability is nicely captured.

The film explores the relentless work of employers to shed jobs and increase productivity (regardless of the cost to workers). It also does a nice job of exploring the tactics of both the union and the employer during a union drive.

-- Bob Barnetson

In Search of Professor Precarious fundraiser

Sessionals at MacEwan University celebrate winning greater rights.

A documentary film about precarious employment in post-secondary education has just launched a crowdfunding campaign.

In Search of Professor Precarious will take viewers into the lives of contract faculty, and tells their compelling stories. 

The film includes interviews with precarious contract faculty, permanent faculty, students, administrators, activists and experts. It also shows artists in action, an outdoor biology class on the shores of Nova Scotia, and the biggest higher education strike in Canadian history unfold.

The film makers have received support from National Film Board, unions OPSEU, CUPE and CUPE 3911, associations CAFA, FPSE, and ACIFA and faculty associations ULFA, AASUA and APTUO. They are seeking an additional $15,000 in donations to finish the film and cover the costs of both post-production (e.g., editing, sound mix, music) and develop promotional material.

-- Bob Barnetson

Superstore: Unions and Undocumented Workers

In late May, the TV show Superstore wrapped up another season. I’ve written about Superstore before because they had a very interesting union storyline a few years back as well as some hilarious staff training videos.

This finale had a three-episode story arc. Cloud 9’s corporate office grinds workers’ hours which leads store management to publish photos of the gross effects on store cleanliness in order to get more hours. This leads to a disciplinary investigation and the firing of a worker (meek weirdo Sandra). Sandra then becomes a union stalwart and starts organizing. Cloud 9 then targets the store for closure.



There are three really interesting moments in the final two episodes:

1. There is a depiction of a union organizing meeting. Although the meeting is played for laughs, this is the first mainstream depiction of a union organizing meeting that I can recall on TV.

2. During the meeting, one employee argues against organizing by highlighting how vulnerable the workers are and maybe they should just be happy with the pittance they have. This part of the meeting is played straight and it has the effect you would expect on the union drive.



3. A part of its union-busting, Cloud 9 contacts ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) to raid its own store. This is expected to be disruptive to the workers’ solidarity as well as terrify them. This is where the episode takes a dark, dark turn for undocumented worker Mateo.



Interestingly, the ICE raid seems to solidify support for the union. We’ll have to wait until the fall to see how this plotline plays out. But this story line returns Superstore towards the kind of critical comedy that we saw in shows like Archie Bunker.

-- Bob Barnetson

Edmonton Public Library flirts with cutting teens' wages

Alberta’s minimum wage for youth under 18 will be reduced tomorrow as part of a broad series of labour-law rollbacks enacted by the new United Conservative government. The short of it is that workers under 18 and enrolled in school will have a minimum wage of $13 per hour, instead of the $15 per hour earned by everyone else.

Some employers have publicly pledged to continuing paying youth the same wage as adults. Others are quietly rolling back wages. The first public case of a rollback was (oddly) the Edmonton Public Library.

Background

The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) has a pretty good reputation as a library system and its staff provides wonderful services, often to vulnerable populations. The EPL also contributes to and is committed to important democratic principles such as intellectual freedom: “Intellectual Freedom protects your right to read, listen, write and speak your beliefs and opinions – and everyone has the right to have an opinion or hear an opinion on any topic. ”

EPL’s collective agreement with CSU 52 set the wages of its youth pages at the minimum wage plus an additional premium (between 15% and 25%). On June 10, the EPL emailed its youth ages to tell them that it would be reducing their wages between $2.30 and $2.50 an hour because the provincial government has reduced the youth minimum wage.

Staff were told verbally not to “gossip” about this wage rollback and to direct questions or concerns directly to management. This suggests the EPL’s commitment to intellectual freedom extends only to its customers, not its employees. Despite efforts to contain news of this rollback to within the library, word got around.

Timeline and Messaging

On June 12, when queried about the rollback, the library’s talking points were essentially these:

As some background, EPL employs youth workers under 18 as Student Pages in our libraries. These positions are unionized and their wages are outlined through a letter of understanding with Civic Service Union 52. 

The Government of Alberta has instituted a new youth minimum wage of $13 per hour for students under the age of 18. This will come into effect Wednesday, June 26 and our Student Pages will be affected by it. This is because rates of pay for a Student Page are tied to the minimum wage as established by the Government of Alberta.

In short, the library sought to place responsibility for the change on the government and on the EPL’s collective agreement with CSU 52. In these talking points, the EPL appears to lack agency or choice.

In the early hours of June 13, local blogger David Climenhaga published a sharp critique of the EPL, noting that the EPL could indeed negotiate a solution that precluded a wage cut. By 8 am, the library’s talking points had shifted:

I do wish to let you know though, that EPL is currently open for bargaining with Civic Service Union 52 and through negotiations will be discussing further.

This suggests that the EPL had some choice but things are still constrained by its bargaining relationship with CSU 52 (with which it was bargaining). At this point, criticism of the EPL began to pick up on twitter, with long-time library supporters expressing shock and disappointment. Traditional media also began to ask questions. After lunch, CSU 52 then made a chippy post (since removed) about its dismay with the EPL’s behaviour.

By the afternoon, the library had reversed course. A statement on the EPL website indicated, in part:

The Edmonton Public Library (EPL) would like to acknowledge feedback we’ve received regarding our Student Page positions and the impact of recently announced changes to student minimum wage rates in Alberta. As part of our Collective Agreement with Civic Service Union 52 (CSU 52), Student Page wages are based on a premium applied to the provincial minimum wage set by the Government of Alberta. 

EPL is proud to have ongoing roles specifically for high school students under the age of 18. We value our Student Pages as evidenced by our commitment to paying a premium over the minimum wage. 

EPL will begin bargaining with CSU 52 shortly to negotiate a new Collective Agreement. Generally, changes to language contained in the Collective Agreement are done through the bargaining process which involves EPL working collaboratively with CSU 52 to make any amendments. 

Fortunately, EPL has not implemented this proposed change, and after further discussion, EPL and CSU 52 have come to an agreement to maintain current Student Page wages rates until negotiation of the new Collective Agreement is complete. As a result, there will be no changes to Student Page wages at this time ($17.25 - $18.75 per hour). 

Thank you for voicing your opinions and asking us to find a solution.

In this set of messages, the EPL is still the victim of circumstance but is now also a responsive employer that values the workers whose wages it was going to cut.

CSU then replaced its critical post with one outlining how it cooperated with the library to resolve the issue. The EPL then went on a twitter offensive, individually pushing its resolution messaging out to everyone who made a critical comment. This generated mostly praise and relief, with a few tweets querying what the library had been thinking in the first place.

Analysis

Although this case relies solely on public documents, there are some conclusions we can draw. These include:

1. Intentional decision: The partial paper trail that I have seen suggests this decision was both intentional and well enough thought through that there was plan to mitigate reputational harm. In light of this, it is reasonable to conclude that the EPL decided the benefits of reducing teens’ wages (e.g., cost savings, leverage over CSU 52 at the bargaining table) outweighed the costs of acting to maintain wages.

2. Pressure worked: Concerted public pushback caused the EPL to reverse its decision about reducing youth wages. The EPL may have been particularly sensitive to reputational harm because reputation is an important asset, particularly as the EPL tries to raise money to complete the renovation of the Milner library. Whether other employers are equally vulnerable to reputational harm is an open question.

3. Incremental response: The EPL’s response changed over the course of two days from defending the change to reversing it. I would suggest the mounting criticism among library patrons and supporters caused this (eventual) reversal. Absent continued criticism, I suspect the library would not have reversed its decision but instead would have tried to communicate the problem away.

4. Inconsistent messaging: The EPL’s messaging started out claiming the EPL had little agency (caught between the union and the government). By the end, the EPL had worked out a fix. This fix was available from the get go. What was missing was the political will to achieve it.

5. All smiles: Both the EPL and CSU 52 are now touting their agreement as a good news story and CSU has revised it public statement. This “nice-nice” behaviour elides the conflict they had during the dust up.

6. Organized labour's absence: Alberta’s unions were notable absent in this push back. To be fair, they were focused on opposing Bill 9, which attacks wage settlements. But unions are large organizations that can attend to multiple problems. This was a missed opportunity for labour to support a vulnerable and sympathetic group negatively affected by government policies. This “poster-child” dynamic is important. For example, the 1995 laundry workers strike in Calgary was an important turning point in blunting Ralph Klein’s enthusiasm for further wage rollback.

-- Bob Barnetson

Some labour implications of the Final Report of MMIWG Inquiry

A few weeks back, the final report from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman and Girls was released. While I haven't finished reading the report yet, Volume 1a contains two sections of particular interest to human resource and labour relations.

The first section is a deep dive into the relationship between resource-extraction projects and violence against Indigenous women and children (starting on page 584). The report specifically examines the impact of transient (or migrant) workers on receiving communities and their citizens as well as workplace harassment, shift work, additions and economic insecurity. The nub of it is that the structure of employment associated with these projects creates and/or amplifies negative consequences for Indigenous women and children.

The second section is a deep dive into the sex industry (starting on page 656), in which Indigenous women and girls are often participants. This section does a nice job of capturing the nuances of sex work and the impact Canada’s colonial legacy has on the dynamics of sex work. It also highlights the importance of an intersectional analysis when examining how individuals experience sex work.

-- Bob Barnetson

Video: Sex work and sex workers

I’m currently working with a subject matter expert to develop and launch a course about sex work and sex workers (LBST 415). I'd guess we are about a year from launch, but who knows. In the interim, this video does a nice job of introducing the topic of sex work (specific to the UK).

 -- Bob Barnetson

On the Move: Stories of Mobile Work

One of the long-term research projects I’ve been involved with is the On the Move partnership, which examines economic-related geographic mobility (ERGM). The project is wrapping up and two new knowledge translation activities have recently rolled out.

The first is another episode of Ideas on CBC radio. This episode reports some of the findings of the series and the link includes other episodes of Ideas that have covered the project. These include the experiences of young migrant workers in Banff and live-in caregivers in Fort McMurray and the impact of the wildfire.

The second is a set of stories produced by the Alberta team which captures the stories of migrant workers in Alberta. There are stories of Indigenous, interprovincial, and international migration. My own work has mostly been with international workers and the stories (which are composites) reflect that:

• Carlos: A Gautemalan temporary foreign worker in the meatpacking industry who transitions to permanent residency.
• Anong: A Thai worker comes to Canada and experiencing human trafficking.
• Eugene: A Ukrainian migrant worker who stays on after his work permit expires and becomes undocumented.
• Gabriela: A Mexican agricultural worker struggles to assert her reproductive rights on a mushroom farm.
• Ashok: An Indian migrant worker struggles to work and live in rural Alberta.
• Reyna: A Filipina caregiver flees the Fort McMurray wildfire and sees her dreams of family reunification put on hold. 

These stories highlight the exploitation and vulnerability of migrant workers. It is not that they lack agency or understanding, but they are trapped within profoundly exploitative immigration regimes. These stories will be included as learning elements in a new course I'm writing, LBST 325: Mobile work and migrant workers.

-- Bob Barnetson

Report identifies failing in Caregiver program

A week ago, a coalition of groups released a report addressing shortcomings in Canada’s existing Caregiver Program. This program brings foreign nationals to Canada to work on a temporary basis providing care for children, the elderly and persons with disabilities. After 24 months of work, the caregivers can then apply for permanent residency.

The existing Caregiver program is set to expire in November of 2019. The coalition identifies a number of issues with the current program:

1. It defines caregiving as a temporary labour market need when, in fact, there is an ongoing need for caregivers (as witnessed by the ~5000 new caregivers who come to Canada each year).
2. The program requirements separates caregivers from their own families, often for years.
3. The structure of the program makes it almost impossible for caregivers to leave bad jobs, such as where there is economic exploitation or abuse.
4. The pathway to permanent residency contains a hard cap on the number of caregivers who may become permanent residents (which is the primary attraction of the program for workers) that is set at about half of the number of caregivers who are allowed into the country each year. Consequently, there is a huge backlog of applications.
5. Some of the requirements for permanent residency (language and education) are assessed only after caregivers have already been employed on a temporary work permit for two years. Other requirements (medical exam) are repeated.

The report also contains recommendations for actions and is well worth a read.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Organized labour support for minimum-wage increases

Last week, I shared a preliminary analysis of the arguments and discursive strategies used by business lobby groups to oppose the minimum wage. This week, I’d like to wrap up this series by examining the narratives and strategies used by organized labour to support the increase.

I found 9 statements by the Alberta Federation of Labour (AFL). I selected the AFL because it is a labour central representing 29 unions tat, in turn, represent approximately 175,000 workers.

AFL spokespersons advanced a consistent narrative about increasing the minimum wage, asserting that raising the minimum wage:

1. did not cost jobs,
2. did increase spending and employment,
3. was not a youth issue but affected adults, specifically women and families
4. remedied poverty, and
5. was the subject of fear mongering by self-interested employers.

The AFL mostly employed very similar narratives and discursive strategies as government MLAs, relying primarily upon instrumental rationalization and moral evaluation. Two differences are of note. First, the AFL also used impersonal authorization when it used academic research to undercut claims that the minimum wage resulted in job losses:

There is a considerable and growing body of evidence showing that the negative economic effects of minimum wage increases are negligible, while the impact of lower-income people having more money in their pockets is quite considerable. The evidence ranges from a classic 1990 study by researchers David Card and Alan Krueger; a 2010 examination of fast-food restaurants; to the 2014 British Low Pay Commission, which concluded “minimum wages boost workers’ pay, but don’t harm employment.” (AFL, 2015, p. 1)

Second, AFL statements often aggressively attacked opponents of the minimum wage hike:

Predictably, Restaurants Canada launched a campaign today opposing Alberta’s plan to increase the minimum wage to $15 by 2018. Unfortunately with industry groups like Restaurants Canada it is never the time for meaningful increases to the minimum wage (AFL, 2016a, p. 1).

[Q:] Aren’t low wage employers just trying to keep their doors open and create opportunities for workers? 

A: That’s what they want people to believe. But the track record of some of these employers and lobbyists suggests they’re much more interested in keeping wage low than in creating and maintaining jobs. These are the same guys who always say the sky is falling whenever any provincial government even whispers about increasing the minimum wage. And, in many cases, they’re the same people who made extensive use of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) to displace Canadians and keep wages artificially low. After years of focusing on self-interest, why should we believe they’re suddenly concerned about the public interest? (AFL, 2016b, p. 3)

While government MLAs and the AFL both used similar narratives about minimum wage increases discursive strategies, the difference in tone creates a sword (AFL) and shield (MLAs) dynamic. There is no clear evidence of coordination between the government and the AFL and this dynamic may simply reflect independent and rational communication choices by each party. The small number of statements in the dataset suggest that this analysis should be treated with caution.

My research project on this topic is now turning to analysis of the media coverage of Alberta’s minimum-wage increase—something I expect will take a few months to complete. Comments on this research are welcomed.

-- Bob Barnetson