Labor + Community + Environment = Australia’s Green Bans

Earlier this year I was able to attend the AIRAANZ conference in Melbourne, Australia. At the end of one of the conference days, there was an optional Green Ban Walking Tour. I had no idea what the “green ban” part was, but walking around Melbourne after being at a conference all day sounded like a great idea. It turns out that green bans in Australia were an interesting way in which labor unions were fighting for broader community concerns in the 1970s. Not only is this interesting in own right, but a greater community orientation is something that today’s worker centers have embraced, and it’s a mindset that some advocate as a way to revitalize the labor movement in the United States.

A green ban is a protest against property development that is perceived as harming the local community. Most of the history I can find online gives first credit to the New South Wales Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) who responded to a plea from a local group of women about blocking development on a local green space in a Sydney suburb in 1971. After seeing widespread community support, the BLF refused to work on the development, and when the developer threatened to use nonunion workers, the BLF refused to work on that developer’s other projects. In other words, it issued a ban to its members from working on these projects—which was successful, and Kelly’s Bush remains green space today. In Melbourne, however, they say that the first ban of this kind was issued by the Victoria branch of the BLF to stop the development of the Hardy Gallagher Reserve in Melbourne in 1970. Far be it from me to get in the middle of yet another Sydney-Melbourne rivalry!

At the time, strike orders were called “black bans” and even the Melbourne history seems to admit that the label “green ban”—because it was in defense of green space rather than to improve wages and working conditions—was first applied in Sydney. Another green ban in the early 1970s prevented the Royal Botanic Gardens from being turned into a parking lot for the Sydney Opera House.

And then I never would have learned that 19 species of ferns have been named after Lady Gaga!

But I digress.

Green bans expanded to cover redevelopment of existing buildings in addition to the protection of  undeveloped green spaces based on the protection of affordable housing and other facilities that served the existing (often working class) community as well as the protection of historic buildings. Again, this was a tight-knit partnership between labor and community groups, with labor sometimes advocating against its own narrow self-interest by blocking development that would have provided construction jobs. According to a pamphlet I received, these unions asked their rank and file:

Will you stand in solidarity with your fellow workers not just over wages and conditions, but in the streets where they live will you take control out of the hands of employers and make decisions that are in the interests of communities, against the interests of building companies and other employers, when that solidarity is called upon?

The Green Ban Walking Tour in Melbourne, offered by the Earth Worker Cooperative, highlighted a number buildings that were saved. Perhaps ironically, some of the historic buildings that were saved were banks, theaters, and fancy hotels that served the elite, not the working class. But other saved properties have tighter connections to the working class, such as the city baths:

Another Melbourne landmark saved by a green ban that served the working class was Queen Victoria Market:

Though development is again threatening the market:

As concerns with the environment, communities, and redevelopment are again prominent in many areas of the United States, Australia, and elsewhere, and as the future of the labor movement in many countries is also debated, this was a fascinating historical walk with a lot of relevance for today. With respect to labor, what is its role in the community? Can it be more than a voice on the job? The green bans movement is example where it certainly was.

The Great Uprising of 1877, The Great Divides of 2019

The 1870s ushered in an era of intense and violent labor conflict that would continue for decades, and I wonder whether we’re on the cusp of similar social strife, albeit not as overtly violent. A massive depression in the mid-1870s caused severe unemployment and wage cuts, and union membership plummeted. A six-month coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania in 1875 involved open battles between strikers and company-paid police. The coal company hired an agent of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to infiltrate the miners (two decades later, a Pinkerton even infiltrated the legal defense team representing union leader Big Bill Haywood). The strike ended when the miners agreed to a 20-percent wage reduction. Although it may have been fabricated, the Pinkerton agent’s testimony led to the death penalty for 10 miners accused of killing several mine bosses.

But this was just the beginning. After a series of wage cuts, railroad workers reached their limit with a 10-percent wage cut in July 1877, and went on strike. The strike quickly spread until railroad activity in large sections of the country was affected. Large crowds stopped trains, spiked switches, and took over depots and roundhouses. Two hundred federal troops were first sent to Martinsburg, West Virginia, and violence flared elsewhere. Nine people were killed in rioting in Baltimore; the state militia fired into a crowd in Pittsburgh, killing 20 and prompting a night of conflict, fire, and destruction that resulted in $5 million of railroad property damage.

These events became known as the Great Uprising of 1877 because this was much more than a railroad strike. More workers were involved than in any other labor conflict of the 1800s. Many of these were not railroad workers—coal miners, ironworkers, and others significantly aided the railroad workers in many locations. Black longshoring workers in Texas and sewer workers in Kentucky struck for higher pay. There were general strikes in Chicago and St. Louis. State militia and federal troops were used to forcefully end demonstrations and restore order in many locations. Yet despite its widespread intensity, the uprising ended nearly as quickly as it began, and railroad traffic resumed normal operations at the end of the month.

The Great Uprising of 1877 is probably more notable for what it represents than what it accomplished. The numerous strikes clearly reflected pent-up grievances of workers in many industries and locations struggling with the forces of industrialization and the conflict between labor and capital. The uprising also demonstrates the shared concerns of workers and is frequently used to define the beginning of the modern era in U.S. labor relations—one in which capital and labor are often sharply at odds. As such, the Great Uprising of 1877 laid the foundation for future labor–management conflict, not cooperation.

More broadly, in his book Age of Betrayal (Knopf, 2007), Jack Beatty characterized the Great Uprising of 1877 as a “social earthquake.” Some of the violent attacks on railroad property may have resulted not from work-related grievances but from frustration with the invasion of railroads into local communities, often against the wishes of local residents and small retail shop owners.

Fast forward to today and we can see parallels. Then and now, new technologies and new forms of employment relationships caused significant disruptions to work and communities. Then it was the railroads and industrialization, now it's computing-based technologies and gig work. Then and now, the rhetoric of protecting the individual liberty to hire or work on terms of one’s own choosing is used to weaken workers and unions. Then it was armed repression of unions, now it’s rulings like Janus. Then and now, individuals turn to collective action and protest when they feel otherwise powerless against threats to their work and their community. In recent months, we’ve seen vibrant teacher strikes, often in states that are not labor friendly, and walkouts at McDonald’s and Google over sexual harassment. We should be trying to create workplaces and communities that are inclusive and enjoy broadly-shared prosperity. Instead, we have increasing insecurity, widening disparities, and polarization. History shows us that trouble follows.

Undoing Work, or Doing it up? How Central Should Work Be to Society?

I just finished reading James Chamberlain’s new book Undoing Work, Rethinking Community: A Critique of the Social Function of Work (Cornell University Press). It’s an ambitious theoretical work that raises fundamental issues regarding not only the meaning of work but also the construction of society. But let me first back up. My own book, The Thought of Work, is intended partly as a statement of the diverse ways in which work is important—materially, psychologically, sociologically, and so forth. Behind this is an assumed default in which work’s diverse values are not fully appreciated, especially when it is reduced largely to an income-generating activity. That is, capitalism and neoliberalism devalue work by prioritizing the monetary aspects and reducing work to being seen as simply a commodity.

Undoing Work comes from a seemingly-opposite perspective—that work is too central in today’s neoliberal, capitalist societies.  So whereas I want to raise the value of work, Undoing Work wants to, well, undo it. Why? Because neoliberal social norms require an individual to be working full-time for pay in order to be fully welcomed and included as a citizen—normatively if not in fact. But this raises at least two problems. One, the highly-unequal nature of capitalism limits the opportunities for full-time, paid work to a privileged set, thus excluding from full citizenship many who have traditionally been marginalized, whether on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other bases. Two, the material and social pressures for full-time salaried or waged work limit human freedom by coercing people into spending more time at work than they would choose if they were truly free.

Chamberlain strongly argues that at a fundamental level, these norms are rooted in how society is constructed. That is, Undoing Work argues that neoliberal, capitalist societies are seen as collections of individuals who form societies (communities) because they benefit from exchanging their work. So the twin features of individualism and work lie at the core of a capitalist society. Through the Marxist lens that grounds Undoing Work, this is highly problematic because capitalism always degrades work and because individualism always leads to hierarchy and exclusion. So how can individuals—or maybe I should say, members of communities—be free to follow their self-determined rather than neoliberal needs and wants?

A popular proposal these days is for a universal basic income, the (simplified) theory being that reducing people’s dependency on work for subsistence will allow them to choose from a broader set of life activities. An interesting contribution of Undoing Work is showing how the thinking that lies behind many of the proposals for universal basic income do not break with traditional views of work and society to the extent needed to really bring about a large-scale change in the centrality of work. Which brings Chamberlain to the heart of his argument: for humans to truly be free, the basis of society needs to be seen as something other than work. So it’s not just about rethinking work, it’s about rethinking the definition of community. Maybe it’s my own lack of sophistication, but unfortunately, after reading Undoing Work I’m left with a much greater appreciation of the nature of this problem than for the author’s solutions. And by this, I don’t just mean practical solutions—which the author admits are challenging given that he believes this entails a rejection of capitalism; rather, I’m referring to the conceptual solution. Maybe I’ve been studying work for too long, but I can’t figure out what it would mean to undo work.

Undoing Work is clear (at least towards the end), that work would remain important (otherwise I think we’d really be getting into utopian territory), but what would seem to be left of value are psychological rewards and caring. This strikes me as a movement towards the more individual aspects of work—which make sense in some respects because it’s the social aspects of work in terms of exclusion and lack of solidarity that are at the root of the problem presented in Undoing Work. But on the other hand, this seems contradictory with the overall direction advocated—that is, this movement toward individualism does not seem consistent with the overall goal of trying to reconstitute society on basis of something other than a collection of individuals.

So where do we go from here? I think Professor Chamberlain would agree with me that work is too important to be left in the hands of neoliberal thinkers or propagandists. But dedicated readers of my blog will know that I’m a pluralist scholar rather than a critical, heterodox (including Marxism) scholar. So imbalances of labor market power are important, but can be alleviated. This requires continued attention to the material institutions that shape work—laws, unions, and the like—as well as the normative institutions. Going back to The Thought of Work, my goal is that if society can more fully recognize the ways in which work is important—including the dimensions that Undoing Work rightly recognize, like inclusion, citizenship, and solidarity—then we can design institutions that will better support inclusion, citizenship, and solidarity. And empowered individuals can pursue something that comes closer to their desired forms or conditions of work and do so with dignity.

But as I admit in my own writings, this is challenging because we don’t want to elevate work to such a level of importance that it is the only way of creating an individual and social identity. I think Undoing Work is premised on that ship having sailed. I maintain that somehow it’s still possible. But we can both agree that these issues are too important to not discuss as scholars and a society.  

Business Is Not a War, a Jungle, a Machine, or a Game: Rejecting Narratives that are Unhealthy for Work and Workers

Earlier this month, an Australian colleague (Rae Cooper) tweeted that Tony Dundon’s AIRAANZ keynote presentation made the point that the “war for talent” narrative is macho and narcissistic, and undermines collaborative employment strategies. I agree. In fact, there are many war metaphors used in business: in addition to the “war for talent,” we can see references to competitors as the enemy, strategies as plans of attack, cash as a war chest, competition as a battle (“capture market share”), sometimes even employees as troops (“rally the troops”). All of these portray business as focused on beating the competition rather than producing an excellent product or service and make it legitimate to do this by any means necessary. War metaphors make it seem necessary for business to adopt hierarchical, authoritarian, military-like chains of command. All of these should be rejected. Business should be viewed as focused on  excellent products and services, not winning. Business requires cooperation, shared interests, and agreed-upon rules of conduct, not war.

But it’s not just war metaphors that are problematic. Here are some other popular metaphors used in business, all of which should be rejected and discarded:

• “It’s a Jungle Out There”: Business is viewed as uncivilized, lacking rules, and dominated by a killer instinct. This survival of the fittest mentality justifies and even promotes selfish behavior. But to the contrary, and as noted above...business requires cooperation, shared interests, and agreed-upon rules of conduct. Inside and outside of organizations, humans need to be members of communities, not atomistic, isolated individuals.

• Machine Metaphors: Employees as cogs, corporations as machines, knowledge as input, rest periods as downtime. These narratives reduce workers to impersonal machines without needs, rights, and knowledge. These narratives also emphasize static efficiency rather than dynamic effectiveness. But to the contrary...organizations are human communities. Workers deserve more than being reduced to a machine, and effective management requires more than technical optimization and a soulless deployment of labor (oops, back to war metaphors). 

• Game Metaphors: playing fields, players, coaches, and scorecards. This creates a focus on keeping score (money) and winning. This gives legitimacy to seeking thrills and challenges without regard for the public who are reduced to spectators. But to the contrary...business is an integral part of society, not a sideshow for entertainment. Corporate “playing fields” are not isolated from society and business is not just about winning through profits.

Employment relations scholarship and practice has long sought to embrace a broader conception of business than simply making profits. Many of the major theories in business ethics similarly reveal and advocate for this broader conception. These theories also discount the popular emphasis on competition over cooperation as the driving force in business. Rather, it is emphasized that business is “a fully human activity” that requires a sense of community, extensive cooperation, and a deeper purpose than simply making money (as just one example, see Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (Oxford University Press), which is also a good reference for the negatives of business metaphors). 

But note that the common metaphors described above (and by Solomon) capture very narrow views of business. The rhetorical power of these metaphors is illustrated by the negative practices that these metaphors support. In studying and practicing employment relations and human resources (and anything thing else related to business, including policy making), it’s important to break through these narrow metaphors. 

What Happens at Work Doesn’t Stay There: (Poor) Workplace Democracy Promotes (Poor) Political Democracy

The workplace is not like Las Vegas—what happens at work, often doesn’t stay at work. Nearly 250 years ago, the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, worried that mind-numbing jobs would cause workers to lose the ability and motivation to be thoughtful, engaged citizen-people outside of the workplace (The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter I, Part III, Article II). This is perhaps one of the few areas where Karl Marx would have agreed with Smith, and Marx’s rejection of capitalism is deeply rooted in his concerns with the far-reaching, negative effects of work. The detrimental effects on someone’s personal life and on their community might be fairly obvious for workplace injuries, and there is increasing recognition of the mental health risks of lousy work. But does the nature of the workplace affect other aspects of society, like political participation?

Some argue that the workplace can be a breeding ground for pro-democratic attitudes and political behaviors. That is, the use of deliberative and other participatory skills in one’s work can give someone the confidence and the skills to want to participate in the political arena. And hearkening back to Smith and Marx, the absence or repression of autonomous decision-making in the workplace can undercut attitudes and skills that promote political participation, thus weakening political engagement. But does this actually happen in practice, at least to a magnitude we can observe across many workers?

To investigate this, my co-authors and I analyze European Social Survey data on over 14,000 workers across 27 European countries. These workers reported their level of political participation in nine activities (such as voting, contacting a politician, wearing a campaign badge, and belonging to a political party) and also their interest level in politics. Moreover, they also answered several questions on the extent to which they have autonomy and participate in decision-making in their jobs. We combined these several questions into an index of individual voice or workplace democracy.

We then undertake a number of multivariate analyses and find that that employees with greater levels of individual voice at work are indeed significantly more likely to engage in a broad array of pro-democratic behaviors, and we find strong results even when controlling for a wide-range of employee and job characteristics. Or to put this in a negative frame reminiscent of Smith and Marx, dictatorial and authoritarian workplace practices are likely to be related to reduced political participation in the democratic arena.

This relationship appears just as strong as the commonly-accepted relationship between labor unions and political participation. We further show that the results do not appear to be driven by a small number of specific countries; rather, the relationship between workplace democracy and political democracy is one that is apparent across diverse countries, and hence across diverse institutional environments.

These results imply that the importance of organizational practices extends beyond the workplace, and public policy interventions might be warranted to prevent dictatorial work regimes that dampen political engagement. And while we use accepted econometric techniques to account for the possibility that the causal arrows runs from the workplace to the political arena, our findings are still important if causality actually runs from the political arena to the workplace. In such a case, then a participatory workplace should be seen as an important outlet for individuals valuing political involvement. In particular, workplace participation can prevent individuals from getting frustrated or losing their deliberative skills, thus reducing the likelihood that they withdraw from the political arena. So regardless of which way the causal arrow points, the workplace-political engagement nexus is an important one that deserves greater attention.

What happens at work, doesn’t stay at work. Rather, work is an inseparable part of our lives and our communities. As such, it deserves continued scrutiny by all of us. 

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Source:  John W. Budd, J. Ryan Lamare, and Andrew R. Timming (2018) "Learning about Democracy at Work: Cross-National Evidence on Individual Employee Voice Influencing Political Participation in Civil Society,"  ILR Review (https://doi.org/10.1177/0019793917746619).
Click here to read the full paper.

Thoughts on a New Book, Just Work

Forty years ago, Studs Terkel published his famous book Working in which over 130 individuals provided their own narratives of their work. By letting workers speak for themselves in their own words with their own emphases, Working was and remains a powerful and influential testament to the multi-faceted nature of work that affects nearly everyone in deeply personal ways. Like many others, Working clearly impacted Grant Michelson and Shaun Ryan, two Australia-based New Zealanders who have written about varied aspects of work, and through their book Just Work they seek “to celebrate the significance of, and broadly continue in, the traditions established by Working” (p. 2). Just Work therefore parallels Working in presenting a variety of worker narratives about their work in their own words. Specifically, 30 individuals from a diverse set of occupations in Australia voice the good, the bad, and the ugly about their work in accounts that are nothing if not authentic, right down to the Aussie slang (which is “grouse”). 

A useful aspect of this narrative approach is that each reader can make their own interpretations and identify themes of interest. The diverse meanings of work, not only across but also within individuals, resonated with me based on the multi-faceted conceptual nature of work that have written about. As I argue in my book The Thought of Work, work is not a source of income or fulfillment or stress or identity, it can be a complex source of income and fulfillment and stress and identity and more, in practice and in theory. Beyond this, it was striking that the best and worst things at work are all of us. When relationships with co-workers, managers, subordinates, and customers are good, these are frequently cited as the aspects of work that individuals found the most rewarding and engaging. In the words of Robert the migration agent, “any job is a good job if you are working with good people” (p. 115). But when these relationships were poor, they were frequently cited as the elements of work that were the most frustrating. David, a phone salesperson had just quit his job the day before his interview because he “was starting to hate people” (p. 72). Scholars and professionals in employment relations and human resources have long asserted that people issues are of central importance in the workplace, and these accounts bring this to life. But they further underscore the impact that each of us as individuals can have on others in the workplace, whether as workers or as customers.

Another theme I saw is that how work fits with a worker’s life situation, goals, and values at a particular time is very important. This goes beyond the well-recognized issue of work-family balance to become a recognition that personal goals, whether they be around schooling, family, community, or other spheres of life, fundamentally shape how individuals think about work and influence what they see as work that is fitting. So even individuals in the same job can view their work differently (Gordon Cooke, Jimmy Donaghey, and Isik Zeytinoglu  recently identified this same phenomenon in their 2013 Human Relations article, “The Nuanced Nature of Work Quality: Evidence from Rural Newfoundland and Ireland”). Australia also provides a rich context for understanding immigrants’ experiences with their work, and the multiple narratives from those born outside of Australia reveal many of the same influences, hopes, and frustrations. I’m sure other readers will find other themes that speak to them.

Given the prominence of Working, both in the field and in this book, comparisons are inevitable. Like in Working, Just Work brings workers’ voices to us in authentic, powerful ways. Working, however, has four times the number of interviews. While this makes Just Work more accessible than its 700-page predecessor, it does limit the scope of the occupations represented. In particular, while I applaud the authors for the explicit recognition that work can be unpaid, all of the interviews, by the authors’ own admission, pertain to paid employment. The inclusion of some narratives by unpaid workers could have helped reveal similarities and differences between paid and unpaid work.

Being written by academics, I appreciate that, compared to Working, Just Work devotes more effort in the beginning and end to providing frameworks for thinking about work and the themes that emerge from the narratives. But I think the concluding chapter could have dug deeper. While the authors discuss that the nature of work has changed since Working was published, less attention is devoted to the extent to which worker’s reactions to their work has changed, or not. The authors do note that the narratives generally seem at odds with the theme of work as “a Monday through Friday sort of dying” found in Working. But is this because of differences across time, across space and culture, or other factors? Of course, these are big questions and there are no easy answers. Ultimately, we’ll need to draw our own conclusions, but the authors experienced these interviews firsthand and it would have been nice to hear more of their overall thoughts.

Lastly, the authors also include their own personal narratives about work, though they modestly relegated them to an appendix. Given the personal nature of the 30 interviews, it was nice to see the authors put themselves in this same position. These reflections thereby further add to the feeling of authenticity of the entire book. Indeed, the authors’ own stories have inspired me to make a future blog post consist of my own narrative reflecting upon my own work experiences. Perhaps it will inspire you to do something similar?

Grant Michelson and Shaun Ryan (2014) Just Work: Narratives of Employment in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan).

Another Empowering Story from the UK Miners Strike on its 30th Anniversary

This year marks the 30^th anniversary of the UK miners strike. The singular watershed event in U.S. labor relations in last the 50 years is arguably the illegal Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike in 1981. President Ronald Reagan’s firing of the 11,000 striking air traffic controllers is often cited as the event that made it acceptable for private sector companies to aggressively fight unions in organizing drives, at the bargaining table, and by using replacement workers for strikers. In Great Britain, the analogous watershed event is the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) 12-month strike against the government-run National Coal Board (NCB) in 1984-85, often now referred to simply as the Great Strike.

The strike was extremely divisive. Hard line bargaining stances spilled over into numerous violent clashes between miners and police, with an estimated 10,000 arrests, 1,700 injuries, and a couple of deaths. Politically, the strike highlighted north (poor) – south (rich) divisions within Britain, created fissures within the labor movement and the Labour party, and questioned the fabric of British society. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s opposition was so intense that she labeled the miners “the enemy within.” It was later revealed that MI5, Britain’s domestic CIA, led a widespread surveillance effort which included infiltration of NUM, bugging restaurants frequented by NUM leaders, and tapping the phone of every NUM branch. [For a collection of powerful images, see this Daily Mail retrospective]

Any yet, empowering stories emerge (and not just fictional ones, as in the movie-now-musical Billy Elliot). In stories that parallel the women’s brigade in the General Motors sit-down strike in 1935-36, women became actively involved in the NUM strike in running soup kitchens, speaking to groups around Great Britain to develop support for the strike, and picketing. A daughter, mother, and ex-wife of South Yorkshire miners captured this significant change in a later interview:

The NUM, as far as I can see, put all its eggs in the picketing basket, as they traditionally have, and made no particular provision for dealing with destitution amongst the families. So the women began to see that as well as campaigning there was a need to support the families. That meant going far beyond the traditional housewife role of the mining women. There has been large-scale catering, feeding five and six hundred people in a day; having to raise the money for that, learning to argue for it, to earn it in all sorts of ways, by speaking at meetings and rallies, by collecting on the streets. What they did was to set up an alternative welfare system, and an effective one at that. And these women who had never done anything outside the home before, learning to speak on public platforms to enormous audiences. The change in those women is tremendous. [Source: Vicky Seddon (ed.), The Cutting Edge: Women and the Pit Strike (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986), p. 229.]

And now there is a movie, Pride, based on another empowering true story from this strike. A group of gay and lesbian activists in London from a group “Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners” (LGSM) to raise money to support the strikers. One can easily imagine the culture clashes that result when LGSM members travel to a tiny Welsh village (Onllwyn) to personally hand over the donated money, as well as during subsequent reciprocal visits, such as for the “Pits and Perverts” benefit at a London rock club.

I highly recommend this movie to anyone who has the chance to see it. It is a very powerful and uplifting story. Individual struggles among activists and miners as well as the evolution of various relationships are captured with a deft blend of realism and humor. Within the domain of work, the film is a visual reminder that the labor movement can be a champion of social change, but it can be difficult to overcome traditional attitudes. Human resources professionals should also see this movie as a reminder that “diversity” should be very powerfully about human dignity, not superficially about broadening employee demographics to better serve a diverse customer base or enhancing creativity through a mixing of diverse perspectives. But you don't just have to be professionally interested in the domain of work to find this a very good movie. It has it all: human rights and dignity, identity, labor, caring, stunning Welsh scenery, an entertaining soundtrack, and many laughs.

To get you in the mood (or recall it, if you've seen the movie), here is the closing song: Billy Bragg, There is Power in a Union. Which reminds me of Jimmy Barnes, Working Class Man. Though one is British and the other Australian. But I digress. Just go see Pride.

The Power of Work's Connections in Billy Elliot

While in London for the Voice and Value conference (see The Value of Voice entry), we saw the musical Billy Elliot. I might be biased because my family tree includes miners from County Durham, and because of my interest in labor unions, but anyone who does not believe that work has deep connections with family and community should see this musical. I defy them to not be moved by the raw power with which Billy Elliot exposes the impact of the 1984-85 miners' strike on the home life of Billy, his Dad, and his brother, and illustrates the interconnectedness of each family with the entire community. Sometimes this involves solidarity, other times sharp conflict. But in all cases, the relationships are very powerful, and are rooted in class and the nature of work.

Oh once I was a young man
Looked over vales and hills
Saw myself a future
of riches and of thrills
But on me fifteenth birthday
I paid my union dues
And they sent me deep into the ground
Oh the winter wind can blow me colder
Oh the summer's heat can parch me dry
But I'll not leave here for a fortune
I shall never leave here till I die
from: Deep Into the Ground

My wife observed how much rage there is in the musical. This is not an emotion that we commonly associate with work, except in particularly deviant cases of workplace violence. But I think this reinforces how important work is for the families and community in Billy Elliot. The strike does not simply pose a threat to their immediate economic welfare. Rather, it represents a fundamental threat to the community's entire way of life. So the ramifications are deep, and the resulting emotions are quite intense.

And though our hands are bruised and bleeding
And our lungs are full with dust
And our hearts are near to breaking
We will never forgo the trust
We will fight through pain and hunger
Every arrow, every knife.
And we will never give the hope up
Of a proud and honest life
from: The Stars Look Down

In this way, the rage of Billy Elliot is a very vivid reminder of the tremendous importance of work not just for individuals workers, but for their families and communities.