Beneath the surface: Capital-labor relations, housing and the making of the Bakken boom

Abstract

In 2014, a 700-square-foot apartment in the City of Williston in North Dakota cost $2,394.00 per month (Grandstand, 2014). Small remote towns situated within Bakken's shale formation have been radically transformed into boomtowns by oil capital's quest for accumulation. Drawn by promises of high paying jobs, wage-laborers have flooded into these towns, growing them exponentially. While much research investigates the empirics of crime, cost of living increases, and other environmental damage, they miss the underlying structures which drive resource boomtowns. Using a Marxist perspective, I argue that we must first understand how capital-labor relations make oil extraction possible. Since oil capital must incentivize workers to relocate, it must substantially raise wages. As a result, high wages in tandem with scare housing inventory have led to significant cost of living increases, prompting oil companies to subsidize housing. Thus, the very condition of Bakken's boomtowns contradict capitals’ impetus to maximize surplus-value as attracting wage-laborers to remote sites of extraction requires high wages and housing subsidies. In this article, I unravel this contradiction as capital's pursuit for surplus-value is limited by increases in the wage-laborer's value of labor power. Thus, oil capital is inherently haphazard in how it treats worker safety.