Program

Deindustrialization and the Working-Class Politics of Our Times

October 22, 2022 from 9:30am EDT to 10:00am EDT

Location: Room Y 316

Chair: Charles Smith

Lachlan MacKinnon, Department of History, Cape Breton University Petra Dolata, Department of History, University of Calgary Fred Burrill, Department of History, Cape Breton University Lauren Laframboise, Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling, Concordia University

Abstracts:

Lachlan MacKinnon

Following the industrial crisis of the 1920s and the Great Depression in the 1930s, consecutive provincial governments in Nova Scotia turned their efforts towards state-led economic development. Despite its market orthodoxy, the “infrastructure liberalism” of Angus L. Macdonald spurred the completion of projects such as the Canso Causeway in an effort to shift portions of the economy towards tourism and service. After the election of Robert Stanfield and the Tories in 1956, a wholesale modernist planning model was unveiled. Indeed, Stanfieldian economic policy in Nova Scotia was predicated upon the belief that direct state-led interventionism was necessary to offset regional inequity. Industrial Estates Limited, Voluntary Planning, and renewed interest in a state-driven industrial relations paradigm were central in the province’s efforts to revitalize its flagging economy and offset predicted decline in the Cape Breton coal and steel industries. This presentation examines the fate of the Clairtone Sound Corporation, one of Nova Scotia’s “new industries” that had emerged out of these state-led development efforts. A case study of this firm, based in Stellarton in the aftermath of the Springhill disasters, reveals the ways in which the structural processes of deindustrialization produced crisis even within firms that were completely distinct from the provinces cornerstone industries of coal and steel. This includes a 12 reflection upon the class composition of the modernist state in Nova Scotia; in contrast to the cooperative models of state planning demanded by the province’s unionized coal miners and steelworkers during the 1940s, the interventionist model that was developed in Nova Scotia was one that wedded regionalist capitalists to the levers of political and bureaucratic power. This represents a convergence of the historiographical focus on state-led, high modernist industrial development in the Maritimes and recent literature found within deindustrialization studies that more explicitly calls for class-based analysis of the political decisions leading to industrial decline and closure.

Petra Dolata

This conceptual contribution will discuss the connection between deindustrialization and energy transitions. As recent studies on the precarity of coal miners and energy labourers more broadly have heightened awareness of the agency of people to spur, alter or divert energy transitions, it proposes that in the case of basic energy industries, we should examine deindustrialization processes through labour perspectives informed by energy histories. Most worksites of energy exploration are part of larger energyscapes, environmental sacrifice zones and global hydrocarbon-based energy systems thus constituting important regional substories in the era of the so-called Great Acceleration. International changes in energy use impacted these industries disproportionately and energy labourers and their families have been at the forefront of changes in energy systems. Focusing on workers’ experiences in the 1970s, during which discussions of energy crises and structural changes in primary industries intersected, helps us to understand that energy transitions are also always social transitions.

Fred Burrill

This paper proposes a focus on Saint-Henri, a neighbourhood in the Southwest of Montreal that was a key site of struggle for the left in the 60s and 70, and a community that looms large in Quebec’s collective imagination. Relying on oral histories and archives from grassroots groups, it will argue that many of the local political initiatives that flourished in the 1960s and early 70s were tied up in working-class efforts to navigate the treacherous waters of job loss occasioned by patterns of deindustrialization extending as far back as the 1930s. As major employers like Stelco and Dominion Textile left the neighbourhood, they were temporarily replaced by nonunionized, tertiary industries that employed young, local women and migrant male labourers. Initially, there was significant overlap between these workers’ shopfloor militancy and the new forms of community-based political advocacy emerging in the 60s. But as deindustrialization continued, resulting in the increasing technical decomposition and cultural disintegration of Montreal’s industrial working class, significant sections of the community sector-based Left turned to "social economy" models, collaborating with the private sector in the hopes of generating employment and housing for low-income residents. This gamble was ultimately unsuccessful, and these contradictions continue to impact working-class life and memory in the neighbourhood.

Lauren Laframboise

Based on my MA project, this presentation will focus on the 1983 “Grève de la fierté” in Montreal’s garment industry. It was the industry’s first strike in 43 years, and was largely organized by rank and file immigrant women taking a stand 14 against the layoffs, closures, and deteriorating working conditions prompted by industrial restructuring and deindustrialization. The campaign leading up to the 1983 strike, organized by the Comité d’action des travailleurs duvêtement, articulated a series of demands for the improvement of workplace health and safety conditions, better benefits, and more representative union leadership. With original archival research and oral history interviews, I argue that the 1983 strike illustrates how the historically entrenched gendered structure of labour relations shaped the pathways of deindustrialization in Montreal’s garment industry.

Speakers / Panelists

Fred Burrill

Petra Dolata

Lauren Laframboise

Lachlan MacKinnon