Jeremy Milloy - The Violence of Work

JEREMY MILLOY

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence to the spirit as well as to the body.

Studs Terkel, Working (1972)

In the mid-1990s, Margery Wardle was a heavy equipment operator for the City of Nepean, Ontario. She loved her career. She was really proud of what I did for a living, she reflected in 2018, long after it had been taken away from her. On the job, Wardle worked in an environment where pictures of women portrayed as sex objects were posted up. Her own sexuality was questioned and bandied about. She was followed into the washroom. She was grabbed while at work. When she fought this, she got nowhere. Her harassers were promoted. After she spoke out about her treatment, retaliation made her working life unbearable. She left the job and was diagnosed with anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder As Sarah Jessup details in this volume, Ontarios labour law prohibits harassment and the creation of a toxic workplace environment. Yet the provinces Workplace Safety Insurance Board denied Wardles claim for benefits, claiming that interpersonal conflict is a typical feature of normal employment and is generally not considered to be a substantial work-related stressor. Despite legislation and policy, workplace violence is persistent, contested, and unsettled.

Wardle is not alone. Workplace violence is a major problem for working people today. In 2016 there were five hundred workplace homicides in the United States, which accounted for one of every ten occupational fatalities. In a 2015 survey, 45 per cent of Canadian workers polled reported experiencing bullying in the workplace; more than one-quarter of these workers left their jobs in response. In the United States, 27 per cent of those surveyed reported direct experience with abusive conduct at work. Victimization in the Workplace, a 2007 Statistics Canada study, reported that almost 20 per cent of incidents of violent victimization occurred in the victims workplace.

While workplace violence has often been framed as a new or growing problem, workers under capitalism have always experienced violence on the job. Workplace violence has been decried by trade unionists and socialists since the nineteenth century and has often been understood as embedded in the profit motive of capitalism. In that century, the primary forms of violence at work involved mass violence inflicted by bosses, their private armies, and the state against unionizing or striking workers; by strikers against scabs, and vice versa; by strikers versus police and militia and, as the bloody backdrop to all of these conflicts, the death, disease, and dismemberment of working people that underwrote economic development in the industrial age. Over the twentieth century, the dominant trope of workplace violence shifted from mass to individual, with lone workers directing aggression against bosses, co-workers, and customers, a shift I tracked in my book