Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Wheel of Fortune is the best account we have of the raw, stark reality
of working and nonworking life in Canada’s industrial heartland. It is
a hard book to categorize. Essentially, it is a sociological critique of
modern capitalism, with vignettes of industrial life in the manner of
Studs Terkel, sociological explanations reminiscent of C. Wright Mills,
and lucid passages on the state of civil society in the style of George
Orwell, whom Swift clearly admires. Interspersed throughout are poignant
narratives of life in Kingston and Windsor, Ontario. If this immensely
revealing and rewarding book can be said to have a unifying theme, it is
the relationship between training and the goal of full employment. We
get the whole sorry history of industrial training in Canada over the
past century.

Two small criticisms. First, Swift says that union policy on training
is contradictory. Well, unions certainly have different views about
training and different programs; but no union ever claimed that its
programs provided all the answers, or that training alone could achieve
full employment. Second, Swift suggests we should look to Europe rather
than the United States for creative responses to “union destiny.” On
the contrary, the latter country has been a fount of new approaches
including community organizing campaigns, single-issue organizing,
“corporate campaigns” (instead of narrow workplace bargaining), and
the organization of “contingent workers” through union cooperative
agencies. But then, the author seems to suggest in the end, why bother
with the elusive goal of full employment? Maybe it is a good thing that
the old working class is to become the new leisure class.