Resisting and Reinforcing the ‘Entrepreneurial City’: Labour’s Contradictory Role in the Upcoming 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver 

As Vancouver prepares for the upcoming Winter Olympics in 2010, the bid process has dominated urban discourse with its aim to transform Vancouver into a ‘world-class,’ competitive global-city. This essay will use the Olympic Games as an empirical case study to examine the active role of labour in processes of reinforcing and resisting the building of ‘entrepreneurial’ cities. Following Tufts (2004), it will argue that the contradictory roles that labour plays in both reproducing economic scales such as city-regions, and in reinforcing urban hierarchies of class, race and gender, are rarely explored.

Labour geographers have given workers with conflicting interests, greater ‘agency’ in reproducing the social, economic and political landscape of capitalism. They have also theorized new opportunities that arise for union intervention at urban and regional scales. Labour is an active economic agent(s) in processes shaping contemporary Vancouver. An analysis of the pro-Olympic stance of the British Columbia and Yukon Territory Building and Trades Construction Council (BCYT-BCTC), and the 2007 civic strike by the BC Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), can help demonstrate how different unions support and oppose the Games for a variety of reasons ranging from job promises, to employment equity, and future organizing opportunities.