Much has been said lately about the urgent need for a radical transition in the global economy away from fossil fuels to avert climate catastrophe. This problem has two aspects. On the one hand, we must find the political will to change before it is too late. On the other hand, we must ensure that the astronomical social cost of this coming economic restructuring is distributed equitably.
Make no mistake: tens of millions of people will lose their jobs. Hundreds of communities will lose their economic engine. Transitions like this are painful and, more often than not, deeply unfair. To pretend otherwise is to run the risk of history repeating itself. We have already experienced it.
No need to go back far in time. Beginning in the 1960s, trade liberalization fundamentally restructured the global economy. The removal of trade barriers has allowed multinationals to locate their factories or source their supplies where labor is cheapest and where government regulation (everything from pollution control to health and safety) was the weakest. The distribution of labor across the world has been fundamentally transformed, as manufacturing has moved en masse from the heavily unionized countries of Western Europe and North America to the low-wage countries of Asia and Latin America. This phenomenon has been presented as a post-industrial transition in formerly industrial countries like Canada.
Take the analogy of a car. World leaders have pressed the accelerator full throttle, which has increased tenfold the speed at which we are hurtling towards the wall of climate change before us. This transition from global capitalism has been hugely profitable for some, catastrophic for others, and could prove fatal for all of us in the not-too-distant future.
It is no coincidence that the post-industrial transition has been marked by a sharp rise in the income gap within countries. Once-thriving cities like Detroit have been wiped out. We had to invent names, such as “Rust Belt”, or “rust belt”, to describe and symbolically contain these human ruins.
The statistics give an idea of the situation. The share of total employment accounted for by the manufacturing sector in Canada fell from 22% in 1973 to just 10.3% in 2010. Montreal has been hard hit due to its historical dependence on the textile and clothing sectors. These female-dominated sectors were among the first to be traded off in international trade negotiations.
A staggering number of jobs have been lost. Of all the factories and factories operating in Canada in 1961, 75% had closed by 1991. New jobs were of course created, but not necessarily in the same place. In some communities, nothing has come to fill the economic vacuum.
The pain hidden behind these numbers is very real. I have been interviewing displaced workers since the mid-1990s. All cite the heavy material consequences of losing a job: the loss of wages and benefits, as well as the battle to start over in an economic context. ruthless. The question of age comes up often, as many were long-time workers. There has also been a lot of anger over the handling of these closures.
A steelworker from Buffalo, New York, told me, “I heard the news of the shutdown on the 6:00 p.m. news. A few weeks later, I was called and said, “You have a 35-year service pin waiting for you here. We would like to give it to you.” I accepted. The guy told me to meet him at the main entrance. You know, everything was closed, so the guy, who was our department head at the time, gave me the pin for my 35 years of service through the chain-link fence. So imagine that. “Here is the pin for your 35 years of service.” »
The way of doing things could be just as twisted on this side of the border. In the early 1980s, 500 steelworkers from Canada Works, a Stelco plant in Hamilton, were forced to board buses without explanation. About 30 minutes later, they arrived at Ontario Place in Toronto, where they were told that their steel mill was going to close, and then they were taken by bus back to Hamilton. You can not make that up.
The unions were virtually powerless in the face of the closure of hundreds of factories. It was therefore the working communities that had to pick up the shards.
Moreover, the injustice at the very basis of this post-industrial transition was confirmed by the decision of the federal government, then led by Brian Mulroney, to limit access to unemployment insurance at the height of the crisis. Let’s think about that for a moment. Is it really any wonder that displaced industrial workers perceived the transition as fundamentally unfair and inequitable?
Today, we are talking about a new economic transition of even greater magnitude. For many members of the working class, their past experiences of a unilateral transition will certainly influence their perception of the demands for change. Right-wing populists will find fertile ground there. Except that, to hope for a future, we must absolutely learn from the past and do better.