Rewriting the Script: The Relationship Between Labour, Capital and the State in Regional Futures

The relationship between labour and the state is of fundamental importance in understanding regional economic development. Regional economic development strategies routinely place job creation at the centre of their policy rationales. However, these policy processes rarely include the workforces as key stakeholders central to the ongoing policy process, instead focusing on the role that employers and investment capital make in creating jobs. This produces a policy process which fails to account for, understand, and value the ways in which labour, particularly through unions as key labour market institutions, are central to the future of regions. Furthermore, by failing to account for workforces and unions as both subjects and agents of policy, the state risks failing to understand the full implications of policy change, and the ways in which particular policy decisions may in fact contribute to regional economic decline.

The case study is an examination of the ways in which film and television unions in Nova Scotia participated in the development, revision and contestation of the film and television production tax credits from 2008-2016. Film and television production tax credits are key policy instruments in the development of regional creative economies, which are in and of themselves seen as central to economic development strategies in a post-industrial landscape. An analysis of the power relations between labour, capital and the state in the policy process reveals two key points. First, unions were instrumental in the development of the Nova Scotia Motion Picture Industry Association (now ScreenNS), the key means by which the industry represented itself to the state in relation to the tax credit file. Second, the marginalization of unions through the industry association, and with policy-makers, inspired the unions to form their own collective formation through which they proposed an innovative policy proposal for the development of the Atlantic region film and television production industry. The long term consequences of the failure of the state to include the unions, and the interests of the workforces, as central stakeholder in the film and television production tax credit file are represented in recent developments. Changes to the tax credits have resulted in a sharp decline in production. The agency of the workforce is central to the analysis. In an industry as labour-intensive and mobile as film and television production, the workforce is relocating, in significant numbers, to other production locales. Consequently, the viability of the regional creative economy is fundamentally compromised in the long-term.