ResoluteReader: Michael Patrick F. Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown

Monday, December 30, 2024

Michael Patrick F. Smith - The Good Hand: A Memoir of Work, Brotherhood and Transformation in an American Boomtown

One of the mistakes that environmentalists have been guilty of in the past is forgetting that behind every oil, coal, gas and fracking site are dozens of workers. The fossil fuel industry is both a uniquely devastating part of capitalism, and also a massive employer. This is why the British Campaign Against Climate Change produced a number of pamphlets aimed at the trade union movement to argue that a "Just Transition" to a sustainable economy could both create jobs, and transition workers from the fossil fuel industry to alternative employment while protecting terms and conditions. That remains, I would argue, a central task of both the environmental and trade union movement.

The Good Hand is an insight into the lives of the men and women who are behind the fossil fuel industry. Michael Patrick F. Smith lived and worked in New York as a playwright, singer and jobbing actor. In 2013, as the fracking (shale gas) boom exploded in North Dakota he headed up to the oil fields to try and make his fortune. Arriving in Willston, North Dakota, the centre of the boom he finds himself, alongside hundreds of others, trying to get work in a boomtown where rents are rocketing and McDonalds cannot (or won't) pay enough to hire enough staff. Living in a flophouse, where three or four men share a living room sleeping on bunks or airbeds, Smith trudges the streets trying to get a job.

This is oil boom capitalism. But its also capitalism that has shed any dignity. There's plenty of money sloshing around to ensure that the bars, sex clubs, and drug dealers are able to make a killing from the young, lost, alienated and immigrant labour. The work, when Smith eventually makes it into an oil job, is uniquely dangerous. There are safety briefings, but the chances of injury and death are ever present. The long hours, long distances, drink, drugs and pressure to work faster contribute to a workplace safety record near the bottom of the graph.

Smith is an incredible story teller. His experiences however are shaped in this remarkable book by his upbringing in a abusive and dangerous family. His father was violent and sexually abused his sister. Smith notes that there are two topics of conversation for oil workers meeting for the first time - the job, and paternal violence. It is, Smith thinks, because of this background that he is determined to make it in the industry - to be come a "good hand", a reliable worker in the eyes of his compatriots.

Because the other aspect to this alienated world of work is that workers make themselves a community. The shared danger, drinking and drugs, and the hell of life without proper public services and housing, means that men learn to love and defend each other. Even if they are often at each others throats. There are stories here that allude to the love that they develop for each other. Sometimes this is actual sexual relationships, and it's interesting that Smith notes that homosexuality isn't that frowned on, except for a few jokes. In this intensely macho world that seems surprising. That said, this is barely a bastion of liberalism. In his time on the North Dakota prairie Smith meets just one trade unionist.

Nor are there many progressives. The chapter where Smith confesses to the men that he voted Obama had me holding my breath. Here it seemed the jokes about "someone having an accident" might be very real. Smith, in fact, is shocked to find Willston almost entirely white. There are a few black workers, who are to the men from the region mostly figures of curiosity and fun. In turn the immigrant workers are shocked, upset and angered by the racism. It is when Smith realises that he has just accepted the "innocent explanation" for the name of a bar called the K K Korner that he begins to realise how much he has been changed.

Smith's time on the oilfields is a life changing experience - not because of the work. But because of the people. As an explanation of working class life, in the rarefied, high-stakes and sometimes high-paid world of booming fossil fuels, it is often difficult to read. This is a place of drugs, drink, casual violence and deep misogyny. But there are also moments of real beauty and solidarity. People standing up for each other, defending each other or simply putting a hand on someone else's shoulder at a time of need. It's a tough read, but it tells you more about the reality of the "American Dream" than any rhetoric from Trump or Biden will. Smith writes movingly, but never patronisingly about his life, work and the people of America. It's highly recommended.