Labour & Pop Culture: Welcome to the Boomtown

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture is “Welcome to the Boomtown” by David & David. The song recounts the mid-80s excess found in Los Angeles and how a boomtown plays out for the rich and for the poor.

Alberta is no stranger to booms and busts and there is interesting research going on about how this affects labour. For example, foreign live-in caregivers (more commonly known as “nannies”) play an important role in the economy of Fort McMurray. Their often-grueling conditions of work allow their employers to meet the demands of their own employers.

Sara Dorow (from the U of A) and her colleagues have been studying this phenomenon. They note that the boom entails a cascading of social reproductive costs onto this vulnerable group. That is to say, the oil sands couldn’t function without these almost invisible workers managing home and hearth issues for workers. Yet these workers are often treated as disposable.

With the boom also comes the bust. Since 2014, Alberta has struggled economically. It appears that the worst of this recession is passing but the recovery is uneven.

For example, in a recent CBC article, U of C economist Trevor Tombe notes that the economic recovery Alberta is experiencing is evident in employment rates (which are bouncing back up. But as Tombe’s graph (below) shows, young men appear to be excluded from this recovery.

This pattern is understandable given that, in the past, young men could secure well paying jobs in the oil patch with not much more than a strong back. This employment strategy appears to no longer be as effective as it once was. One solution is to provide displaced workers with opportunities to return to school.



Ms. Cristina drives a 944
Satisfaction oozes from her pores
She keeps rings on her fingers

Marble on her floor, cocaine on her dresser
Bars on her doors, she keeps her back against the wall
She keeps her back against the wall

So I say, I say welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the Boomtown

Handsome Kevin got a little off track
Took a year off of college and he never went back
Now he smokes too much, he's got a permanent hack

Deals dope out of Denny's, keeps a table in the back
He always listens to the ground
Always listens to the ground

So I say, I say welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
Pick a habit, we got plenty to go around
Welcome, welcome to the Boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the Boomtown

Well, the ambulance arrived too late
I guess, she didn't want to wait

-- 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: Solo: A Star Wars Story

This week’s installment of Labour & Pop Culture examines the new movie Solo: A Star Wars Story. The film reveals the origins of the Han Solo character. This post contains some spoilers so you may want to stop reading if that bothers you.

The film introduces Solo as an orphan on the ship-building word of Correllia. Orphans are made to steal for criminal gangs in order to survive. This premise a very 19th-century, Dickensian feel to it.

Solo’s only way out is, ultimately, to join the Imperial Navy. Taking the king’s shilling was historically a common pathway out of poverty for lower-class British males

Solo eventually hooks up with a criminal gang but a botched heist puts him in a debt bondage to a bad guy. Relationships within the criminal gang (and between gangs) turn out to be very all-against-all and serve as a nice metaphor for the competitive individualism of capitalism.

Action eventually shifts to the mining planet of Kessel where slavery and ecological destruction are evident. While a heist is underway, Lando Calrissian’s robotic co-pilot triggers a slave revolt, which causes the destruction of the enterprise. It was interesting how quickly control slipped away from the mine’s operators.

More hi-jinx ensue and we eventually get to the climax of the story. Solo only manages to get out of the resulting jam he’s in by working collaboratively with others who are seeking to overthrown the corporatist fascism advanced by the Empire. Overall, some interesting commentary on labour and work in a galaxy far, far away.

-- Bob Barnetson

Dual labour markets, exploitation, and mobilization at MacEwan

One of the most compelling labour stories in Alberta’s post-secondary sector over the past two years has been the mistreatment of sessional faculty at MacEwan University and their subsequent mobilization to protect themselves from their own union.

More than half (~60%) of MacEwan’s instructional staff are contingent workers, with little job security despite years of service. The use of limited-term contract staff has been a long-standing issue at MacEwan, stretching back into the 1990s. The presence of such a large pool of secondary labour creates two interesting labour-relations dynamics.

First, the large number of sessionals has a paradoxical effect on the permanent staff. On the one hand, less costly sessionals subsidize the better working conditions of permanent staff. On the other hand, sessionals create a ready pool of cheap replacement workers, which undermines the long-term job security and power of the permanent staff.

Second, sessionals have the votes to take over the faculty association (FA) and radically renegotiate the collective agreement in their own interests. There are numerous barriers to this mobilization, but the potential for intra-union conflict has long existed.

In the summer of 2017, when most sessionals were not employed and thus were not voting members of the faculty association, the FA ratified a new, two-year collective agreement. Permanent faculty saw extensions of their salary ranges while many sessionals saw significant cuts to their pay (some would lose up to 22% of their wages).

The MacEwan FA justified negotiating cuts to the wages of their most vulnerable members (while increasing the salaries of their most privileged members) as reasonable for the association as a whole. It also noted that sessionals were not allowed to vote because they weren’t employees at the time of the vote, even though most would return in the fall and be subject to the agreement.

This treatment galvanized a portion of the sessional population to form the MacEwan University Sessional Steering Collaborative (MUSSC). By October of 2017, MUSSC had achieved two important changes in the faculty association bylaws.

The first change extended the duration of sessional staff membership in the FA for up to a year after their contract expires. This prevents the future exclusion of sessionals from contract ratification votes due to flukes of timing.

The second change allows sessionals to run for seats on the FA executive board without restriction. Previously, sessionals were only allowed to fill two positions, despite comprising the majority of the membership.

In the early spring of 2018, there was an additional scuffle between the FA executive and MUSSC. The FA executive proposed constitutional amendments that were seen by MUSSC as an effort to negate the changes won in October. The amendments proposed by the FA executive were defeated.

By April, it appeared that pay cuts for sessionals set to take effect on July 1, 2018 would not occur. Pay cuts affecting some sessionals that took effect July 1, 2017 remain in effect.

It is unclear what exactly transpired here, but the negative publicity caused by these cuts for both the institution and the FA may have played a role in the suspension of the pay cuts. It appears that MUSSC will now be seeking restitution for the 2017 cuts during the next round of bargaining.

In addition, half of the FA’s executive board is up for election each year. Following the 2018 election, sessionals hold 5 of the 13 positions on the FA executive board. If MUSSC continues to mobilize, it may be able to secure a majority on the executive board next year.

While this story continues to unfold, it is an interesting to watch a long-disadvantaged group of workers exert power so quickly and effectively against both their own union and their employer.

One question I’m left with is what was the faculty association bargaining team thinking when they signed the memorandum of agreement? A second question is how will MacEwan University will navigate this kind of intra-union dispute? Will it try to exploit the internal division? Will it side with one side against the other?

-- 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

Perils of communicating directly with employees during bargaining

Employers engaged in collective bargaining can be tempted to communicate their bargaining proposals directly to their employees—essentially end-running the union bargaining team. 

Employers typically do this for two reasons. They may hope their explanation will make their proposals more palatable to the workers. And they may seek to undermine the union bargaining team.

This approach has two main risks. First, employers may commit an unfair labour practice if their communication is found to constitute bargaining directly with employees. Second, direct communication may backfire by, for example, making visible discrepancies between what employers say and what they propose.

For example, Athabasca University sent its opening proposal, opening presentation from bargaining, and a cheery note to the members of its faculty association last week. AU’s opening presentation stresses that the employer faces financial uncertainty and needs to control ongoing costs, such as staffing.

The data presented in support of this position is not particularly compelling. Consider this table, which purports to show a 154.4% increases in salary costs between 2005 and 2015:



Three immediately obvious problems with this table are:

• It is in nominal (not inflation-adjusted) dollars. This overstates the degree of increase by not factoring in inflation.
• It does not control for changes in the size and composition of the staffing complement (which are decisions made by the employer).
• Looking at 2010 to present, staffing costs are actually stable (and, using real dollars, in decline). This is contrary to the employer’s narrative. 

Sloppily handling cherry-picked data is a fundamental mis-step with a savvy worker group that does data analysis for a living.

The employer also sent along their opening proposal. A quick read shows the employer wants a wage freeze for the next two years. This is consistent with the employer’s desire to control expenses.

Nevertheless, the other 43 pages of proposed changes have nothing to do with improving AU’s finances. Rather, they are an attack upon the substantive and procedural rights of the union’s members.

Under the employer’s proposals:

• An academic who does not get tenure can get booted out the door with no notice.
• Professional staff can be terminated at any time during their probationary period.
• The decision about whether a professional employee passes their probationary period is entirely within the employer’s discretion.
• Severance and recall rights will be significantly reduced for all employees in the event of layoffs.
• New discipline procedures will hamstring the union’s ability to represent members. This is especially concerning given AU's cavalier approach to discipline in recent years.
• Serious discipline (e.g., suspension without pay or termination) will be applied immediately, instead of after the appeal has been heard.
• Grievances alleging AU allowed a union member to be harassed cannot proceed to arbitration (so essentially the employer gets to stand in judgment about its own behaviour…).
• The composition of important appeal committees will be stacked in favour of the employer, undermining the principle of collegial governance.
• The freedom of professional staff is so significantly reduced that is becomes meaningless.
• The employer may force sick staff members to undergo examinations by company doctors.

In his covering note, Vice-President Matt Prineas characterizes these changes as

…reflect[ing] our desire to clean up existing language to better align to changes in the Alberta Labour Code, Alberta Employment Standards Legislation, to simplify a few processes for all of us, and to help us move forward together. We believe in you, we’re in this together, and we have no interest in disrupting your lives, the security of your families, or the progress of our students by being needlessly aggressive in bargaining. We’re working towards a win-win-win.

The problem with Prineas’s statement is that these proposals are not just house-keeping. Rather, they entail substantial and unacceptable losses for the workers (on top of yet another wage freeze).

They are also needlessly aggressive and, if pursued with any vigor, heighten the risk of a work stoppage.

Prineas's effort to candy-coat AU’s so-called “win-win” proposals further diminishes the vanishingly small amount of trust that AU staff have in their leaders.

An important question is who is giving AU this kind of labour-relations advice? So far this year, AU has been subjected to three unfair labour practice complaints and now it is rolling out a back-firing communications strategy.

Equally important is the question of why is AU’s executive accepting advice that seems destined to intensify labour conflict? Is it seeking to precipitate a strike by faculty? Or are these proposals simply an attempt to reframe bargaining such that a wage-freeze suddenly appears to be a desirable settlement to faculty? 

-- 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