Ideas - The changing world of hard work

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Aaron Williams has worked in fisheries, as a forest fighter and is currently an airport ramp agent. When he's not working, he's writing about work: the hard kind, requiring bodily energy and mental endurance. Physical labour has always been a part of his life. He grew up in a logging family. In this podcast, Williams talks about the ups and downs of working strenuous jobs and the changing realities of hard work.Aaron William's memoir is called The Last Logging Show: A Forest Family at the End of an Era (Harbour Publishing). The book received the 2025 Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction. His public talk was recorded at the awards ceremony at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.

In a nearly unprecedented set of circumstances, Mark Carney has won his majority government. I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News podcast, Frontburner, which is really worth a follow this week because the political drama is far from over. How durable is this majority government? Does it spell the end of Pierre Pollyev's conservative leadership? Follow Frontburner so you can stay on top of this fast-moving story. Plenty of memoirs have taken work as their subject, though there's often something exceptional about the nature of that work. Maybe the author is a tech disruptor or major CEO, a political leader, or global celebrity.

But occasionally, a different kind of book about work gets published. I was at work when I got the news, working in what's called Arrivals, where when the flights come in, you go to the plane, you get the bags, and you dispense the bags on the carousel. That's Aaron Williams. He works as a ramp agent at Halifax-Stanfield International Airport, one of the workers loading and off-loading baggage, among other things. One quiet winter day at the airport,

Aaron was taking a break when his phone rang. On the line was the administrator of a literary prize. There was like the bit of small talk, which was agonizing, of course, and then I could tell there's a little brief pause, and then the way his tone shifted, I knew right away. A book that Aaron had written in his off hours had just won the 2025 Edna Stabler Award for Creative Nonfiction. Not a bad way to spend your coffee break.

Yeah, it was delightful. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. Aaron Williams is the BC-born author of, of two works of nonfiction, including this one. The book The Last Logging Show is about my family's history in the logging industry, which I was the first generation to not go into that in four generations, really. My dad, my grandfather, my great-grandfather. It's both a memoir and a portrait of work.

So it's a story about our time in the logging industry, but also connects up with the logging industry in BC, sort of its rise and fall, and then particularly on Haida Gai where there's been a lot of strife, I guess, would be a fair word and back and forth and protest and stuff. And so it was like a really interesting thing I thought to write about.

It's also about a unique community. Heidegai is a small island chain off the northwest of BC. The population, it's like 50-50 settlers in Haida. But then there's, of course, they're all living there together. There's lots of, mixed couples and kids and people in the logging industry and people against the logging industry

and a small place where you have to see each other a lot more than you do in a more urban setting. So just sort of had this real tension, I felt anyway. The Stabler Award Committee found richness in the story too. They invited Aaron Williams to Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario to accept his prize and to give a public talk on a related subject. He was introduced by the awards chair. Welcome to the presentation of the 2025 Edna Stable Award for Creative Nonfiction. My name is Gavin Brockett.

I'm the Vice Dean in the Faculty of Arts. Today we are pleased to honor Aaron Williams with the 2025 Edna Stable Award in Creative Nonfiction. For his book, The Last Logging Show, a forestry family at the end of an era. In this book, Aaron explores his relationship with his father, who is reaching the end of his career as a logger on Haida Gwai. Aaron retraces places and moments from his own childhood

as he visits his father on a number of occasions and engages with the land, the people, and the complicated issues tied out with British Columbia's logging industry. Aaron himself views this from the perspective of someone who has consciously decided to choose another path in life rather than continue the long family tradition of logging. Aaron provides vignettes into a logging industry that looks very different today than what his grandfather and his father knew decades ago. He shares with us the colorful characters pursuing a most dangerous career in exquisitely beautiful territory. And he explores thoughtfully and sensitively questions related to indigenous rights to the land, environmental preservation, and the needs of those who have been shaped by the very trees that they harvest for consumption for a global economy in which lumber is a key commodity. Aaron, on behalf of all of us here at Larié, congratulations.

Thank you, Adam. So it's now time to hear from Aaron himself. He's going to deliver a lecture titled Work, Loving It, Hating It, and Getting Through the Shift. Hi, my name is Aaron Williams. And along with getting this award, I was asked if I wanted to also give a proper talk on something related to my book. And the speed at which this first one came to mind is the kind of thing you hope for as a writer. What I wanted to talk about was working. I've always been interested in work and how it can be meaningful or not for us. I just turned 40, so I'm not looking back from the end of a long career, but I do think I've just been

granted access to the right to be a little bit retrospective, and I'm excited to use it here. So, working. The first time the thought ever crossed my mind, producing something to make money, came in about 1991. I was five years old. Every late. Labor Day weekend, my family packed up our truck and drove four hours from our home in Prince uput, B.C., the rainy fishing town where I grew up, to a farm outside Smithers, a forestry and farming community. Friends of my parents owned the land. Their house sat near the top of a hill with sweeping views, south down the valley to more ranches like theirs, and west to the jagged coastal mountains, usually with a dusting of snow at the top by early September. Up above the fire pit at the

very top of their property was a hillside with aspen trees. One day I was up amongst these trees on my own and with a carpenter's hammer. I got the idea that if I could cut down one of these trees, we could either A, use it as firewood, or B, this was the crazier thought, was to sell it for lumber. I started hacking at the tree with the claw of the hammer. I was too young to be trusted on my own with a hatchet. This was the most monumental task I'd taken up in my young life. Here I was, only five years old, but already working, helping out the family, possibly making a few bucks too. I remember the feel of the rubber grip of the hammer, making my palms ache, and after a few minutes, starting to sweat. But I kept going, and finally, after what seemed like a long time, but in reality was probably only about 15 minutes,

the aspen, with its small, flittering leaves, squeaked and cracked and came down into the tall grass. The stump left behind was a damp, frayed tuft of green slivers. of wood. It was such an adrenaline rush and felt like such an accomplishment. I ran down the hill to show my parents what I'd done, and I was deflated when their reaction wasn't praise but concern. And when they came up to see what had happened, my hope for turning this fine log into lumber at a local sawmill, or at least provide the camp with more firewood, was debunked by either my mom or dad. I forget which, possibly both. The tree was too green for firewood, a new concept, and they explained how it was not the right species to be turned into lumber. A small mercy was that I don't

recall them making any comment about the tree also being about an eighth as big as it needed to be. After an apology to the landowners, I was on to the next activity. Photos of the time show that a big part of those early years were spent leaping off the wood pile on a rope swing. In hindsight, what I was doing was a more or less perfect rudimentary example of how humans think about work. I was interested in helping my family prosper. More firewood equals more warmth, more safety, etc. Or if we had enough firewood, I could sell this surplus to create wealth, as many societies did. Wealth creation started with a barter system.

I knew, of course, that money existed, and I wouldn't trade the log I'd cut for, say, beef. But I also didn't view my labor as done for an hourly wage. I would only be paid on what I actually produced, a system known as piecework. So I missed the mark with my aspen tree. but it showed I had a basic grasp of economics and a decent sense for my age of what working was. My family had, until recently, run a logging company. When that business folded, my dad and his brother started a concrete company. So they didn't have the type of job you left at the end of the day and kept separate from home life.

Work was always talked about. And saying somebody was a hard worker was the highest praise dealt by either of my parents. If one parent was talking to the other about somebody in our lives, especially somebody that we had just met, there was always a comment about whether they were a hard worker. For them, it was a core question. It was a quick way to find out a lot about a person. Sometimes these judgments weren't kept hidden in the private sphere.

One time my dad, listening to a friend of my friend explained his job, something to do with computers and data, received such judgment in person. After the explanation, dad was silent for a minute. Then he said, so you don't actually do anything. Skipping ahead to the fall of 1993, I was at my dad's workshop helping detail his truck,

an old brown Ford Ranger, before trading it in for a new one. It's my first paid gig. I didn't know how much it would be, and I wasn't driven by the promise of money alone. I love being down at Dad's little property at the Prince of Red Industrial Park with the big trucks coming and going.

But I remember the work going on until after dark, then stopping abruptly, and Dad handing me a $2 bill and a $5 bill from across the console, my first paid work. Around the same time, Dad poured the concrete foundation for a neighbor. I went out to help and was given the job of going around and tapping the forms of the hammer. This allowed the concrete to better settle against the forms. Make yourself busy, dad said, but not in a pretend-to-work way that I have sometimes encountered since then. What he meant was find ways to help. See if there's something you can improve. I happily walked the perimeter of the foundation over and over, thunking the hammer

against the plywood. What better job for a seven-year-old? But sometime, between the age of seven and 13, all the magic drained away. By this time, the summer after grade seven, I no longer went to work with dad. I went to work for dad. And it was to do things like chiseling dried concrete off the bottom of the trucks. I was paid $10 an hour, not bad, but I had friends who spent languorous summers as campground attendants who made the same. Looking back, this was a fantastic deal for my dad. I was a great employee, always on time for work. We drove together, and I wasn't a drug addict. His other employee was also great, probably better than me, definitely stronger. He was an ex-logger who had also worked as a male stripper. His name was

Lane, the rippling dude, as my dad and uncle called him affectionately. My friend Al occasionally worked at the concrete yard as well, an undersized teenager. Al would wear Lane's spare coveralls with his embroidered Lane name tag on them. Dad and Uncle Clayton took to calling him the anti-lane. So there was still camaraderie, and I must have understood at some level that all of this work was at its foundation contributing to my family's success. But this was my first experience of the Marxist idea of feeling alienated from my labor. I'll quote one fiery passage from a Karo Marx essay called Wage Labor and Capital that pops up in multiple books about Marx in his work. I'll take it as light as I can here. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon labor

as part of his life. It is rather a sacrifice of his life. It is a commodity which he has made over to another. Hence, the product of his activity is not the object of his activity. He is not the object of his activity. And the worker who for 12 hours spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, etc., does he consider this 12 hours as a manifestation of his life? As life? On the contrary, life begins for him when this activity ceases at table in the public house in bed. The 12 hours' labor has no meaning for him. For the two or three years before I turned 13, I had been discovering a pre-teen version of the public house. It was in doing things like biking to the movie store by myself

or rolling rocks off steep cliffs with my friends. And it was so quick after those freedoms were given that I discovered what most of us discover sooner or later that those little freedoms come at a cost. And usually, it's your labor. Two things happened later in my teenage years that further altered my view of work. As I mentioned earlier, Prince Rupert was primarily a fishing town

and the summer before grade 12, I started my first outside the family job at a fish plant called Bellicula Fish. The plant was just below our house and was the smallest of many on the waterfront in Princeuport, the biggest of which employed more than 500 people. By contrast, there were about a dozen of us at Bellacula, and the operation was set up on a small barge.

There was the saltwater smell, of course, but other smells too, the arena-like smell of the plant's ice shed, which I could hear from my bedroom window. on quiet nights. The boss was a guy named Gord. He was a snowboard photographer, carpenter and now manager of this little operation.

He tended to hire guys like me who liked to ski and snowboard. And while other fish plants in town were a factory environment with assembly lines and mandatory hairnets, Bella Kula was small enough that we got to do every job at the plant. Our main task was to shovel ice on tots of fish.

Roll the tote along metal rollers, stop at a way scale, weigh it and staple on a tent. tag. This stapling was done with a hammer tack, a quick wap, whack, whack, at each corner of the tag. And what is it about this hammering? It's the best. This is the through line of my whole working life. And we'd continue rolling it off the end to a waiting forklift. On their own, none of these tasks were the type you would aspire to make a career of. But the variety, at least kept the job interesting. This setup, I've since learned, is what's known as a

flexible working group. Volvo tried a similar thing in the 1980s at one of its car plants in Sweden. Instead of having an assembly line where one person did one job over and over, they changed the system into a working group. Not only did each working group at the plant have their own station, where they worked in teams, assembling many parts of the car, they also had their own entrance area, coffee break room, and workshop area. The results were positive. I went back to Bella Kula. fish for one more summer, but that fall, the plant shut down. The fishing industry was rapidly shrinking at the time. J.S. McMillan fish, about a kilometer down the waterfront from Bellacula, was still going, though, so I applied there. I don't remember the first day I showed up. If there were

any nerves, they were minimal, but I do remember, we'll never forget my first job at J.S. McMillan. My task, along with two others, was to take a bottom fish called a turbot and place it on a conveyor belt as fast as I possibly could. This conveyor belt fed into a massive 100-foot-long freezer, and the belt had to be completely full of fish at all times. It was the simplest of tasks,

yet designed with such ruthless efficiency that you weren't even able to chat with your neighbor as it took your full concentration to keep up your pace. This was our only job for the entire shift. We didn't even get to see the results of our work where the turbot, with their wide, flat bodies and skinny tails, dropped like popsicles into totes at the other end of the freezer.

In another section of the plant, there was a group of workers, women mostly, who had it even worse than us at the freezer. These women filleted fish and were paid by the weight of fish they had to cut up. This was my first glimpse of piecework. To the untrained eye, it looked like one more miserable workstation at the fish plant. But if you work there, you knew. These women, they were not like the rest of us. If the freezer I worked at broke, I would go on making money. If these women stopped cutting fish,

they stopped making money. I couldn't articulate it at the time, but going from Belakula fish to J.S. McMillan was like going through a compressed version of the Industrial Revolution, a time during which work was made more efficient. Much of that added efficiency was aided by warping our concept of time. During the Industrial Revolution, people first worked for hourly wages

and had to be at their jobs at a given time every day. We obviously had to be at Bella Cula at certain times too, but it was always changing. Belakula even reflected what anthropologists view as a more natural rhythm of work. We would start slow, setting things up, build into an intense burst of activity, unloading a boat, then slow down, clean up, and prep for the next boat. At McMillan, everything was planned to the second. We'd have to be standing at our workstation before the shift started.

Everything calm at 7.59. Then at 8 o'clock, a bell rang out, and we were hurled into our machine-led tasks. I know the conditions at McMillan were still much better than those faced by 19th century laborers, but as psychologist Michael Argyle put it in his book, The Social Psychology of Work, it was still one in which workers have no control over the work process, the work is meaningless to them, they do not belong to the work community, and the work is not an important part of their personalities or lives. By contrast, Argyll touched on some of the things that made Bellacula more bearable,

An important source of job satisfaction, he said, was the social skill of supervisors. Gord understood that all of us on the barge weren't going home and dreaming of fish at night, but he knew all of us personally and was able to hire people who had similar interests outside of work. That power of bringing people together

with similar interests reached its height when I was hired onto a BC wildfire crew in Smithers, the same place I cut down that Aspen all those years ago. I had never worked for the government before, I was raised in a family that was suspicious of it, the wastefulness of bureaucracy. There's those creeps that take your money, my mom once said, as we passed by the Canada Revenue Agency in Ottawa. That was a rare outburst.

Usually it was just a small government-is-good government feeling. I might have been more torn up about going against the family, but I quickly took a liking to my new co-workers, who were mostly in their 20s with similar aspirations and experiences to me. Still, with this new job came new problems with work. Forest firefighting wasn't exactly what the anthropologist David Graber famously called a BS job in his book of the same name, but there were elements of it. The definition of a BS job, Graber lays out, is any form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence.

Even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employment, the employee is a very important. employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case. Again, I want to stress that does not define forest firefighting. It still ranks among the most meaningful work I've done. But forest fires, especially in northern BC, aren't constantly raging. And the wildfire branch was still part of the provincial government, which of course falls into those bureaucratic trappings. And as an aside, I should add that Graber notes that those trappings,

they're just as common in the private sector. So my first task when I arrived, one that went on for several cold weeks, was pealing logs for a fence of questionable necessity going up along the driveway. The adage some senior crew members used was, we work when there's work. My parents would have found this appalling, but I took this philosophy up easily, partly because of a desire to conform, and partly because I wanted nothing that resembled the previous summer at J.S. McMillan. The following season, a new crew boss, Dan, upended the work when there's work. philosophy. The dubious projects we did around base went away. Dan was often at loggerheads with his superiors, whose jobs, more than our own, resembled what sociologists see Northcote Parkinson

referred to as Parkinson's Law, which is, work expands so as to fill the time available. Parkinson was working in the 1950s, and his prime example was how the British Colonial Office was expanding, even as the colonies were contracting. At the time, BC Wildfire was also undergoing big growth and a lot of it was at management level. Something else Dan did was bring in a rookie week. This was to set the new tone for new hires on the crew. I described rookie week and its attendant aspects of BS in my book, Chasing Smoke.

Rookie Week is a curated gauntlet of abuse meant to show new hires the worst of what they'll do as a forest firefighter. Some of the abuse is paperwork. It's meaningless, but it's an accurate representation of what they'll face on the job. for every five days of work, one whole day will be dedicated to feeding the bureaucracy. One of the crew's non-paperwork tasks was the gear carry, a punishing afternoon where we dropped a bunch of firefighting equipment at the bottom of a long, steep trail, and had the rookies walk it all to the top. The rest of the crew would spread out along the trail, watching them suffer,

but also encouraging them. I had a conversation with a co-worker, Addison, while watching the gear carry in 2014. Addison was only 23 years old at the time, but had a deep understanding of work. His family ran a cattle ranch and had a logging business on the side. The old man is crippled, Addison said to me. He went to the doctor and the doctor said the only reason he's still able to stand is because he's completely worn out the nerve endings in his knees. He used to wake up at 3 o'clock a.m. to go logging and then come home and work the farm, he adds.

Addison now gets up early to help his parents, works a full day with the fire crew, then goes home in the evening and works some more. Just as he's saying this, a rookie named Kelly passes us on the hill. Good work, Kelly, Addison says, almost in a whisper. Kelly later told me her thoughts on the gear carry. All day, I couldn't stop thinking. It's not worth it. No job is worth what I'm doing.

I could be in a cafe somewhere eating donuts. Addison waits until Kelly is well up the hill before he begins talking again. He says that some people don't understand work, and that rookie week is their first real taste of it. He talks about the Wildfire Service's preference for hiring high-performance athletes. Good athletes and good workers don't have much in common, he says. Hard workouts twice a day?

It's not the same as going to work for 12 hours straight. Takes a different strength to work those long days. If I hadn't written this down, I would still remember it. Addison had said out loud, something I'd been stumbling towards for a few years. Aaron Williams, speaking at Willford, Loria University. He is the 2025 winner of the Edna Stabler Award for Creative Nonfiction, an author with a working past in fisheries and forest firefighting. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. In a nearly unprecedented set of circumstances, Mark Carney has won his majority government.

I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News podcast Frontburner, which is really worth a follow this week because the political drama is far from over. How durable is this majority government? Does it spell the end of Pierre Polyev's conservative leadership? Follow Frontburner so you can stay on top of this fast-moving story. In Aaron Williams' BC family, to say that someone was a hard worker was the highest praise his parents could give.

So they likely approve of Aaron himself. He's a full-time ramp worker, or station. attendant at the Halifax Airport. He also pulls a few shifts a week at a local bookstore, and he's managed to write two books, the latest of which won the Stabler Award for Creative Nonfiction. It means so much, yeah, while remembering that I would be doing it anyway, I guess, is sort of the caveat there. It's like, I write anyway.

I write pretty much every day, just because it's sort of how I process life. I'm realizing as I get older, and especially as I have a young family and way more demands, like, you know, you think you're so busy in your teens and 20s, and then you actually get busy in your 30s. So at night, I'll open, like, just a notebook. And sometimes I just sit there and stare at the wall in front of the notebook for a really long time. And it could be the day's events piling up, like, things happen so fast that you can't process them at the time. And then so later in the evening, usually you get a bit of a chance to, and thank goodness for it, because I feel like I wouldn't know how to deal with a lot of things in my everyday life if I didn't have that,

make that extra time. His parents have read Aaron's book, a portrait of the industry that put food on the family table. It's called The Last Logging Show. My mom's quite a harsh critic, which is good, for the most part. My dad, I think that when I gave him this manuscript, he was very uncomfortable at first, and I think he still probably kind of is, but I think that's kind of surprised me the most is how supportive he's been through this whole thing. He's a very gracious person, I think. Aaron can't earn a living from writing alone. That's not viable in today's publishing world. But he does suspect his parents might approve of the fact that his stabler award comes with a check for $10,000. Because

what I'm doing is different than what they did. This is a thing that makes sense, you know. Here's a prize with the dollar value attached to it. Okay. In the next part of his talk about manual labor jobs, Aaron Williams reflects on just how strenuous and physical that work can be and how things are changing through automation. He starts by reading a passage from his first book.

I was on a unit crew in BC, like a firefighting, forest firefighting crew for nine seasons. and in my last season of work in 2014, I just wrote about that season, a season of wildfire fighting. It was called Chasing Smoke, a Wildfire memoir. Here again is writer Aaron Williams. I was walking up a steep hill, stringing out hose along a trail

we had built close to the fire's edge. After making it up with one load, I head down for another. This time, I carry eight lengths of rolled hose. Four skewered on my Pulaski. That's an axe-like tool, we always carried with us at work, four more hanging from my shoulders.

Some can carry six at a time. Others carry as many as 12. At about 100 pounds, eight is good enough. I lift the Pulaski over my head and rested across my shoulders. The hose coupling sink into my skin, grinding muscle into bone. I sweat worse on the second trip, and with each step, my legs quiver. This is the best, cheapest way to fight fire, a person stringing hose through the bush. For more CBC podcasts, go to CBC.

cbc.ca slash podcasts.