Abstract
Reviewed by: Gavin Bridge, Durham University, UK
The syntax of oil is flow: wildcat gushers, transcontinental pipelines, fuel-injected engines – oil’s seeming ability to move unaided is central to accounts of its social and historical significance. Oil’s fluidity can be beguiling – particularly when set against the long-run history of solid fuels like wood and coal – and has recently led some social historians to root structural shifts in class relations in the 20th century, and in social democracy more broadly, to the different labour regimes associated with coal and oil (Malm, 2016; Mitchell, 2011). Such comparisons are instructive, but they tend to systematically discount the labour involved in locating, extracting, shipping and refining crude oil and moving its products to market. Working for Oil steps directly into this analytical space to reassert the relevance of labour to the evolution of the global oil industry. The book’s provocation is that class relations have largely ‘disappeared’ from the repertoire of social science research on oil since the 1980s. Furthermore, this effacing of labour has occurred in a period when scholarly interest in the environmental, cultural and international politics of oil has been growing. In response, Working for Oil offers a rich set of analytical portraits that attest to the relevance and agency of labour, the variegation and dynamism of labour relations, and the continuing significance of the politics of work in the oil sector.
Working for Oil is an edited collection of 15 chapters. It includes 13 substantive country cases, a short introduction by the editors, and an opening essay by Kaveh Ehsani which considers why labour and class relations have become increasingly invisible in research and writing on the global oil industry. Ehsani dismisses three conventional arguments for the growing irrelevance of labour in the oil sector – the increasing capital intensity of production, flexibilisation and casualisation of large parts of the workforce, and the geographical remoteness of production from metropolitan centres – as ‘neither convincing nor historically accurate’. Instead, he argues, social historians need to account for the ways in which the invisibility of work is a consequence of ‘policies and strategies adopted by corporate employers and national governments … to actively fragment, isolate and reduce the possibilities for more radical and collective engagements’. Ehsani illustrates his argument with the example of oil workers in Iran in the late 1970s who, having been celebrated by the Khomeini government for their role in the Revolution and the Iran--Iraq War, were subsequently rendered invisible via the repression of independent trade unions and reforms to labour laws. The problem of ‘disappearing workers’ is well presented, although the chapter (and the book more generally) pulls it punches in relation to a wider argument about the politics of research, and the consequences of occluding industrial and labour relations when studying the historical and geographical dynamics of the global oil industry. Much is at stake in how we write about work and labour in the oil sector, and arguments about technological change and competitive outsourcing run the risk of naturalising what are, in fact, active strategies to constrain the political capacity of labour.
The core of the book is divided into three parts. Part 1, The Political Life of Oil, focuses on national politics and the relations between workforce, employers and state institutions, with chapters on Colombia in the early 20th century, Iran in the 1970s, and three chapters dedicated to the more recent histories of Norway, Nigeria and Ecuador. Chapters in Part 2, The Productive Life of Oil, adopt the scale of the workplace as their entry point, examining labour relations in refineries, oil fields and ports. The four chapters in this section explore the role of Indian migrant workers in Iran in the first half of the 20th century, organised labour on the US Gulf Coast and in Houston, and Soviet workers in western Siberia in the 1970s. Part 3, The Social and Urban Life of Oil, expands the field of view to consider the social reproduction of labour outside the workplace. Chapters in this section focus on gender relations in US oil company towns in Libya in the 1960s, the construction and management of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline in Lebanon in the 1950s, the emergence of a class of oil workers in Kazakhstan in the Soviet period, and the role of women in the offshore oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico.
Working for Oil understands labour in sufficiently broad terms that the collection can accommodate multiple disciplinary perspectives, including those of anthropology, history, human geography, international relations, and studies of technology and culture. The book’s coherence derives from its broad, labour studies perspective on the upstream (extraction) and midstream (refining) phases of production. The editors cast an agreeably wide net, and individual chapters extend the analysis of power beyond the dynamics of class to include gender, race and ethnicity. The collection as a whole effectively documents the complex encounters between labour activism and nationalism; the application and enforcement of racial, ethnic and gender hierarchies in the workplace, and their reproduction through racial segregation and gender norms in oil field camps and company towns; and the emergence in some moments – and sundering in others – of ‘cross-collar’ alliances when different occupations within the oil sector become united in a common cause. There are inevitably some bounds to the book’s general embrace of labour relations, work and oil: there is, for example, no sustained consideration of labour practices in ‘downstream’ workspaces such as gasoline retailing, or ‘mid-stream’ components like tanker crewing or oil trading; and there are some surprising geographic gaps, such as the diverse experiences of Angola, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon in Africa, as well as of China, Indonesia, Venezuela and Brazil. However, the book’s objective is to show some of the diversity of labour relations in the sector, rather than be comprehensive, and in this it succeeds. The editors have assembled an impressive collection of contrasting case histories that push well beyond familiar cases of North America or Europe. Working for Oil is a valuable and distinctive addition to research on the evolution of the global oil industry, and will be of interest to anyone who cares about industrial relations and the agency of labour in this sector.