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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: 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

Presentation: Science fiction and organized labour

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

Labour & Pop Culture: The Factory Witches of Lowell

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

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson, Worker 889398

Unions and the USS Enterprise

A friend passed me this 1977 song about organizing a union on the USS Enterprise (ST:TOS). The absence of unions in Star Trek (excepting one episode of Deep Space 9) is quite notable. This song moots how a Starfleet crew might be induced to organize and how this would affect ship operations.




Listen and I'll tell you a tale I've been told

Of a union organizer who knocked a starship cold They met where the stars are squattered thin out along the galactic rim And starfleet command is sorry that they ever ran into him Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Now the ship was patrolling rim stars when she got a call for aid And up come a local convoy in a hurried grim parade Saying Captain we've caught a monster whose far much for us by far So take him and throw him into the heart of the nearest star Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Just why do you need a whole convoy the Captain wished to know Three ships to guard the other less decrepit as we go Now the Captain was intrigued and he said stand by for scan But all that showed on the viewing screen was little ol'union man Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man The Captain said I can take him and he beamed the man aboard The convoy turned and raced away crying Thank the Lord Then the Captain looked him over asking just what's going on That they sent out half their trading fleet just to make sure you were gone. Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man The little old man just chuckled saying Captain don't you know My job is organizing wherever I may go And I can build a union out of anything you got And the folks that run that planet well they disliked that a lot Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man I first organized the laborers Then i unionized the clerks Then i unionized the robots that staffed the atomic works But when I organized the milk cows and led them out on strike Well you can guess what official reaction to that was like Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Amazing said the Captain but you cant do that in here My crew are loyal navy men and we've no cause for fear But he heard the old man saying as he walked out the door Captain, yano, there have so been navy unions before Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Well the Captain soon forgot him setting course for starbase five For all he saw the union man he might not ever of been alive Till a troubled ensign asked him 'is it true sir what they say? That we've got high hazard duty without high hazard pay?' Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Well the Captain couldn't answer except to say its true Starfleet could pay you better but there's not much I can do But when he woke up next morning he found out what moral was like For the bridge was filled with pickets and the whole crew was on strike Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Then the union man walked up and said I'm sorry to trouble you But your ship is now a job shop of the I-W-W-U We've sent our demands to Starfleet command and they said they'd grant us none So we're just gonna keep on sailing till this strike is won Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man Now further we've decided to run this co-op style Giving everyone experience at each others job awhile We like you too much to dump you at the first starbase we see But we bolted you to the galley and this weeks command to me Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man So somewhere down in the galley you'll find poor Captain Kirk Scrubbing away on dishes swearing it'll never work And Spock as he dries those dishes says 'It might succeed I fear' And please Sir while you're washing don't splash water in my ear Pull up your guns Run while you can Look out here comes the union man

-- Bob Barnetson

Unions & Sci-fi: Hunger Makes the Wolf

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Frankenreads

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Unions in SF redux

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Darth Vader's Performance Assessment

It's summer and, honestly, I got nothing left this week so enjoy some Star Wars-related labour stuff. Especially the mission statement stuff.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Company Town

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: 1632

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Dirty Hands

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is the Battlestar Galactica episode “Dirty Hands”. I recently coauthored a paper on the absence of unions in science fiction with Mark McCutcheon and this was one of the few examples we found of unions in the (huge) canon of SF. I never really watched the new BSG (I prefer my Cylons robotic and my flight suits corduroy—see right) but this was a good episode.

The crux of the plot is declining fuel quality and quantity endanger the fleet’s ability to evade the Cylons. Responding to Dickensian working conditions aboard the fleet’s refinery ship, the refinery workers sabotage its operation by hiding crucial parts, a tactic thwarted via imprisonment and psychological torture. A replacement director of the refinery is converted to the worker’s cause and calls a general strike, which is averted first by threats of killing supporters and then by accommodation of some of the workers’ demands by the authorities.

In this episode, we see fleet Admiral Adama use the coercive powers of the state—including imprisonment, threats, and torture—to contain illegal strike action. Yet, having achieved his goal, Adama then sees the need for a political solution, wherein workers’ consent to their conditions of work is necessary to maintain long–term stability.

This portrayals of state activity may reflect the pluralist view of labour relations (i.e., workers and employers have legitimately conflicting interests and the state referees to preserve social stability) or the radical (i.e., the state colludes—or is one and the same as—with the employer to contain worker dissatisfaction).

This radical interpretation of “Dirty Hands” might be preferable given that the union’s leader, after abandoning a strike and securing minor improvements in working conditions, is wined and dined by the president in her luxurious cabin. This scene implies that the union leadership has been coopted by the political elite.

It is notable that the episode uses a strike as a plot device: strikes and corrupt union officials are pretty much the only two instances where unions are mentioned in contemporary books, TV series, or movies. I couldn’t find any related video of “Dirty Hands” so, instead, I leave you with the opening sequence from the 1978 Battlestar Galactica television series.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The Bar Association

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

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

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

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



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



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



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

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

-- Bob Barnetson