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Feb. 26th, 2007 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccatoriaOkay, so I'm back after missing last week's episode (which I still mostly like, and which I still have little to say regarding). Apparently I'm making up for it this week. This is long. And mostly about Classism.
I liked this week's episode. I am forced, I think, to compare it to the last episode I "reviewed" - "The Woman, King." I think the comparison is not a bad one - both focus on important but not "A-list" characters dealing with the harsh realities of life in the fleet and dealing with "isms." Last time it was racism, this time it's classism. Perhaps it's just because a lot of shows feel obligated to have the "race" episode but not very many feel obligated to have the "class" episode, meaning that this episode had less to be measured against, but I can't help but feel this was a much more solid show with a much clearer message.
I think this is an episode I'm going to end up explaining through comparisons to external events, both real and fictional, which probably none of you know about. So sorry. But it's my journal, so there!
Apparently Aerilonians are Northern, and Baltar's accent is Caprican, though Capricans also seem to have an American accent. Then again, if tiny little countries like Britain (hey, let's narrow it down, if REGIONS WITHIN BRITAIN) are allowed to have multiple accents, why not an entire planet? Though I bet his friends and family thought Baltar was a right little shit if he was trying to lose is accent at age 10. Going by my dad's example, it's perfectly easy to lose your accent nearly entirely when you're 18.
I'm also not sure why Tyrol was so convinced by Baltar's accent. I do happen to believe his background story, but also, the guy's a genius, surely he can fake an accent! I mean, I can do a reasonably convincing northern accent, and a scottish one, and a slightly terrible irish one, and passable if slightly dodgy liverpudlian and somerset (i.e. good enough to convince someone from a country that's not the UK), and at least two different kinds of welsh and a couple of shades of american. And I'm not all that great at accents.
Okay, gratuitous nitpicking out of the way, let's get on to the heavy stuff.
I'm not completely against people listening to Baltar. He's a genius and he knows what's going on, and I believe what he's writing in his book has a lot of merit. He wants to appeal to the people, and he knows exactly how to do it.
On a certain level, I understand why people would overlook the author, or at least be brought around to him. They're hearing things that ring true, that they need to hear, so they might well be better disposed towards the source.
That said, most of the people listening to "The Book" were in the labour union on New Caprica. A union that was depicted as antagonistic towards Baltar. Surely some of them would remember that for all his sudden posturing as a farmer's son, on New Caprica, he was a part of the aristocracy he's suddenly decrying.
Perhaps it's easy, considering the current situation on the fleet, to make unoccupied New Caprica look a whole lot better. I suppose if he's calling his book "My Triumphs, my Mistakes," there could be a heady amount of apology mixed in there, which along with a call to action - a seeming stand taken on behalf of the workers, could be a potent mix.
Still. I like the disturbed poetry of such a message coming from Baltar, for utterly selfish reasons, and catching Tyrol in the middle.
I felt they did a good job of presenting the situation as untenable and the mining ship as dangerous while also presenting the situation should the ship stop mining as untenable and dangerous.
When they first went on the run, as Lee insisted in "Bastille Day," they held on to things like democracy and consent of the people and trials and human rights (except not for cylons...).
The basic paradox in this episode - in fact the basic paradox of the show - is that humanity is in an extreme situation without any of the facilities to continue existing with adequate space, safety or food. The basic paradox of this episode and the show is, how many of your rights do you sacrifice for your survival? What about when your right to survival is being threatened for the survival of your species?
It's easy to see how rights to things like sane break periods and compensation (compensate you with what was my immediate thought) would be the first things to go. It's almost like getting drafted but into a workforce and not a military. Except, that makes it exactly like a military. And that didn't work well for Cain.
It's easy to see that worker comfort is second-class to the ability to defend the fleet and to flee the enemy. But as soon as you start abandoning rights on the basis of extraordinary situations, you start on a road that ends in a very dark place.
The problem is, it's a road they were forcibly put on when the cylons killed over 99% of their species. As soon as that happened, rights were lost. Rights like adequate sanitation and nutrition. Rights like privacy and adquate living space.
How can you keep a balance? Maybe you can't. It's interesting that while racism and classism have many parallels (often as a result of racial differences and stereotypes breaking down broadly along class lines), there's a fundamental difference. With our current model of society, it's possible to imagine racism no longer existing, it's possible to imagine no xenophobia or sexism. In terms of our daily functioning, it isn't possible to imagine a lack of a working class. Someone has to do the unskilled labour. The best you can do to redress this is try to make sure class doesn't become generational, try to make sure the working class aren't subjected to second-rate services or derided. But the working class will always exist as long as our society continues and is in any way similar to the one we have now.
I would also like to throw out there, look what happened when the Colonials tried to get rid of their working class by replacing them with robots. That just worked out spectacularly, didn't it?
The union put the fleet in danger; the demands of the fleet were putting the union in danger. This sounds like I'm making an arguement that "no one was to blame really! They were both acting in understandable ways!"
...Not quite true. Roslin having someone arrested because she pissed him off...yes. That was interesting, and, as much as I love the idea of Roslin the dictator, it was also disturbing. Her totalitarian behaviour is starting to spread to beings other than cylons and Baltar.
First external comparison warning: it's like Jacen Solo. One day you wake up and realise...he was beautiful once, he was a total hero. But he got wrecked inside more than ever realised and now, he's utterly, utterly broken. Now, I can no longer get on board with his murderous, dictator-like behaviour. And as a sidenote which applies to both Battlestar Galactica and the Star Wars extended universe (which specifically does not apply to Anakin Skywalker), anything that pulls off waking up one morning and realising a character is a total dictator with occasional murderous intent, and that it's been building for years but you only just realised it, deserves serious, serious respect.
So yeah. I was thinking, Roslin, you just got Jacen Solo'd.
Until she broke my heart. Because she didn't fall off the wagon, but I'm half-certain she's still going to. Which...breaks my heart.
I'm pretty sure now that her initial reaction to the Refinery Captain was due to Baltar. I mean, even at the time, I kind of knew that, but didn't yet know she'd do such a graceful 180 (sorta). Roslin really, really hates him, I mean, it's boiling rage, because he consistantly gets a reaction for her and nothing else ever does.
Which isn't to say the reactions he does get out of her aren't dangerous, totalitarian and generally "of the dark side". And even if she wasn't specifically mad (or overreacting) to the strike, it's still a sign that what she's capable of has changed.
Adama...that's another issue. And one I think I'll save til the end of the post.
As to the portrayal of the class issues themselves, I really liked the battered, brutal, gritty feel they established with the camerawork. It felt more like the dirty, documentary style that was the hallmark of the mini series and earlier episodes.
I felt that they managed to strike the right emotional chords regarding the strike action. It would have been too easy to make the strikers look irrational, making a fuss at exactly the wrong time. But I did feel that it was made clear that this already was/would end up being a long-term situation.
The problem of inherited jobs is a situation that it makes sense would grow out of the situations on the exodus and I really feel for Roslin when she says that nothing on this fleet is ideal, and that there is a limited amount she can do to change the old established classism that meant poorer colonies were more likely to be un/skilled manual laborers. But she won a lot of respect for the graceful way she completely aknowledged the Chief's concerns as valid, intelligent comments.
I found something quite powerful about her encouraging the Chief to fight for a better society and to unionise, andsaying that she'd fight for it too, even if that meant sometimes they'd be fighting with each other.
It's an extremely important thing to know - that democracy isn't easy, it isn't safe, and that it requires dissent. Just because things have gotten difficult doesn't mean it's failing; it might actually mean that it's working.
Perhaps the real level that I think this show succeeds on is the real importance a strike has to the people involved. That it's not trivial. That it's important enough to tear apart friendships and families.
Second external comparison warning: the parallel it brought up for me was the miners' strikes in the eighties. Which I'm too young to remember, but they remade my nation, and I grew up with those stories. It's a great example of what happens when the government dismisses its workforce, and a tragic story of what happens when the commodity they work with is nowhere near as valuable as tylium. I mean, these strikes went on forever, there were armoured vehicles escorting the coal that was getting mined. Workers were literally in positions where they had to make the choice between feeding their families and crossing the picket lines, and crossing the picket lines... I don't know what it was like in the rest of the country; the stories I was raised with tell me about the way every day on the news, they'd have a tally of how many workers went back to work in the different mines. In some places it'd be 12 people or 20 people. In the welsh vallies it was no one. No one. One person. No one. Crossing the picket line in wales was treasonous. It splintered families, and friendships. Irreparably sometimes. It was brutal; half of it wasn't even due to the redundancy of the mines, it was fear of the labour unions, Maggie Thatcher's fear of the working class. Those strikes failed, in the end. The legacy was ugly.
Perhaps that's why the episode struck a chord - these stories I know? I don't think my dad would actually disown me, but I wouldn't ever want to have a conversation with him about how I crossed a picket line. Yeah. That would go down...not well at all.
On the whole I found this to be a nuanced look at workforce issues with some actual genuine reasons for the poor conditions that stemmed organically from the ongoing plotines. I thought it did a good job of making the concerns look trivial enough from one perspective before shifting to show them as really important.
I guess I felt there was a lot in this episode that has to do with dignity. But I'm babbling...and unable to coherently put together my point of view on the points I've already raised, let alone delve into anything else.
Now I'm going to unleash all hell on Adama.
I appreciate that the issue of military strikes are very different to civilian strikes. I can appreciate Adama's belief that it's important not to start treating his military like a civilian workforce.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the way he threatened murder in order to get a response. Yes, perhaps dissidents should be put up against a wall and shot [i]under Admiral Cain[/i]. But I don't believe he was ever going to do that. I don't believe that this was a viable solution to him. I believe he was terrifying Tyrol by threatening his wife and the mother of his baby and blackmailing him into believing it would be his fault. And that's...low.
If you have to stoop to those tactics to prevent your military force from unionising, perhaps you should be looking at the conditions that lead to this and wondering if it's flaws in leadership. Perhaps it's a message that long-term military service this way, with no way to muster-out, just as trapped by the convenience of "where you were at the time," just as stratified... Maybe slightly less so because yes, at one point, you signed up for service. But a lot of people's service is up by now. Cally signed on to learn to be a frakking dentist for crying out loud! In some ways she's as trapped as that boy who happened to have worked on a farm for a summer, she just chose a more skilled, and slightly more permanent, and yes, potentially more dangerous, interim career.
He makes comments in the boxing ring about how he's going to stop making calls due to personal bias and treating his crew like a family. But he has crew members like Cally and Tyrol and Helo and Sharon who are trying to raise families. He let them marry. It's not something you can take back because it's inconvenient. And there's a difference between trying to go back to a more standard military operation and then actively using things like someone's family against them.
At a basic level, I would be more sympathetic if Tyrol were endangering anyone, but the deck gang are performing basic services.
At an even more basic level, I'd be more sympathetic if Adama weren't falling back on his "you don't get a choice about orders," rhetoric, when it seems that actually, yes, you DO get a choice about orders. If you're Starbuck, or Tigh, or Apollo, or Helo. And yeah, he's even defended Helo's insubordination recently. Since his whole supposed boxing-ring epiphany. He's bent the rules of ethical treatment of prisoners with regards to Baltar just for Roslin since then, too.
Apparently you get a choice about orders if you're part of the emerging aristocracy - if you're one of Adama's surrogate or actual family. I think that scene was intended to show him as a hardass but a fair one. As in, you can't strike in the military and I won't permit it. You can strike as a civilian and I will support it.
But the nature of his hardassitude prevented me from seeing a glimmer of the old rights-defending Adama, and instead all I saw was unjustified manipulation, draconian threats, and a confirmation of the truth of Baltar's self-servingly written book.
And that is what I think.
I liked this week's episode. I am forced, I think, to compare it to the last episode I "reviewed" - "The Woman, King." I think the comparison is not a bad one - both focus on important but not "A-list" characters dealing with the harsh realities of life in the fleet and dealing with "isms." Last time it was racism, this time it's classism. Perhaps it's just because a lot of shows feel obligated to have the "race" episode but not very many feel obligated to have the "class" episode, meaning that this episode had less to be measured against, but I can't help but feel this was a much more solid show with a much clearer message.
I think this is an episode I'm going to end up explaining through comparisons to external events, both real and fictional, which probably none of you know about. So sorry. But it's my journal, so there!
Apparently Aerilonians are Northern, and Baltar's accent is Caprican, though Capricans also seem to have an American accent. Then again, if tiny little countries like Britain (hey, let's narrow it down, if REGIONS WITHIN BRITAIN) are allowed to have multiple accents, why not an entire planet? Though I bet his friends and family thought Baltar was a right little shit if he was trying to lose is accent at age 10. Going by my dad's example, it's perfectly easy to lose your accent nearly entirely when you're 18.
I'm also not sure why Tyrol was so convinced by Baltar's accent. I do happen to believe his background story, but also, the guy's a genius, surely he can fake an accent! I mean, I can do a reasonably convincing northern accent, and a scottish one, and a slightly terrible irish one, and passable if slightly dodgy liverpudlian and somerset (i.e. good enough to convince someone from a country that's not the UK), and at least two different kinds of welsh and a couple of shades of american. And I'm not all that great at accents.
Okay, gratuitous nitpicking out of the way, let's get on to the heavy stuff.
I'm not completely against people listening to Baltar. He's a genius and he knows what's going on, and I believe what he's writing in his book has a lot of merit. He wants to appeal to the people, and he knows exactly how to do it.
On a certain level, I understand why people would overlook the author, or at least be brought around to him. They're hearing things that ring true, that they need to hear, so they might well be better disposed towards the source.
That said, most of the people listening to "The Book" were in the labour union on New Caprica. A union that was depicted as antagonistic towards Baltar. Surely some of them would remember that for all his sudden posturing as a farmer's son, on New Caprica, he was a part of the aristocracy he's suddenly decrying.
Perhaps it's easy, considering the current situation on the fleet, to make unoccupied New Caprica look a whole lot better. I suppose if he's calling his book "My Triumphs, my Mistakes," there could be a heady amount of apology mixed in there, which along with a call to action - a seeming stand taken on behalf of the workers, could be a potent mix.
Still. I like the disturbed poetry of such a message coming from Baltar, for utterly selfish reasons, and catching Tyrol in the middle.
I felt they did a good job of presenting the situation as untenable and the mining ship as dangerous while also presenting the situation should the ship stop mining as untenable and dangerous.
When they first went on the run, as Lee insisted in "Bastille Day," they held on to things like democracy and consent of the people and trials and human rights (except not for cylons...).
The basic paradox in this episode - in fact the basic paradox of the show - is that humanity is in an extreme situation without any of the facilities to continue existing with adequate space, safety or food. The basic paradox of this episode and the show is, how many of your rights do you sacrifice for your survival? What about when your right to survival is being threatened for the survival of your species?
It's easy to see how rights to things like sane break periods and compensation (compensate you with what was my immediate thought) would be the first things to go. It's almost like getting drafted but into a workforce and not a military. Except, that makes it exactly like a military. And that didn't work well for Cain.
It's easy to see that worker comfort is second-class to the ability to defend the fleet and to flee the enemy. But as soon as you start abandoning rights on the basis of extraordinary situations, you start on a road that ends in a very dark place.
The problem is, it's a road they were forcibly put on when the cylons killed over 99% of their species. As soon as that happened, rights were lost. Rights like adequate sanitation and nutrition. Rights like privacy and adquate living space.
How can you keep a balance? Maybe you can't. It's interesting that while racism and classism have many parallels (often as a result of racial differences and stereotypes breaking down broadly along class lines), there's a fundamental difference. With our current model of society, it's possible to imagine racism no longer existing, it's possible to imagine no xenophobia or sexism. In terms of our daily functioning, it isn't possible to imagine a lack of a working class. Someone has to do the unskilled labour. The best you can do to redress this is try to make sure class doesn't become generational, try to make sure the working class aren't subjected to second-rate services or derided. But the working class will always exist as long as our society continues and is in any way similar to the one we have now.
I would also like to throw out there, look what happened when the Colonials tried to get rid of their working class by replacing them with robots. That just worked out spectacularly, didn't it?
The union put the fleet in danger; the demands of the fleet were putting the union in danger. This sounds like I'm making an arguement that "no one was to blame really! They were both acting in understandable ways!"
...Not quite true. Roslin having someone arrested because she pissed him off...yes. That was interesting, and, as much as I love the idea of Roslin the dictator, it was also disturbing. Her totalitarian behaviour is starting to spread to beings other than cylons and Baltar.
First external comparison warning: it's like Jacen Solo. One day you wake up and realise...he was beautiful once, he was a total hero. But he got wrecked inside more than ever realised and now, he's utterly, utterly broken. Now, I can no longer get on board with his murderous, dictator-like behaviour. And as a sidenote which applies to both Battlestar Galactica and the Star Wars extended universe (which specifically does not apply to Anakin Skywalker), anything that pulls off waking up one morning and realising a character is a total dictator with occasional murderous intent, and that it's been building for years but you only just realised it, deserves serious, serious respect.
So yeah. I was thinking, Roslin, you just got Jacen Solo'd.
Until she broke my heart. Because she didn't fall off the wagon, but I'm half-certain she's still going to. Which...breaks my heart.
I'm pretty sure now that her initial reaction to the Refinery Captain was due to Baltar. I mean, even at the time, I kind of knew that, but didn't yet know she'd do such a graceful 180 (sorta). Roslin really, really hates him, I mean, it's boiling rage, because he consistantly gets a reaction for her and nothing else ever does.
Which isn't to say the reactions he does get out of her aren't dangerous, totalitarian and generally "of the dark side". And even if she wasn't specifically mad (or overreacting) to the strike, it's still a sign that what she's capable of has changed.
Adama...that's another issue. And one I think I'll save til the end of the post.
As to the portrayal of the class issues themselves, I really liked the battered, brutal, gritty feel they established with the camerawork. It felt more like the dirty, documentary style that was the hallmark of the mini series and earlier episodes.
I felt that they managed to strike the right emotional chords regarding the strike action. It would have been too easy to make the strikers look irrational, making a fuss at exactly the wrong time. But I did feel that it was made clear that this already was/would end up being a long-term situation.
The problem of inherited jobs is a situation that it makes sense would grow out of the situations on the exodus and I really feel for Roslin when she says that nothing on this fleet is ideal, and that there is a limited amount she can do to change the old established classism that meant poorer colonies were more likely to be un/skilled manual laborers. But she won a lot of respect for the graceful way she completely aknowledged the Chief's concerns as valid, intelligent comments.
I found something quite powerful about her encouraging the Chief to fight for a better society and to unionise, andsaying that she'd fight for it too, even if that meant sometimes they'd be fighting with each other.
It's an extremely important thing to know - that democracy isn't easy, it isn't safe, and that it requires dissent. Just because things have gotten difficult doesn't mean it's failing; it might actually mean that it's working.
Perhaps the real level that I think this show succeeds on is the real importance a strike has to the people involved. That it's not trivial. That it's important enough to tear apart friendships and families.
Second external comparison warning: the parallel it brought up for me was the miners' strikes in the eighties. Which I'm too young to remember, but they remade my nation, and I grew up with those stories. It's a great example of what happens when the government dismisses its workforce, and a tragic story of what happens when the commodity they work with is nowhere near as valuable as tylium. I mean, these strikes went on forever, there were armoured vehicles escorting the coal that was getting mined. Workers were literally in positions where they had to make the choice between feeding their families and crossing the picket lines, and crossing the picket lines... I don't know what it was like in the rest of the country; the stories I was raised with tell me about the way every day on the news, they'd have a tally of how many workers went back to work in the different mines. In some places it'd be 12 people or 20 people. In the welsh vallies it was no one. No one. One person. No one. Crossing the picket line in wales was treasonous. It splintered families, and friendships. Irreparably sometimes. It was brutal; half of it wasn't even due to the redundancy of the mines, it was fear of the labour unions, Maggie Thatcher's fear of the working class. Those strikes failed, in the end. The legacy was ugly.
Perhaps that's why the episode struck a chord - these stories I know? I don't think my dad would actually disown me, but I wouldn't ever want to have a conversation with him about how I crossed a picket line. Yeah. That would go down...not well at all.
On the whole I found this to be a nuanced look at workforce issues with some actual genuine reasons for the poor conditions that stemmed organically from the ongoing plotines. I thought it did a good job of making the concerns look trivial enough from one perspective before shifting to show them as really important.
I guess I felt there was a lot in this episode that has to do with dignity. But I'm babbling...and unable to coherently put together my point of view on the points I've already raised, let alone delve into anything else.
Now I'm going to unleash all hell on Adama.
I appreciate that the issue of military strikes are very different to civilian strikes. I can appreciate Adama's belief that it's important not to start treating his military like a civilian workforce.
I have absolutely no sympathy for the way he threatened murder in order to get a response. Yes, perhaps dissidents should be put up against a wall and shot [i]under Admiral Cain[/i]. But I don't believe he was ever going to do that. I don't believe that this was a viable solution to him. I believe he was terrifying Tyrol by threatening his wife and the mother of his baby and blackmailing him into believing it would be his fault. And that's...low.
If you have to stoop to those tactics to prevent your military force from unionising, perhaps you should be looking at the conditions that lead to this and wondering if it's flaws in leadership. Perhaps it's a message that long-term military service this way, with no way to muster-out, just as trapped by the convenience of "where you were at the time," just as stratified... Maybe slightly less so because yes, at one point, you signed up for service. But a lot of people's service is up by now. Cally signed on to learn to be a frakking dentist for crying out loud! In some ways she's as trapped as that boy who happened to have worked on a farm for a summer, she just chose a more skilled, and slightly more permanent, and yes, potentially more dangerous, interim career.
He makes comments in the boxing ring about how he's going to stop making calls due to personal bias and treating his crew like a family. But he has crew members like Cally and Tyrol and Helo and Sharon who are trying to raise families. He let them marry. It's not something you can take back because it's inconvenient. And there's a difference between trying to go back to a more standard military operation and then actively using things like someone's family against them.
At a basic level, I would be more sympathetic if Tyrol were endangering anyone, but the deck gang are performing basic services.
At an even more basic level, I'd be more sympathetic if Adama weren't falling back on his "you don't get a choice about orders," rhetoric, when it seems that actually, yes, you DO get a choice about orders. If you're Starbuck, or Tigh, or Apollo, or Helo. And yeah, he's even defended Helo's insubordination recently. Since his whole supposed boxing-ring epiphany. He's bent the rules of ethical treatment of prisoners with regards to Baltar just for Roslin since then, too.
Apparently you get a choice about orders if you're part of the emerging aristocracy - if you're one of Adama's surrogate or actual family. I think that scene was intended to show him as a hardass but a fair one. As in, you can't strike in the military and I won't permit it. You can strike as a civilian and I will support it.
But the nature of his hardassitude prevented me from seeing a glimmer of the old rights-defending Adama, and instead all I saw was unjustified manipulation, draconian threats, and a confirmation of the truth of Baltar's self-servingly written book.
And that is what I think.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-28 01:51 pm (UTC)I’m kind of looking forward to it in a terrified, horrified, fascinated way.
Ooooh I know!
Hmm, that link does go to a rather strange story.
The initial union story was an example of one of those bad union situations where someone made a poor decision but the media grabbed it before it could be quietly dealt with. It angered me though because it was yet another example of why I dislike unions -- or rather, certain privileges that they have. The rest of my thoughts are further down in the comments with missedith01.
I do not like the concept of striking. I can appreciate a go slow. I appreciate that the strikers in BSG still maintained important services, etc. But I will not change my feelings on the fact that a strike holds people hostage. I'm not saying their reasons are petty, though (the flag example was, but the other strikes aren't necessarily so).
Yes I'm in Canada. :)
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 06:09 pm (UTC)I agree with that analysis.
I do not like the concept of striking. I can appreciate a go slow. I appreciate that the strikers in BSG still maintained important services, etc. But I will not change my feelings on the fact that a strike holds people hostage. I'm not saying their reasons are petty, though (the flag example was, but the other strikes aren't necessarily so).
Most of the strikes I've experienced or seen in my life have been more a kind of "go slow" than an absolute strike. They've usually been planned one-day strikes among non-essential services that effectively disrupt service provision on a relatively minor level.
When strikes have been among emergency services (there was a strike in the fire department a while back) they've always maintained a response to emergency calls.
When we had massive fuel truck driver strikes a few years ago, I remember there were government reserves (I believe) that were set aside for both public transport and the emergency services.
In the instance of the miners' strikes I mentioned, that was pretty different - they were striking in protest that their mines - sole source of income for almost entire communities - were going to be shut down wholesale with terribly inadequate compensation; so that's a situation I don't think is really comparable to BSG or the reasons for most strikes (i.e. improvement of conditions over continuation of existing conditions).
Strikes do hold people hostage. That's not something I can really argue against. I guess ultimately, that's the point; BSG illustrates the origins of the strike well - the only thing you can withold is your labour. I guess I don't find the idea of holding people hostage in this manner (i.e. no risk to any lives) to be inherently bad if the situation is serious enough. The problem is knowing when you've done all you can short of that; when a go-slow is enough; when a one-day strike will prove your point; when you should put down your tools and refuse to work until you get something better. Like all power, the mass power of the worker can be abused.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 06:39 pm (UTC)I can appreciate go slows or one day strikes -- things that show a clear understanding that yes, we are removing your services and it will hurt you, but we've considered that.
It seems like striking is the fastest threat here and it has happened several times in various groups and lasted for good chunks of time. On top of the striking, the protestors make sure to get in the face of everyone, picketing our alternate options so that no matter what we do, we are slowed down.
For example, civil servants went on strike one extremely hot summer, which means, most noteably, there was no garbage disposal. A serious threat to public health. The strike stopped a few days before the government were going to force them back to work because of health and safety concerns. For those who tried to take their garbage to dumps themselves, they had to make it through picket lines. It lasted a good 2 weeks, I believe. Same with teachers strikes. Parents had to take time off of work for strikes that went on indefinitely. :/
no subject
Date: 2007-03-01 07:55 pm (UTC)But from the examples you give, I wouldn't want to support that kind of action unless their workers' situations were really dire. Specifically I find the picketing of all alternate options worrying. Usually the point of a picket is to force you to go elsewhere, but I can see that being a problem with services provided by a single organisation.
I guess the problem is you need to balance the havoc you'll wreak against the seriousness of the situation, and where you're picketing and why and what level of discomfort you can expect the public to reasonably undertake on your behalf when you ask them not to cross picket lines (again versus the seriousness of your situation; death and maiming and no time off in BSG doesn't really compare to the "we're underpaid!" problem at the bottom of most strikes).
I'm beginning to wonder if this is a cultural difference with respect to both strikes and attitudes towards them in our respective countries. Problem is, I have no real idea of Canadian politics or attitudes towards such things, so I couldn't really begin to compare (using my admittedly limited knowledge of such political things).
no subject
Date: 2007-03-02 01:24 am (UTC)Here, there is literally a strike or threat of a strike every month or week. I'm not exaggerating. Right now, CN Rail is on strike. That, along with a fire an a refining plant has caused problems at the gas pumps (many stations shut down). Prior to that... I believe the auto workers were threatening. TTC (Toronto Transit) went on an unauthorized strike. One day, no warning. All commuters were just shit out of luck. The union leader said it was not authorized ... but it kind of shows the attitude regarding striking -- that they know how powerful it is and will throw it down as an "option" right from the start.
Let's see... other strikes I can recall in recent history... postal, civil servants (irony: they had a parade for themselves about 2 weeks after the strike, which clogged the city streets >.<), teachers, janitorial staff, TAs at my university (I liked this one... I didn't have to take any of my exams *grin*). Ambulance drivers threatened to strike (can't recall if they did). Farmers held a planned protest, taking their slow moving farm vehicles to the highways. I believe truck drivers did something similar.
Again, I have to be aware that the media does not provide all details. I know there is more to their demands than pay raises and job security. I do not know how long negotiations have gone on before the strike threat appears. But based on the strikes and threats of strikes that are always in the news, I will reason that the threat to do so hangs over every negotiation table right from the start, even if the issue is not verbally raised.
Oh the actors guild recently went on strike. Not life threatening, of course, but I do know some details: Canada's rules on internet royalties are apparently lax/our actors are paid more. Hollywood complained so the powers that be immediately put an end to this. The actors didn't appreciate that and went on strike. The powers argue that Hollywood is a MAJOR force when it comes to filmmaking (well, duh) pointing out how many movies/shows are filmed here, thereby providing work for these very actors. If they have an issue, it needs to be dealt with because it is very easy for Hollywood to go elsewhere to film. Meanwhile, all the crew had no work for the entire time. I'm not sure they have a union.
no subject
Date: 2007-03-03 08:13 pm (UTC)Although our university lecturers went on strike recently, I think, over pay issues and there was a chance that students' papers and exams wouldn't get marked in time. And airline staff struck recently as well, for about three days, maybe?
But overall, I think I can remember perhaps two or three major strikes in the last year or two (you know, major ones, not planned single-day strike action). And of those, I think the airline worker one was resolved in about three days, the university lecturer one within a week or so (though that's hazy). The last really major strike I remember was the fuel truck drivers and that was about six years ago.
It's a shame it seems so abused in your city; it's a powerful and important tool and shouldn't be devalued by "crying wolf." As your attitudes show, overuse just destroys the sympathy of other workers who might otherwise support your cause.
Ah well. If the world were perfect, Battlestar Galactica wouldn't have any cannon fodder for political commentary and then where would we be?! ;)