Still watching men work

by David Ruccio

Deadliest Catch is now in its eighth season and we’re still watching the men on the Cornelia Marie, Wizard, Northwestern, Time Bandit, and other boats work. Like last year at just about this time, I want to ask the question, what’s with Deadliest Catch and all the other television shows (from Ice Road Truckers to Moonshiners) representing men at work?

My colleague Jon T. Coleman [ht: dg] offers the following perspective:

Watching men battle storms, sleeplessness, falling ice chunks, and 400-pound traps while keeping their cigarettes lit on heaving, slime-covered decks is the principal fun of Deadliest Catch. We tune in to witness masculine agony. The producers know their audience, so they focus on greenhorns and strung-out vets. The rookies bumble into trouble while the old-timers explore the dead-end of careers meant for younger bodies. The captains, cozy in their wheelhouses, philosophize for the cameras. They typically instruct their underlings to meet pain with stoicism. “You ain’t a man,” once spoke Captain Phil, “until you’ve pulled out a tooth with a pair of pliers.” . . .

It’s harder to see for whom or what the crab fishermen on Deadliest Catch stand. The show nods toward all sorts of higher motivations—God, country, the eternal struggle against nature—yet the narrative conceit that drives the men hardest is the “crab count.” They suffer to win a race, to fill their holds the quickest with the most pounds of ocean flesh. The weight transfers directly to the heft of their checks. Yet who pays for all that? In the end, the crews withstand physical torment so that you and I can stuff our holds at all-you-can-eat buffets. They bleed for seafood conglomerates and well-padded consumers.

As it turns out, there is a certain degree of reality in the Deadliest Catch. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men suffer many more fatal work injuries than women (92 percent of the total of 4,690 in 2010), and agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting is the sector that has the highest number of fatal occupational injuries in the U.S. economy (27.9 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers).

However, in terms of nonfatal injuries and illnesses, the occupational categories represented on the boats plying the Bering Sea don’t come close to capturing what is happening. Again according to the BLS, nursing and residential care facilities is the category that has the highest incidence rate, followed by fire protection, travel trailer and camper manufacturing, iron foundries, and hospitals.

But I doubt those occupations and industries would make good TV. So, we’re backing to watching reality shows of men working in dangerous jobs that do not come close to representing the reality of work in contemporary U.S. capitalism.