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Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| James Sacouman and Henry Veltmeyer, eds., From the net to the Net: Atlantic Canada in the Global Economy (Aurora: Garamond Press 2005)
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| EVERY TIME I sit down to write this review, the same image comes to mind: it is of a bearded man, about five-foot-five, perhaps taller, though it is hard to tell because he walks slightly hunched over; he is walking down my street in Sydney, Cape Breton, pulling two shopping carts taken from a nearby parking lot; each cart is loaded down with pieces of corrugated tin and chain-link fence, wrought iron, and rusty rails and ingots. Nearly every day, he walks from Whitney Pier, a working-class, working poor, multicultural neighbourhood, across an overpass, and past my house with his load, which he has teased from the rubble of the city's former steel plant, which was shut down in 2000. In the winter, he uses a toboggan to carry the material, looping its rope around his forehead to pull it along the icy, slushy streets, the way a horse might pull a wagon. Whatever the season, he is headed to a scrap metal yard not far from Sydney's downtown to exchange his load for cash. I don't know who this person is, but, as I watch him go about his work, I can't help think about the depth and breadth of capitalist restructuring here: the near evisceration of the city's industrial working class; a century of steel-making reduced to so much detritus, sold for pennies a pound. |
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The de-industrialization of Sydney is truly astonishing — all the more so when the disappearance of the island's coal mines is considered at the same time. Importantly, this long and torturous experience is but a local expression of a province- and region-wide process: the long-term decline of traditional industries such as steel-making, mining, forestry, fishing, and fish processing. In the 1970s and early 1980s, this dynamic — the "development of regional underdevelopment" — was the focus of much scholarly attention, much of it conceived within a Marxist centre-periphery framework and grounded in an appreciation of historical context and archival sources. Since that time, however, academic interest in Atlantic Canada's political economy and the utility of class analysis has waned. James Sacouman and Henry Veltmeyer assert in the introduction to From the net to the Net: Atlantic Canada and the Global Economy, that this is lamentable for the region is currently being reconfigured by the forces of globalization and neo-liberalism, a set of forces that the older "Maritime Marxist school" is uniquely qualified to dissect and understand. (1, 24) This collection of nine essays, the editors suggest, is an attempt to "revisit" the question of regional political economy but in the "new" context of "the internationalization of capital and trade and a trend towards the integration of nation-states into a single global economy based on capitalist principles." (3) |
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The early 1970s, the moment when the long post-World War II economic boom ended and the neo-liberal "war against the working class and petty producers in this region" began, loom large in this volume: five of its nine essays recount this basic story. Contributors Thom Workman, Anthony Thomson, Colin Dodds, and Ronald Colman paint a particularly grim picture of life in the region over the past three decades: the disparity between rich and poor has widened; union density in the private sector has contracted sharply; the minimum wage purchases less today than it did in the past; and employment insurance is harder to get. "The line between eking out an existence from paycheque to paycheque and lapsing into desperate struggle to meet basic needs is growing thinner by the month," Workman writes in "The Decaying Social Compact in Atlantic Canada," capturing the flavour of the book as a whole. "[N]eo-liberal governments are deliberately creating such hardship." (85, 98) And they are doing so, Tom Good and Joan McFarland argue in "Call Centres: A New Solution to An Old Problem?," not simply by abandoning their commitment to the welfare state and social wage, but by embracing uncritically the chimera of economic development through the "knowledge-based service sector" — a trend evident throughout the region. (100) Operated by the likes of Air Canada, Xerox, and Sirius Satellite Radio, call centres thrive on a diet of low wages, anti-union legislation, and government subsidies and tax breaks: "[A]s New Brunswick has become more dependent on call centre jobs, the government has become more and more anxious to satisfy the industry," they conclude. "The fear that these footloose enterprises might relocate once again creates an incentive for the government to perpetuate its repressive polices of the 1990s." (113) |
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As this brief summary suggests, the accent in this collection is on the state and state policies. It is a book about neo-liberalism more than it is a book about globalization, and that is a disappointment. The specific ways in which the "internationalization" of capital, labour, and trade have reconfigured the working lives of Atlantic Canadians who work on farms, in the woods, factories, or casinos, or on offshore drilling platforms do not emerge from the welter of theorizing deployed here; indeed, the voices of working people themselves are barely audible at all. James Sacouman's "Capitalist Restructuring on Canada's East Coast" is emblematic of this overall deficiency: an analysis of the "one-sided war of capital on the working class" being waged in the region, he dispenses with the "destruction of the industrial proletariat in Cape Breton" and the "persistence of a petty producer class in the inshore fisheries, on farms, and on woodlots" in a scant three pages, leaving the reader wanting additional historical context, more detail about the experiences of working people in each sector, and greater clarity on the link between globalization — the book's overarching theme — and their lives. |
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Traces of a more "bottom-up" perspective can be found in two essays in this collection. In "State Employment and Trade Unionism: Signs of Renewal?," Anthony Thomson provides a deft analysis of the evolution of collective bargaining law in Canada in the post-World War II period, including two short case studies of public sector union conflicts in Halifax in 2001. "Policy Issues in the Trade Union Movement" consists of two interviews with representatives of the Confederation of Canadian Unions and the Canadian Labour Congress that highlight competing approaches to unionization within the Canadian house of labour. Overall, however, the thrust of both articles, like the volume as a whole, is to foreground the importance of the state and state policy, not rank-and-file concerns or the perspectives of non-unionized or rural workers. One of the defining features of the older "Maritime Marxist school" was a strong sense of the balance between "internal" (society, economy, culture, geography) and "external" (Confederation, transnational capital) explanations for regional crisis. On display in the skilful work of historians Ian McKay, David Alexander, and David Frank, that sense of balance, coupled with a reverence for the words and culture of working people themselves, conveyed what was specifically Atlantic Canadian about the question of underdevelopment, and highlighted what working people did for themselves in times of stress or crisis, not what was done to them or for them. Unfortunately, this collection, with i t s emphasis on neo-liberalism, does not strike the same sort of balance. |
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As I sit down to write the conclusion to this review, a second image comes to mind: it is of a Cape Breton Regional Municipality transit bus that picks up and drops off passengers a few blocks from the scrap yard mentioned above. In the narrow window above the driver's head, where the route information is displayed, one reads "Ashby EDS." Ashby is the name of a community that used to be home to many of the city's steel workers. EDS is the name of a corporation which runs several call centres in the city; it is the largest, private sector employer on the island, a distinction that used to belong to Sydney Steel. Having read this book, I have a clear picture of the role that the state and state policies may have played in facilitating this wrenching transformation; my purchase on the precise role of globalization in this specific context, what makes this situation distinctly Atlantic Canadian, and how it felt to go through this economic shift is far less secure. Perhaps the older Maritime Marxist School would be of greater assistance. |
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Andrew Parnaby
Cape Breton University |
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