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

News round-up: Farm WCB, child labour, and dead workers

A few interesting things went down last week in Alberta labour issues. The government announced the results of the first full year of mandatory WCB coverage for paid farm workers. The short version is that the number of operations covered jumped from 1756 in 2015 (when coverage was optional) to 3629 in 2016. There was no estimate of what percentage of operations have taken out the mandatory coverage.

In 2016, 793 farm injuries were accepted. The most number of accepted injuries came from feedlots (192), then hay/grain/crop farming (131) and beef producers (106). In 2015, there were 339 claims accepted.

Looking at the these numbers, it is important to be mindful that (1) these injuries represent only the most serious injuries (where there was wage loss or medical aid beyond first aid required)—most injuries do not have to be reported to the WCB—and (2) even among injuries that should be reported, there are going to be unreported injuries (40% non-reporting is the best estimate I have seen).

Add in farms that haven’t taken out WCB coverage and we can be confident that the true level of injury to paid farm workers is appreciably higher than these numbers indicate. Looking at the type of injury, the Calgary Herald reports:

Nearly a quarter of the claims, 199, were strains or sprains, with 153 superficial wounds, 165 open wounds and 106 cases of fractures, dislocation or nerve damage. There were 170 other injury claims, as well as three accepted farm fatality claims.

The most notable response was from the Wildrose that seemed to walk back promises to repeal Bill 6 by saying the Wildrose would provide replacement legislation, perhaps allowing farmers to choose between WCB or some sort of private alternative.

Staying with agriculture, the Parkland Institute posted a piece I wrote about proposed exemptions around hours of work and child labour for farms. The most interesting reaction to this was that report that triggered the blog post disappeared from the employer lobby group website it had been posted on!

The union-positive website rankandfile.ca also posted a two-part interview they did with me (part 1 and part 2 here). This interview canvasses a wide variety of labour issues in Alberta and (I hope) heralds new attention to labour issues in Alberta.

Finally, APEGA levied a $10,000 fine and a $150,000 contribution on Canadian Natural Resources Ltd as a result of engineering problems that lead to the deaths of two foreign workers in 2007. This fine is trivia (CNRL's revenue in 2015 was $13 billion) and likely is less than the cost of proper engineering work would have been.

This announcement likely concludes the various investigations into this incident where an unqualified employee did the engineering work on tanks that fell apart while being assembled due to high winds. This incident also revealed that one of the other companies involved in this project was stealing the wages of the foreign workers that had been brought in to do the work. Good work, "job creators"... .

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: How to have an Accident at Work

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is a 1959 safety video featuring Donald Duck that my colleague Jason Foster ran across while revising IDRL 308. The video subscribes to the careless worker myth: essentially that worker inattention and irresponsibility are the main cause of workplace injury. Apologies in advance for the sexism and racism in the six-minute film.



Donald’s behaviour is clearly ridiculous and the movie ignores the insanely unsafe conditions in the factory he works in! It isn’t clear to me who funded this cartoon or who the intended audience was (all I could find was that it was a theatrical short). You can see more modern version of this theme in this 2008 Alberta video from the Bloody Lucky series.



An interesting question is why is the myth of the careless worker so persistent (it dates back about 100 years)? As I note in my book The Political Economy of Workplace Injury in Canada, American companies used the careless worker myth in the 1920s to counter opposition to the introduction of leaded gasoline. Lead poisoning among workers making the tetraethyl lead additive made people leery of leaded gasoline. General Motors, DuPoint and Standard Oil responded to critics, in part, by blaming injuries on workers not following safety precautions.

In this case, carelessness was not root cause of worker injuries and death—exposing workers to a toxin at work was. Indeed, analysis of injury causation suggests unsafe conditions, not carelessness, are the cause of most accidents. Injury mechanisms are well known to employers, as are many ways to prevent injuries. The problem is that eliminating or containing hazards is expensive. It is cheaper and much easier to blame the victim

Focusing attention on the victim protects cherished beliefs or powerful actors. We do this all the time. Victims of sexual assault were (and are) often blamed for their injury. Blaming rape victims is easier than grappling with seemingly intractable issues like the objectification and victimization of women by social and legal forces. Similarly, it is easier to blame workers than grapple with the idea that injuries are the byproduct of employer decisions.

-- Bob Barnetson

Research: Safety crimes in Alberta's O&G industry

Last week I had a chance to re-read an MA thesis I have been saving for awhile. “Bloody Oil: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Safety Crimes in the Alberta Oil and Gas Industry” comes from the Department of Criminology at UOttawa.

This study is notable in two ways. First, it conceptualizes safety violations as crimes (rather than regulatory offences). Framing the injury of workers as a crime sits uneasily with the mainstream view of occupational injuries as uncommon, unpreventable, and (regrettably) economically necessary.

The idea that workplace injuries are caused by so-called accidents reflects that the “perps” are upstanding members of the community (corporations) doing legitimate work where responsibility for the injury is often diffuse and hard to see. Shooting someone in the head is murder. But decapitating someone on the job because of a decision to delay cable replacement is an accident. Added to this is the widely accepted notion that “workers accepted the risk” when they took the job and responsibility for injury is subtly shifted to the worker.

Second, it applies this framing to Alberta’s oil-and-gas industry, the upstream portion of which (basically dinosaurs to the refinery gate) has a real cowboy culture. You can see an analysis of that culture in the book chapter “Working hard and staying safe: Drilling rig hands in Alberta”.

The economic importance of the oil-and-gas industry in Alberta meant that the conservative government largely turned a blind eye to workplace safety (to be fair, the Tories did a poor job on workplace safety in general). The study examines court documents, fatality reports, and safety awareness campaigns to tease out how serious injury and death are officially conceptualized.

The upshot of the study is that injuries are typically framed as the fault of the worker. Blaming the worker has a long pedigree (as we’ll see in Friday’s post) and the careless worker myth has been evident in many Alberta safety campaigns over the years. If the worker is to blame, then the employer must be (mostly) innocent and there is little reason to identify root causes of injury found in the structure of work. Where remediation is possible, it is focused on worker behaviour.

In a way, workers face a catch-22 in comparison to employers who are described in more general or descriptive terms: if a worker is well-trained and experienced, they have no excuse for not being able to avoid harm; if they are un-trained or inexperienced, then their carelessness is simply and quickly used as an explanation for what occurred. (p.61).

Injuries are also represented as non-serious and non-violent offenses. Investigations generally don’t look for root causes (found in the structure of work), instead focusing on proximate causes of injury. Where employers are found to have violated the law, they often receive creative sentences, whereby they make a socially beneficial donation (which is tax deductable) and then look to be good corporate citizens. The level of the fine and that it is levied on the corporation (rather than an individual) may also attenuate the impact of the fine on future behaviour. This, in turn, reinforces treating injury events as regulatory offences, rather than as crimes. Injuries are caused by accidents, rather than a chain of decisions leading to an unsafe workplace.

Overall, this is a very useful piece of research. It examines in depth how serious injuries and fatalities in the oil-and-gas industry are dismissed as unavoidable accidents that are likely the fault of the worker anyhow. We see a similar framing in newspaper reports of workplace injury, which dial down public concern by noting that injuries are under investigation or before the courts or are simply human tragedies (for which no one is really at fault).

The question going forward is whether Alberta’s New Democratic government will adequately resource and politically empower OHS inspectors to raise the cost of injury to employers to the point where employers make structural changes in their workplace.

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: Absolute Rage

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- Bob Barnetson

Occupational violence in health care

Violence against health-care workers is a profound problem in Canada. A recent article in The Bulletin (co-authored by AU tutor James Brophy) identifies how the victims of this violence are more likely to be women (due to occupational segregation) and this contributes to the lack of action on the issue.

A number of other actors contribute to the occurrence of violence. These include high patient loads and limited access to security for workers. Workers are also reluctant to report violence, perhaps because they know little will be done and that they will be singled out as complainers.

Overall, this is an excellent summary of how workplace violence has been normalize in health-care settings

-- Bob Barnetson

Labour & Pop Culture: The A-Team

With the Christmas break upon us, this week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture looks beyond music to television. I’m awaiting publication of an article (coauthored with Mark McCutcheon) about the absence of images of labour in science fiction. When that finally drops, I will feature some of the few sci-fi texts we found.

In the meantime, I’ve been keeping an eye out for other television shows where unions and labour issues come up. With in-laws to avoid, this situation cries out for… the A-Team. Because, if you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team.

The A-Team was a terrible 1980s drama about a group of do-gooder Vietnam vets driven underground because of something-or-other I forgot after I discovered girls. Season Two featured an episode called Labor Pains. I have embedded the key scene below but you can watch the whole, tedious episode here.

The show is a good example of the “a stranger comes to town” trope, albeit in a 1982 custom GMC van driving helluva fast and crashing through a billboard and then jumping a washed out bridge. The boys then have a fight with some goons who work for some agri-stooge kingpin who are pushing around some migrant farm workers. (You can now skip the first 14 minutes of the episode). Eventually, the A-Team convinces the workers to continue a work stoppage and form a union.



“You’ll have a union in this valley over my dead body!” cries the boss and then tries to starve the workers out because the crop is rotting in the field. Organizing ensures (the scene at 28.00 is pretty funny—if only every union drive had Mr. T on board, suckas). Mayhem ensures (although this was shot in the 1980s so it takes for-frigging-ever to get to the action), including a cabbage cannon. The workers triumph and the A-Team scoots before the military police show up.

Not a super realistic portrayal of an organizing drive, but an oddly sympathetic one (usually television episodes focus on the disruptive nature of strikes and union corruption). Of course, the A-Team are mercenaries and, in Season Three, they help a small-time logging operation battle a (you guessed it) corrupt union intent on shutting them down.

-- Bob Barnetson