The morphing subject: analyzing the agency of mobile construction workers in the Alberta oil sands

Abstract

This article contributes to existing scholarship on mobility regimes by examining how construction trades workers in the oil sands of northern Alberta, Canada undergo a transformation in keeping with the conditions of the resource industry fly-in fly-out (FIFO) regime. Labour studies in the construction industry emphasize its inevitable and high levels of mobile work, and the mobility regime literature emphasizes the systems and regulations that condition workers’ movements; but both literatures are in need of further exploration and explication of how movement and circulation might condition a transformation in worker subjectivity. We undertake a phenomenological examination of 25 interviews and over 100 hours of observations with workers conducted from 2014 to 2016 during a period of transition from boom to bust. We find that workers undergo an automorphosis in three key ways: into the immovability of the FIFO regime, into the logics of the circulation of oil capital and labour, and finally, into the overall objective conditions of FIFO-based resource extraction and its relentless but restless demands. We conclude by suggesting that mobile workers might thus develop a kind of ‘plastic agency’ that challenges us to revise the binary opposition between structural control and consciously adaptive subject.