| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 55

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Steven High, Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969–1984 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2003)

EVEN A CASUAL OBSERVER of North American economic trends would recognize that workers today continue to experience significant anxiety and fear about impending job loss. Outsourcing, downsizing, restructuring, and rationalizing are now part of the common language of working- and middle-class decline under neoliberalism and global competitiveness. Steven High's book illustrates that, while in the so-called "new economy" we may use new terms to describe massive layoffs, job site alienation, and unemployment, the underlying forces behind such dislocation are not new. High's analysis, then, of the processes of industrial transformation in the 1970s and early 1980s in Canada and the US, which produced economic and cultural misery across the Great Lakes region, is not merely an historical text. It is also a useful and timely study that reminds us of the important countervailing force national politics and policies once played in challenging the contradictions of global capitalist restructuring.

High is centrally preoccupied throughout this book with assessing how well workers adapted to widespread plant closings when drawing upon either national or local solidarities, meanings, and purposes. What develops is an interesting cross-national perspective that demonstrates that in the midst of such upheaval, Canadian workers fared much better than their US counterparts. Specifically, US workers, who drew upon locally shared senses of solidarity, consistently failed to stop plant closings, and experienced considerably greater emotional and economic pain from such displacement. Canadian workers, in contrast, much more often drew upon nationalist claims and national policy to limit the extent of actual economic transformation as well as the searing emotional distress of workplace, community, and family upheaval. Thus, while the US heartland during this time period evolved into the depressed and aged "Rust Belt," Canadian economic nationalism served "as a kind of ideological rustproofing that denied the Rust Belt imagery into the country." (17)

Throughout the book's various chapters, High draws upon oral histories and narratives, interviews, corporate records, and popular magazines and newspapers of the day to highlight how whether the locus of resistance for workers was national or local mattered a great deal to both their perceived and actual fates. High also makes liberal and welcome use of a variety of photographs, cartoons, and maps to illustrate the theme of industrial transformation that swept, albeit differently, across North America. Photos of padlocked factory gates, collapsed buildings, and of the many displaced workers protesting or on the assembly line, add to the pervasive sense of regional depression that affected parts of the Great Lakes region. Select illustrations from labour cartoonist Fred Wright add significantly as well to the palpable sense of anger at the dislocation especially affecting US workers as plants closed or relocated to the Southern or Western US.

The theme of national variation in worker response to plant closings is returned to frequently in this book. In early chapters, High discusses the evolution of the Rust Belt imagery, and the building sense of hopelessness and disillusionment among US workers in the face of growing plant closings. As residents of the Great Lakes region watched plants relocate to geographically far-flung regions of the US, they failed to draw upon national imagery or were unable to call upon national political power in acts of resistance. As High notes, American nationalism had become soiled with McCarthyism and the Vietnam War, with divisions emerging between students and the New Left of the 1960s on the one hand, and workers less comfortable with opposing US involvement in Vietnam on the other. At the same time, American population shifts undercut Democratic Party strength in the US Congress and limited any legislative response to this industrial transformation.

The experience of Canadian workers in the face of plant closings, according to High, was strikingly different. First, geography played an important role, as the concentration of people along the Montreal-Windsor corridor limited company relocation to other parts of Canada. The relative economic health of Southern Ontario, including the fact that no integrated steel mills or auto assembly plants closed in Canada, prevented the Ontario "Golden Horseshoe" from taking on a rusted tint and becoming economically margin-alized. However, the presence of anti-American nationalism, national political power, and national legislation was clearly the deciding factor, for High, in influencing more favourable responses and outcomes to plant closings for Canadian workers.

The effectiveness of national political resources and the importance of national borders is a theme woven throughout the final three chapters of the book. In Canada, regional development initiatives and national legislation requiring companies to provide advance notice of plant closings proliferated. Nationalist, social-left legislators in the federal Liberal and New Democratic Parties were swayed by nationalist appeals against American multinationals, and responded with the use of increased legislative protection for Canadian workers. Meanwhile, in the US, the local community strategies of solidarity and collective response to plant closings had little impact on both businesspeople and legislators who lived apart from this economic turmoil.

High's discussion of the different national political responses to the crisis affecting Chrysler in the late 1970s and early 1980s is an illustrative example of these national political differences. Democrats in Congress were too timid to take possible risks to regulate plant closings, and in fact in Chrysler's case joined Republicans to demand worker concessions in exchange for public financing to help the automaker. In Canada, the importance of union political representation and NDP and left Liberal legislators was reflected in the Canadian government response to Chrysler: the 1980 bailout loan arrived with conditions that Chrysler maintain jobs in Canada, make new investments in its Canadian plants, and guarantee that no plants would close without the approval of the federal Ministry of Industry. (112) High's discussion of how Canadian national and provincial legislators, as well as the editors of major newspapers, collectively sought government regulations on how foreign — especially American — companies would close plants in Canada, is notable for its incongruence with today's climate of neoliberalism.

In fact, it is striking to reflect, as High perhaps too briefly does in his conclusion, on how different the political environments are today under neoliberal continentalism compared to the heady days of Canadian economic nationalism. To be sure, workers in the US currently seem no more successful in drawing either upon local or national communities of identification as political strategies than in the period of economic dislocation and political impotence charted in High's study. Since 2000, the Rust Belt region of the US has once again become identified with massive job loss in the manufacturing sector, and has become the focus of the 2004 Presidential campaign as widely designated and politically valuable "swing states." Yet, American nationalism, having been strategically exploited by the Bush Administration in its war on terror and invasion of Iraq, again provides little comfort to workers in confronting these destabilizing economic trends.

In Canada the political and economic changes associated with deepening continentalism raise serious questions about the resilience of the economic nationalist position. High suggests that a pattern of economic nationalist resistance continues today, (191) and identifies the emergence and membership growth of the Council of Canadians as evidence of the survival of Canadian nationalism. Yet, the Council today has a much more internationalist orientation, and Canadian political and economic élites after North American free trade have all but abandoned economic nationalism. Even public opinion polls taken across Canada today show a public much more supportive of the trade deals that have so securely integrated Canada into a more North-South economic pattern. In short, it is much harder to argue, in the wake of renewed Québec nationalism and growing contin-entalism, that there remains a politically significant thread of economic nationalism that can continue to help Canadians overcome class or regional differences. This point aside, this is a well-written and soundly researched book that richly illustrates an early stage of the tremendous and ongoing economic transformations affecting labour in North America.


Jeffrey Ayres Saint Michael's College, Vermont

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