Book
review:
The Collaborative Games
By Tony Webb
Pluto
Press 2001
Tom Sandborn

In 2000, the Olympics were
staged in another city out on the far reaches of what had been the
British Empire, in Sydney Australia. One decade later, the big show is
coming to Vancouver. Despite a vigorous local opposition to what many
saw as one more festival of capitalist consumption and corporate self
congratulation, the 2010 Olympics are a done deal. Now the real
questions are how well the Games can be brought into real agreement
with their professed ideals, and how well local political leaders, loud
during the Games Bid process in their public commitment to a
Vancouver/Whistler Games that will protect the most vulnerable elements
of the community and respect social justice and environmental concerns,
can deliver on these commitments. The disturbing news from the run up
to the Athens Olympics this summer, full of health and safety abuses,
dead and injured workers and dubious environmental practices, is not
encouraging. Viewed through the lens of the Athens experience, and the
prospect of a 2008 Olympics to be held in Beijing, despite the Chinese
government’s championship role in union busting and worker killing
events, the prospects for a just and environmentally sound Olympics do
not look good.
However, many observers are hanging their hopes for Games in Vancouver
that are worth the support of working people on the partial social
policy and environmental successes of the Sydney Games in 2000. Tony
Webb’s The Collaborative Games, a strenuously enthusiastic account of
the Sydney experience, is an important and compelling read for any BC
citizen who cares about the upcoming 2010 Games, a book full of
instructive examples of what can be done to make the Games pay off for
the someone other than the big corporate sponsors.
The task was immense. The costs for construction projects alone
associated with the Sydney games came to $3.5 billion dollars, and
employed 7,500 workers on site and another 15,000 in off site work.
During the actual Games, over 200,000 paid and volunteer workers joined
with thousands of athletes and performers to entertain over seven and a
half million who attended the games and their associated off-site
performances live, and billions who watched broadcasts around the
world. Records were broken regularly, both on the playing field on the
profit margins of big business.
But the Sydney Games were not just another squalid tale of corporate
profit taking, at least as Tony Webb tells the story. Instead, because
of creative steps taken by local organized labour and by the organizers
of the Games (made possible in part by the presence in the state
capital of a Labour government that was more interested in cooperation
than in the dreary neo-liberal catechism of privatization, union
busting and profit maximization that shapes so much public policy
around the world these days) the Games provided Australian workers with
improved wages and a voice in the day to day operations of Games
pre-build and operations, and local unions with an opportunity to
recruit substantial numbers of new members, at the same time
delivering on construction and performance time lines in an almost
flawless fashion, on time and on budget, with only one day lost to
labour dispute over the construction period, and only one accidental
death. All of this, in the book’s account, is the result of a policy
commitment to what Webb calls the “collaborative games” model. (The
model will seem familiar to those who have followed or been
participants in the ongoing debates within the labour movement about
tripartite labor/management/government bodies over the years.)
Some militants within the Australian labour movement criticized this
approach for excessive co-operation with management and the state, but
Webb’s argument is that the collaborative approach won workers far more
that it cost. In the BC context, where the local government is far more
antagonistic to organized labour than was the case in Australia, and in
contrast to the lethal practices on view in Athens, the prospect of a
collaborative relationship between Games organizers and the workers who
will actually make the event happen can look pretty attractive.
Attractive, but not necessarily likely. It will take concerted
political pressure and relentless public oversight over the next half
decade to make the 2010 Games look more like Sydney than Athens or
Beijing.
And make no mistake, the Sydney experience, however instructive, will
not do as a complete model for a bearable Olympics here in the
rainforest. Despite much public huffing and puffing about a “Green
Olympics”, and some real progress made at Sydney in terms of mitigating
environmental impacts, the environmental record of the Australian games
was very mixed indeed. ( Greenpeace, for example, in its assessment of
the Sydney Games, praise its innovations in solar power and the policy
decision taken to make the Games site car free, but sharply criticizes
the failure to deal with the toxic waste pollution of Homebush Bay
waters and the failure of many sponsors to live up to their
environmental commitments.) Similarly, although the Sydney Games issued
eloquent statements about guaranteeing that Olympic uniforms and other
apparel be produced without sweatshop abuses, in actual practice the
Games organizers stalled disclosure of suppliers’ supply chains and
grossly under funded any attempts to enforce this anti sweatshop
policy. These are defects that will have to be corrected if the 2010
Games want to have any claim to meeting their publicly professed goals.
The Collaborative Games is a must-read for anyone who is following
Olympic debate during the run-up to 2010. (Other suggested
reading includes the website of the current Play Fair at the Olympics
campaign
www.fairolympics.org
and the website of the locally based Impacts of the Olympics on
Community Coalition,
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/ioc/welcome.htm.)