Public Works: State Formation, Class Composition, and the Making of Ontario’S Public Sector

Public Works: State Formation, Class Composition, and the Making of Ontario’s Public Sector by Chris Hurl A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in SOCIOLOGY Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario © 2013 Chris Hurl Abstract This dissertation examines the role of labour in the formation of a modern public sector in Ontario. Specifically, I explore how the public sector has been rendered intelligible and administrable through strategies of ‘government at a distance,’ which have aimed to disentangle labour from its strategic location in vital infrastructural networks, enabling its regulation through increasingly centralized administrative structures. I draw from three historical case studies in developing my argument. First, I examine how civic employees’ unions contributed to the reconfiguration of sanitation work in early twentieth century Toronto. Second, I explore how the federation of public sector unions on a provincial and national scale in part provoked the emergence of regional governance structures across the province in the 1940s and 1950s. Finally, I explore how interest arbitration was taken up as a means of depoliticizing the bargaining process in Ontario’s hospital sector through the 1960s and 1970s, galvanizing new understandings of the public sector as a distinctive domain. In each of these cases, I explore how new forms of expertise were developed which aimed to impartially calculate the value of public work and render it comparable across disparate sites. In this sense, I draw from Foucault in viewing the formation of a public sector as a process of ‘governmentalization’ -- setting up an economy at the level of the entire state. While a great deal of literature in governmentality studies has tended to focus on the role of state officials in this process, I emphasize how workers, at various times, have been able to build leverage through their critical position in the provision of services, and change the scale at which their labour is framed through establishing new levels of organization. In this sense, I argue that the formation of the public sector a uniform and coherent domain has in many ways been the outcome of struggles from below. In other words, workers have played a very active role in the production of the public sector. Acknowledgments The first problem in organizing academics is to demonstrate collectively that we are workers and not just intellectuals. At times, writing the dissertation has felt like a very solitary intellectual exercise. Like everyone else, I’ve experienced the tendency to internalize an image of myself as a rugged individual aggressively carving out a place within the cold, asbestos-riddled walls of the Loeb Building. Cordoned off, frantically typing away, seeking to live up to distant performance evaluations and fantasies of elusive tenure track jobs. Of course, that’s far from the truth. Writing, teaching, and doing research are all profoundly social experiences. You need a support-base from where you can get the requisite nutrients, exercise, sleep, feedback, love, respect and understanding. In this sense, the dissertation is an amalgam – the outcome of years of togetherness in formal and informal networks. First and foremost, I would like to thank Julie Tomiak. She told me that I owe her a beer for all of her help over the years, but really I owe her a small microbrewery. Her support has been so important in helping me to find my voice. Through all of the trials and tribulations over the years, she has been there for me. Furthermore, I would like to formally acknowledge that she was right the whole time; there was never any sense in worrying about the dissertation. She helped me to understand that I should just have confidence in myself. I would like to thank my committee. My supervisor Wallace Clement has always asked questions that I could not quite articulate but which were necessary in moving me to the next stage. From our insightful reading group conversations onwards, Rianne Mahon acquainted me with the literature on scale and critical geography, and helped me to recognize how institutions are open; there are always little spaces through which we can move. The insights of Bruce Curtis have been very important in developing my own theoretical perspective. No one else blends together Marx and Foucault in such a rigorous, empirical and politically effective way. I’d also like to thank my external examiners – Rebecca Schein and Joe Painter – whose comments have been extremely useful. I was fortunate enough to have a lot of friends help me through the process. Kevin Walby read and reread my chapters at precisely marked intervals, providing hundreds of detailed comments in ‘track changes’. His relentless drive and motivation have been an important inspiration for me. As he likes to say: talking about writing is not writing; writing is writing. I’ve bummed far too many cigarettes from Robyn Green, sitting and talking about anything and everything. Now that the dissertation is finished, I’m looking forward to writing that screenplay with her. I’ve enjoyed my drunken rants, tennis matches and Red Lobster dinners with Jamie Brownlee. And I was able to stay so long in Toronto doing research and finally come to appreciate the Blue Jays thanks to Benjamin Christensen. Dale Spencer has also been a good friend over the years and has always lent an ear, even from Winnipeg. I’ve always enjoyed the razor-sharp dialectics of Paul Finch, who has a knack for discovering just the right line in leveraging things forward. Lisa Smith played a very important role for me this summer as I was trying to get together the final draft. At similar stages in the process, we held each other accountable and worked to firm deadlines. The ceaseless energy and deep empathy of Chris Dixon and Alexis Shotwell have also been a great inspiration. And my family has been with me every step of the way. While my parents, Dennis and Marilyn, and my sister, Danielle, might not quite understand what it is that I’m doing, they have always given me a lot of love and support. I would like to thank all of my sisters and brothers at CUPE 4600 – representing Teaching Assistants and Contract Instructors at Carleton University – who have helped me to understand unions as living creatures. Never finished, always growing, it takes a tremendous amount of work to sustain their singular and collective voice. I’ve spent many hours with Mat Nelson talking heavy theory and somehow connecting it back to practical questions. I’ve had countless conversations about union politics with James Meades, whose crisp polemics have always helped me to find an edge in struggle. Tabatha Armstrong has been a great co-conspirator, as we try to put our theories into practice, transforming the university into a General Assembly. And I’ve picked the brain of our business agent, Stuart Ryan; his decades of experience in the labour movement have given him a long institutional memory that can never be captured in any book or article. I never get bored of his stories, from May ’68 onwards. Additional conversations with Michael Hurley, Jane Stinson, Derek Blackadder and Larry Katz have also helped me to get a sense of what it has been like to organize with the Canadian Union of Public Employees over the years. And Margot Young, at the National Office, has been instrumental in helping me gain access to the CUPE National collections located at the Library and Archives of Canada. On paper, the current period often seems bleak. We are living in an era of austerity in which everything appears scarce. There is not enough time or money; there are not enough jobs or natural resources. We need to always be cutting back, tightening the belt. But I feel very fortunate to be part of this moment in time. Far from scarcity, I know that there is a great abundance, because I’ve experienced it with all of the fantastic people that I’ve met. They’ve helped me to think and act with a feeling of fullness – to understand that there’s always more than we’re told. Ultimately, that gives me hope and energy. Table of Contents Abstract Acknowledgements Chapter 1 Introduction: Putting the Public Sector in Context 1 Chapter 2 Assembling a Public Sector: New Theoretical 19 Perspectives Chapter 3 State Formation, Critical Discourse Analysis and the 48 Constitution of the Archives Chapter 4 Public Waste, Sanitation Work and the Fight for 71 Clean Government, 1890-1920 Chapter 5 Spatial Keynesianism, Industrial Pluralism, and the 118 Making of a Provincial Public Sector, 1945-1963 Chapter 6 A Militancy of Invidious Comparisons: Interest 157 Arbitration in the Hospitals, 1965-1974 Chapter 7 Conclusion: On Producing Publics 200 References 225 Chapter One Introduction: Putting the Public Sector in Context “On the one hand, when it comes to the matter of wages or benefits, public workers are considered utterly non-essential. They’re stereotyped as leeches on the public purse or leeches on the private sector. On the other hand, let these ‘public workers’ even breathe the word ‘strike’ ... and they can go to jail or pay a fine. Suddenly, these ‘leeches on the public purse’ are essential!”1 --Robert E. Clarke, Research Director, National Union of Provincial Employees, 1979 Introduction The public sector tends to be seen today as a discrete domain. Drawing on topographical metaphors, it is often conceptualized as a realm of redistribution, a decommodified zone, or a space of entitlements. It is described as a monolithic sphere, with its own distinctive features – its own rate of growth, mode of organization and class of workers.

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