“The Whole Thing Was to Try to Make a Living Here”: Labor, Land, and the Relationships They Produced on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, 1974-Present

• Main Author: McIntosh, Matthew
• Other Authors: Beda, Steven
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: University of Oregon 2024
• Subjects: Alaska; Climate change; Labor history; Organizing; Tourism; Trans-Alaska Pipeline System; north slope
• Online Access: https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/29810

This thesis examines the relationships between workers, their labor, and the land during and after the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). It places these relationships within a broader history of twentieth century industrial labor on the North Slope and in Alaska. Without these antecedents, the TAPS would not have been possible. I understand and analyze these relationships using oral histories, memoirs, and archival materials including photographs and journals. The TAPS workers’ relationships with labor and land were a productive historical process and force which created oil infrastructure. Workers on the TAPS built meaningful affective relationships which shared many factors with the conservation and environmental movements that so vehemently opposed the TAPS. Therefore, I argue that for some Pipeline workers, these relationships contributed to the construction of future personal lives and small businesses in Alaska’s post-1977 economy. This economy features environmental tourism alongside other resource extraction. I argue that the logics of capitalist extraction and extractivist labor run throughout both forms of value production. Because workers are one consistent throughline between these seemingly disparate economies, labor organizers can use environmental logics with fossil fuel workers to win broad proposals for a post-fossil capital economy.