Ten Forward: Working Stiffs And Unions On Sci-Fi TV

Most fans of genre television are just now starting to feel the effects of the disappearance of intelligent, scripted entertainment, and would love nothing better than to see this conflict end swiftly and justly. But as Joss Whedon recently said on Whedonesque, "It's gonna get really rough for a lot of people, but the studios are not going to break our union."

About three years ago, I had developed a course at Rutgers University called "Labor in Popular Culture," where we would watch a different labor-oriented movie or TV show each class, and delve into the history and issues represented in it. Among the movies we watched were some of my all-time favorite movies, such as "Cradle Will Rock," "Matewan," "Salt of the Earth" and "Newsies." I also made sure I included a couple of episodes of some of my favorite sci-fi/fantasy television series.

I had started compiling a list of labor-oriented sci-fi/fantasy television episodes, with the hopes of coming up with a great list of 10 for this column. The sad truth is that since the late 1940s, worker-management conflict is rarely addressed in the genre that was originally born out of a desire to incorporate social commentary into fiction. The first sci-fi movie, the 1928 silent German film, "Metropolis," highlighted conflict between an intellectual elite and working class people.

Kurt Vonnegut excelled at using a blend of sci-fi and satire to highlight the futility of life within the perpetual motion machine of capitalism. His novel "Hocus Pocus" was perhaps the most brilliant in equating academic work with prison (something I identify completely with).

H.G. Wells, best known as a science-fiction writer, also dealt with man's exploitation of his fellow man, as did George Orwell. As much as his "1984" appeared to be a criticism of communism, it was also a criticism of the oppression of workers by an omnipresent power that too many workers in the United States (and elsewhere) know all too well. Just ask any TWA worker about how every move they make, and conversation they have, is monitored by management with surveillance devices.

This was going on way before the attacks on the World Trade Center, as a way to intimidate workers who were union activists – or merely disgruntled, or sick, or human.

In my search for genre union- and worker-oriented stories, I had to broaden my search to beyond the 10-year framework I usually try to stay in. I also had to include shows that simply portrayed the daily struggles of working people. Even still, few shows ever really address the topic, instead either going for broader, less specific "man's inhumanity to man" issues, or side-stepping the fact that no matter where we are in time and space, work pretty much sucks.

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