Neoliberalism and Working-Class Resistance in British Columbia: The Hospital Employees' Union Struggle, 2002-2004
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In British Columbia in the spring of 2004, over 40,000 hospital and long-term care facility workers, mostly members of the Hospital Employees Union [HEU], struck to defend their jobs and services against attacks from an aggressive neoliberal government and employers. This strike was distinguished by the social composition of the workforce, the fact that HEU had one of the more left-wing leaderships in the Canadian labour movement, and the determination of the strikers to persevere even in the face of back-to-work legislation. HEU's resistance evoked an unusual degree of support that took the form of active solidarity rather than just passive sympathy. The BC labour leadership was pushed towards a confrontation of the kind that the existing regime of industrial legality was designed to prevent. This article identifies the systemic causes of the BC health care strike in public sector restructuring and the building of a lean state, explores its background, traces its trajectory, and explains and assesses its outcome. This strike highlights the significance of the character of the contemporary labour officialdom as a social layer whose conditions of existence lead it to usually oppose forms of collective action outside the bounds of industrial legality. En Colombie-Britannique au printemps de 2004, plus de 40 000 travailleuses et travailleurs d'hopitaux et d'etablissements de soins prolonges, dont la plupart etaient membres du Hospital Employees Union [HEU], ont fait la greve pour defendre leurs emplois et services contre les assauts d'un gouvernement neo-liberal agressif et des employeurs. Cette greve s'est distinguee par la composition sociale de la main-d'œuvre, le fait que le HEU avait l'un des chefs de gauche les plus importants au sein du mouvement syndical canadien, et la determination des grevistes de perseverer meme face a la loi de reprise du travail. La resistance du HEU a evoque un degre inhabituel d'appui qui a pris la forme d'une solidarite active plutot que juste d'une sympathie passive. Les dirigeants syndicaux de la Colombie-Britannique ont ete pousses vers un type de confrontation que le regime actuel de legalite industrielle aurait ou prevenir. Cet article identifie les causes complexes de la greve relative aux soins de sante en Colombie-Britannique dans le cadre de la restructuration du secteur public et de la formation d'un gouvernement degraisse. Il explore les antecedents de la greve, trace son parcours; explique et evalue le resultat. Cette greve met en evidence l'importance des officiers syndicaux contemporains comme couche sociale dont les conditions d'existence l'amene habituellement a s'opposer a des formes d'action collective au-dela des limites de legalite industrielle.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it