Dunk

Remaking the Working Class: Experience, Class Consciousness, and the Industrial AdjustmentProcessAuthor(s): Thomas DunkReviewed work(s):Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Nov., 2002), pp. 878-900Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805161 .Accessed: 04/12/2011 20:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Blackwell Publishing and American Anthropological Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to American Ethnologist.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=anthro

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805161?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

remaking the working class: experience, class consciousness, and the industrial adjustment process

THOMAS DUNK Lakehead University

In this article, I examine the interrelationships between experience, class consciousness, and unemployment counseling in displaced workers' narratives about the process of industrial adjustment. Focusing on the rhetoric of unemployment counselors and trainers, I argue that the hegemony of neoconservative and neoliberal interpretations of industrial restructuring and economic change are secured-to the extent they are through a microphysics of power that operates through the agents and agencies of assistance made available to displaced workers. [male working-class culture, deindustrialization, Canada, discourse, experience, power]

Since the mid-1 970s the class structure of the so-called advanced nations has un- dergone significant transformation. Although these changes have affected all segments of society, they have been particularly dramatic for the male industrial working class. The "whole way of life" (Williams 1963:16) that took decades to establish and which was appropriate to the Fordist era is being remade to better fit the regime of flexible accumulation (Harvey 1989). As was true of the earlier transition from competitive capitalism to Fordism, this process involves uneven developments on a number of fronts-economic, political, and cultural and is both contradictory and contested.

At the economic level, workforces have been downsized, plants closed, and the exploitation of labor intensified through new production techniques and strategies. In terms of politics and ideology, the shrinkage of the male industrial working class has contributed to the further marginalization within Western nations of communist, so- cialist, and social democratic ideas (Sassoon 1996:730-754). Governments of all political shades have embraced policies aimed at promoting labor market flexibility. These policies generally have involved the retraction of the social wage as embodied in such things as unemployment insurance, welfare, and public pensions and a tight- ening of labor legislation, effectively increasing workers' exposure to market forces while simultaneously restricting their ability to organize and resist these changes. In the cultural realm, some of the most important developments include a conservative remodeling of education (a return to the three "Rs" of reading, writing, and arithmetic) and a celebration of flexibility and constant change (personal growth) through endless upgrading and retraining.'

In this article, I describe and analyze the interpretive repertoires that male industrial workers in the Canadian pulp and paper industry use to explain the causes of economic dislocation in light of their experience of the process of industrial adjustment.2 The newsprint mill workers discussed here were part of the privileged segment

American Ethnologist29(4):878-900. Copyright C) 2002, American Anthropological Association.

remaking the working class 879

of the Fordist-era working class. Despite relatively low educational levels, they enjoyed high wages, relative job security, and union protection in a Canadian industry that had had certain ecological and economic advantages in the world market since the end of World War 11 until the early 1 980s. In hindsight, it is evident that many of the industry's current problems were already emerging by the late 1960s (Marchak 1995:3-1 16), even though more than a decade passed before they were fully mani- fest. As for relatively privileged, white, male workers in other classic Fordist industries, industrial restructuring has involved severe economic disruption as well as emo- tional and social trauma in the lives of workers in the pulp and paper industry. Yet, as Nash (1989, 1994) observed among General Electric workers in Pittsfield, Massachu- setts, this experience does not seem to have generated a culture of resistance.

Analysts who perceive the working class in Western capitalist nations to be relatively quiescent explain this passivity partly in terms of an instrumental orientation to work and politics (Goldthorpe et al. 1 968a, 1 968b, 1969).3 Workers are said to define their interests in relatively narrow and individualistic terms focusing on working conditions and wages-what Lenin referred to as "trade union" consciousness (1970:143). This orientation limits workers' ability to develop either a penetrating critique of the social relations in which they are embedded or a collective response to the field of forces in which they are enmeshed. In this article, although I confirm the view that some segments of the white, male industrial working class in North America tend to perceive the solution to the employment crisis in individualized and instrumental terms, I show that this perception is not automatic. Both corporate and state actors have to work hard to produce a relative passivity among the workers.

During the Cold War, for example, radical elements were purged from the Cana- dian and U.S. Iabor movements, thus ensuring that corporate hegemony would not be seriously challenged, even if conflicts over wages, benefits, and workirfg conditions persisted. To be sure, the battles between communists, social democrats, and liberals were not solely the product of external forces acting on the labor movement, but the anticommunist witch hunts were actively supported by state, church, and corporate forces (see Abel la 1973; Nash 1989:94-100; Palmer 1992:290-298).

Working-class passivity is not the result only of repressive actions by hegemonic forces, however. My specific focus in this article is on how an individualized and instrumental response to an employment crisis is secured through a complex combina- tion of experience and micro power. The effects of this amalgam of forces "guaran- tee[s] . . . the submission of forces and bodies" (Foucault 1977:222). I demonstrate how neoconservative and neoliberal hegemony results from the efforts of agents and agencies of assistance that are made available to displaced workers. I argue that counseling and retraining services reinforce an instrumental, individuated, and competitive understanding of job loss and economic adjustment.

This is not to suggest that labor adjustment and employment counseling operate in an oppressive manner. To the contrary, counselors are there to help individuals deal with an involuntary dramatic life transformation. Their help, however, involves gathering information about individuals and providing society and the affected individuals alike with labels and, indeed, an entire discourse that frames, organizes, and expresses experience in ways that restrict workers' options. As with other normalizing discourses and processes in democratic societies, workers are not forced to partici- pate in counseling and training; however, failure to submit oneself to the help provided is interpreted by the counselors as a sign of an even more profound need for help. Thus, the system operates according to a totalizing logic even though it is not a seamless web in practice.

880 american ethnologist

I base the following analysis on a multifaceted research process that began in 1991 with participant-observation among six displaced mill workers and their fami- I ies al I among my friends and neighbors. In the fal I and winter of 1 994-95, I conducted a series of extensive interviews with 22 former mill employees in their homes. These open-ended interviews focused on the reasons for the plant closure and the ways in which workers had dealt with their resulting situations. Another 35 workers participated in shorter interviews over the telephone or provided written responses to a questionnaire. I also interviewed in person the administrators and teachers of the training courses provided by a local community college and a private-training and employment-counseling firm, as well as the officials with Human Resources Devel- opment Canada who were responsible for the programs for the displaced workers that were funded by the federal government of Canada. The head of the Industrial Adjust- ment Committee, a committee of government, employee, and corporate repre- sentatives created to lobby for and coordinate assistance for the displaced workers, generously agreed to a number of discussions and made available his records as well as the minutes of the committee's meetings. Finally, I undertook a content analysis of a local television broadcast devoted to the mill closure and of the media coverage both of the closure and of the impact of the closure on the community and workers.

pulp and paper in Canada

Pulp and paper mill workers occupied a privileged economic position within the Canadian working class throughout much of the postwar era. Indeed, between the Turn of the Century and the early 1 970s, the pulp and paper industry was a pillar of the resource-dependent Canadian economy and a key industry in many small communities. Pulp and paper are among Canada's most important export commodities and pulp and paper mills are the principal employer, especially high-wage employer, in many communities in the forested regions of the nation. By the 1 960s, the wages and benefits in pulp and paper were significantly higher than the industrial average, and although the industry was always prone to cyclical booms and busts, the overall tendency was expansion of capacity and employment levels.

The growth of the Canadian pulp and paper industry was the product of a conflu- ence of factors: Turn of the Century tariff policies in the United States and Canada that encouraged the establishment of mills in Canada and yet allowed unhindered access to the American newsprint and pulp markets; relatively cheap hydroelectric power; and the fact that Canada was blessed with an abundance of spruce and pine forests- the long fibers of slow-growing northern conifers at that time being essential to the production of the highest-quality newsprint. These circumstances gave the Canadian industry a strong position, especially in the North American pulp and newsprint markets, and comprised the economic and ecological basis of the high wages enjoyed by a workforce that in relative terms lacked human capital, such as educational or vocational credentials. As was common during the 1 950s and 1 960s, unions were able to gain substantial increases in real wages and the high wages and apparent job security generated a stable workforce. A study conducted for a joint labor-management- government committee investigating the future of the forest industry reported that in 1992 the average length of service for waged employees was 15 years (Price Waterhouse 1994:57). In many smaller communities pulp and paper mill employees formed part of the local labor aristocracy, at least in terms of wages, benefits, and apparent job security.

By the late 1 980s and early 1 990s, however, this world of relative comfort was unraveling. The Canadian pulp and paper industry faced severe difficulties resulting


from several factors. The general economic stagnation from the mid-1970s onward (relative to the rapid growth between 1945 and the early 1970s) affected the growth of markets. Technological developments improved the productivity of faster-growing southern pines and allowed the use of some hardwoods, threatening the older mills, especially in eastern and central Canada. In many regions, decades of questionable forest management policies had exhausted easily accessible and cheap wood sup- plies. And consumer demand and government legislation for paper made from recy- cled fibers and for stricter control of emissions from the mills imposed added costs. All of this undermined the competitive position of the Canadian industry (Marchak 1995:348, 61-65). Labor costs and practices became a major concern as the industry experienced severe downturns in the 1980s and the early 1990s. Despite a brief boom in the late 1980s, mi 11 closures and workforce downsizing became common. Overall employment in the pulp and paper industry fell by 10.5 percent between 1980 and 1990 (Price Waterhouse 1994: 70).1 n the newspri nt sector, the workforce shrank by 16.5 percent between 1987 and 1992 and estimates published in 1994 predicted the workforce would shrink from 72,000 to about 52,000 by the end of the 20th century (Price Waterhouse 1994:71 -72).

This is the general economic context for my research on the remaking of displaced newsprint mill workers. Specifically, l worked with men (in the early 1990s, 98 percent of the hourly operating personal in the Canadian pulp and paper industry were male [Price Waterhouse 1994:49-51]) who were once employed by the Thun- der Bay Division of Abitibi-Price. At the time, Abitibi-Price was one of the largest pulp and paper companies in Canada, and its Thunder Bay Division, but for a brief period of bankruptcy in the 1930s, had been in continuous operation since its construction in the 1920s. Certainly, since the end of World War 11, the mill, despite changing ownership, had been a source of steady, and by the 1960s, well-paid employment, especially for noncredentialed, male workers. The effects of periodic industry-wide downturns on this company's employment levels were mitigated somewhat by the company's practice of reducing hours at all their mills in the region or rotating down- time, rather than closing any one mill completely.

This is not to say that work in the mills was pleasant or easy or that there were no conflicts or problems. Pulp and paper mill work was notorious for its boredom and shift work. It was known, too, for the discomfort generated by the high temperatures and the deafening roar of the machines in the paper room and the slashers, grinders, debarking drums, and countless conveyor belts in other parts of the mill.4 In the 1970s and 1980s, dissatisfaction among Canadian workers with the way many U.S.-based multinational unions operated gave rise to a number of nationalist movements within the Canadian labor movement. In 1974, most of the Canadian locals of the U.S.- based United Paperworkers International Union broke away and formed the Cana- dian Paperworkers Union (CPU). A long and bitter strike ensued as the paper industry took on the fledgling union in its first round of negotiations.

Nonetheless, nationally and in this case, within the city of Thunder Bay pulp and paper mills remained a reliable source of well-paid employment until the difficulties of the 1980s. Because of the relative stability of employment in the industry, many of the roughly four hundred-seventy workers claimed to be shocked, despite weeks of speculation in the local media, after Abitibi-Price announced on May 31,1991, that it was idling (this is the term used by company spokespersons) its Thunder Bay Division newspri nt m i 11 for at least two years.5

The workers now found themselves facing the lean labor market of the 1990s in a small isolated city in which the jobs they were losing comprised the apex of the job


market for noncredentialed workers. Even the papermakers, the men who ran the paper machines, whose jobs were considered skilled within the industry, had to con- front the fact that their skills were specific to the paper industry and thus of little value in the service-oriented economy in which they were now immersed. The majority of the men who are the subject of this study had less than a grade-twelve education, and many of their elders less than grade ten. The men were accustomed to wage levels on average 25 percent above the national industrial average. Workers on the paper machines commonly earned CAN$20 to CAN$25 an hour. With overtime and shift dif- ferentials, annual earnings in the range of CAN$45,000 to CAN$60,000 were not un- common.

In one respect, even now, these workers were lucky. Losing their jobs when they did, they were grandfathered out of the extensive changes to the unemployment insurance system introduced by the Canadian federal government shortly thereaf- ter changes that tightened eligibility rules, reduced benefits and the time period during which individuals could collect, and increased the surveillance of unemployment insurance recipients. The Industrial Adjustment Committee was able to ensure that Thunder Bay Division mill workers were eligible, in some cases, for as much as three years of financial support from the Unemployment Insurance Commission, provided they were continuously enrolled in approved educational upgrading and vocational training courses or programs. They also had available to them, at the company's ex- pense, a job search and counseling service. Thus, compared to many workers before and since, Abitibi-Price employees received gold glove treatment in the adjustment process. I argue below, however, that although the immediate result of job loss was far less harsh than it otherwise would have been, the adjustment process also involved subjection to a microsystem of power aimed at normalizing a traumatic life event and transforming subjectivities from the Fordist ideal into compliant post- Fordist flexible workers.

remaking the working class in the 1980s and 1990s

Since the 1 970s, economic change, particularly industrial restructuring, has had a serious impact on the working class in Western capitalist nations. Debates have raged over the years regarding the nature of this social category and whether or not it makes sense to talk of a distinctive working-class culture. Other identities as home- owners or members of a residential neighborhood, ethnic or racial group, nation state, region, or gender are said to be more significant than class for workers.6 More- over, trying to define a clearly demarcated working-class culture separate from the wider mass or popular culture of television, mass spectator sports, malls, and bars is very difficult, especially in Canada and the United States, where the language and tra- ditions of class have never been as strong as in European countries (Pakulski and Waters 1 996).

While academics debate the reality of class and concepts such as working-class culture, policymakers and employers in many of the Western capitalist nations are engaged in self-conscious attempts to change the attitudes and behavior of workers suggesting perception of an underlying culture or cultural dispositions that are in need of adjustment. In almost all of these states, governments ranging from social democratic to neoconservative in their proclaimed political leanings have engaged to some extent in a process of labor market deregulation and reduction of access to non- wage sources of income (especially welfare and unemployment insurance). This retraction of various forms of protection of the standards of living of working people has been combined with the idea that the real solution to such issues as unemployment,


underemployment, and low wages is more or continual training and education. There has, in other words, been a fundamental shift from the Fordist-era idea that the absence of sufficient well-paid work was a social problem that should be addressed through social programs and legislation to protect workers' rights. The shift has been in the direction of the current post-Fordist dominant thinking that emphasizes the individual responsibility of workers to adjust themselves to labor-market realities through continuous training and education (cf. Organization for Economic Coopera- tion and Development 1994; International Labour Organization 1998). In other words, the problem of unemployment and underemployment has come to be seen as one of individual personality or cultural deficiencies and the solution preferred by governments and private capital is workers' self-transformation.

With a few important exceptions (Martin 1994), this transition has yet to receive much commentary from anthropologists. This is unfortunate because the shift in thinking and in state policy is quite consciously an effort to remake the subjective identities of millions of working people. It is the post-Fordist equivalent to what Gramsci (in his notes on Americanism and Fordism) refers to as "the biggest collective effort to date to create, with unprecedented speed, and with a consciousness of pur- pose unmatched in history, a new type of worker and a new type of man" (Hoare and Smith 1971:302). It is explicitly about cultural transformation on a grand scale, a subject that certainly is a domain of anthropology even if workers in wealthy Western nations have not been a principal concern of the discipline.

Retraining and reeducating workers is also an appropriately anthropological concern because in certain respects the current debates resonate with echoes of the arguments about the culture-of-poverty thesis of the 1 960s (Dunk 1996). Once again the cause of poverty and lack of economic opportunity is said to rest within the minds and behaviors of the victims of economic change. The explicit concern of governments and employers is with the culture, often dubbed "skills," of the labor force. The concept of skill is not perceived as a culturally relative construct in this discourse (cf. Attewel 1 1 990). Moreover, the concern with ski 11 development is often a gloss for a concern with attitude adjustment and the reinsertion of market discipline in the minds and hearts of young and displaced workers. As Bourgois (2000:320) notes in his discussion of the effect on Puerto Rican immigrants of the transition from an industrial to a service economy, the job requirements in the service sector are "largely cultural" and the nature of work is such that workers no longer have the social space at their work sites to develop or celebrate a distinctive set of cultural values and attitudes. The emergence of the training state (Pye et al. 1996) thus fits hand-in-glove with the new post-Fordist realities. The extension of market freedom is accompanied by increased levels of intrusion and surveillance in the lives of workers, although, and this is the rub, the enhanced intrusiveness and surveillance often is wrapped in the guise of education, training, and counseling. Access to such things as unemployment and welfare payments is incumbent on participation in these kinds of programs (Cutler 1992; Green and Ashton 1 992; Lafer 1 992, 1 994; Lee 1 989; Pye et al. 1 996; Swift 1 995; Usher 1 990).7

One of the key concepts used in the discourse about economic restructuring since the 1 980s is flexibility. As Emily Martin suggests, there is a "tense dichotomy" in the vogue for flexibility in organizations and production systems (1994:145, 1 43-1 59, 207-225). On the one hand, the discourse celebrates individual initiative and creativity. On the other hand, it celebrates the flexibility of corporations and states to respond rapidly and easily to market, budgetary, or political fluctuations and opportunities by hiring, firing, reclassifying, or reassigning workers at will. The tension


emerges from the contradiction inherent in a theory that celebrates both individual and systemic flexibility because the latter depends on a degree of individual and group passivity and acquiescence on the part of employees that is in some respects at odds with the exhortation to take initiative and be creative.

This tension is reinforced by state policies that aim at enhancing the flexibility of labor markets. Generally, this enhancement involves removing rigidities so that workers respond more quickly and efficiently to changes in the labor market conditions. The rigidities are from many workers' points of view sources of security union rights, unemployment insurance, and other social security measures. They are regulations or contracts protecting individual workers' employment and noncommodified sources of income. The option presented to states is that they can maintain these kinds of policies and have high rates of unemployment or they can lower unemployment rates by restricting or removing these sources of worker protection and labor market rigidity (Albo 1994; Human Resources Development Canada 1994; Organization for Eco- nomic Cooperation and Development 1994). Here again a maximally flexible labor market is said to depend on reducing the flexibility of options open to workers.

Neoliberal labor market policy and the total quality management version of human resource management are opposed to many (not all) of the assumptions and policy outcomes of the Fordist period. To a certain extent, the human resource problems encountered by industrial management early in the 20th century are a reverse image of those faced by management in the later 2Oth century. As Gramsci argued in an early statement of the deskilling hypothesis (Braverman 1974), Scientific Manage- ment, or Taylorism, aimed to develop "in the worker to the highest degree automatic or mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified pro- fessional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations exclu- sively to the mechanical, physical aspect" (Hoare and Smith 1971:302). Henry Ford had totransform a culturally heterogeneous and only partially industrialized workforce into steady, dependable workers and consumers who could be counted on to put up with the deskilled work of the assembly line and to consume the homogeneous output of this kind of production system (May 1982). Creativity and originality on the part of the worker needed to be discouraged if a heterogeneous population was to be transformed into a homogeneous and predictable workforce.

In these terms, the Fordist project never came close to completion. Older forms of diversity were always replaced by newer ones. Nonetheless, in the Fordist period, many jobs were reduced to the merely mechanical and physical, and tendencies toward homogenization of labor regulations and practices did emerge in the Western industrial-capitalist nations. Bureaucratic forms of industrial and trade unionism became features of the economic, political, and cultural fields. Unions demanded stand- ardized labor practices. The right of management to manage was formally recognized in return for official job descriptions, seniority rights, and negotiations to changes in contracts. These became common elements of workplaces, at least in the core industries. Moreover, the success of the Fordist production system increased the labor movement's ability to insist on various state-run or state-financed programs to enhance the economic security of workers.

Although great diversity in working conditions and labor processes was always common, the model that dominated the core of the segmented labor market provided something for which workers in the secondary and tertiary sectors could push. The call for flexibility in labor markets, production systems, and individuals is an obvious attempt by management to reverse the effects of the drive for homogeneity that characterized


Fordism, even if the Fordist model was never as dominant as social scientists sometimes thought (see Alderson-Smith 1991). Current labor market and management theories are premised on the idea that the characteristics of the labor market and workplace practices that defined Fordism are problematic. Critics of Fordist labor- market policies see the issues as the need to stimulate creativity and imagination among workers and to encourage diversity in thinking and products (see the discussions in Albo 1994; Cutler 1992; Green and Ashton 1992; Human Resources Devel- opment Canada 1994; International Labour Organization 1998; Lafer 1992, 1994; Lee 1989; McBride 1992; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development 1 994; Swift 1 995).

If the term Fordism conjures the image of an ideal worker, it is likely to be a male (usu. white), blue-collar, unionized, industrial worker. These are the workers who benefited most from the Fordist-era compromise between labor and capital, at least in terms of wages, benefits, and job security. They are also among the ones who have been most seriously affected by deindustrialization and whose established patterns of wages and work are seen as most problematic by the terms of the new management philosophy. Their wage expectations and their insistence on bureaucratic labor practices such as formal job descriptions and seniority rights are viewed by the critics of Fordist-era labor market policies as unrealistic. They are the ones who typify the problematic inflexible workers.

adjusting to the mainstream

On October 10, 1991, four months after the Abitibi-Price Thunder Bay Division mill had been officially idled, the local television channel broadcast a show entitled "Life after Abitibi: Adjusting to the Mainstream." The title was a play on words. Abi- tibi-Price had contracted a private corporation, Mainstream Access, to provide counseling services and workshops to the workers laid off by the closure of the Thunder Bay Division mill and downsizing at a second Abitibi-Price mill in the city. The broadcast was sponsored by Mainstream Access Corporation and the Industrial Ad- justment Committee. In addition to the coy reference to the corporate name, the title of the show clearly suggested that the permanent, relatively well-paid, full-time work that had been the experience of the Abitibi-Price workers was no longer the norm. As explained by Mainstream Access counselors, "the mainstream" now consisted of a much tougher labor market in which insecure, impermanent employment and a constant pressure to change and sell oneself were prominent features. The title might also be read in an ironic postmodern mode as a suggestion or confession that workers would have to adjust to dealing with organizations like Mainstream Access.

The show included taped interviews with Mainstream Access counselors during which they explained the goals and philosophy of the services they provided, especially those related to job searching. It also contained a live discussion with other members of the Industrial Adjustment Committee. Much of the information provided was of a very practical nature. The counselors explained, for example, that one of their main goals in job search counseling was to help workers "come to grips" with their skills. One of them pointed out that the workers needed to learn how to identify and describe the skills they actually possessed to people who would not know what being a paper mill worker involved. Indeed, suggestions as to how best to present oneself to prospective employers is perhaps the key job-related service Mainstream offered. As expressed by one of the counselors,


If you understand that you have something to offer and you can express it, you can say such things as "my skills are," "my strengths are," possibly "my gift is," thatthateven in a tough job market can dramatically change your ability to impress an employer. And I really mean impress because employers today are unenamored of the prospect of taking responsibility for people. They want people to take responsibility for themselves in exchange for which there will be income and work done.

The problem of identifying and representing skills is both an individual practical problem and an issue of national and international concern that involves some fundamental cultural questions around perception and representation. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (1 994) jobs study briefly notes that there are accounting problems regarding the recognition of workforce skill levels. In its neoliberal green paper on social security reform, Human Resources Development Canada (1994) also notes that recognition of skill is a problem and calls for the development of a national skills passport. Thus, counselors' advice to workers about how to represent themselves in the 1 990s labor market was, at one and the same time, practical assistance and a recognition that skills are only perceived as skills if they can be represented in a manner that fits the context.

Undoubtedly, much of the personal and employment related counseling provided real, needed, and desired support and information. Very few of the displaced workers I interviewed who had used Mainstream Access services had negative comments; in fact, most of them were very positive about the experience. The new labor market does in fact require workers to be much more adroit at self-presentation than was the case a generation earlier. The observations of many commentators on the importance of surface and image in postmodern cultural space have purchase even in the mundane and practical sphere of job searching. The attractive and well-organized resume has become a fundamental element of job application even, if one is to believe job-search counselors, for laboring and other unskilled positions.

This is not to suggest that in the recent past appearances did not matter; however, the process of finding out about and getting blue-collar jobs in the past appears to have been quite different than what it is today. Even relatively young mill workers learned about possible openings at the mill through their kinship networks a father, father-in-law, or uncle who worked at the millr through an informal network of friends. The mills sometimes posted openings at government employment offices, but they did not advertise for basic, noncredentialed workers in newspapers or other public media. Upon hearing a mill was hiring, one simply went to the mill employment office and filled out an application form that asked for very basic information about age, education, and past work experience. Workers did not worry about being able to describe what their particular gift was or about putting together a striking resume in the hope of attracting the attention of a personnel director.

The ideological features of the counseling process were often far more direct and transparent, albeit wrapped in what was objectively also good, practical advice. The counselor's statement cited earlier about employers being "unenamored of the prospect of taking responsibility for people" ends with the observation, "and I think in the big picture that's, that's a fair balance." But perhaps more significant than such bald defenses of a corporate perspective, was a frequently repeated admonition to forget recent history and accept what has happened. For example, the October 10 broadcast began with a personal comment from the show's host, a local freelance journalist.

We've all heard the name calling and watched some rather bitterfinger pointing about the Abitibi-Price situation but the time for that I believe is now over. Finger pointing and name calling will not help the 500 people who've been laid off at Abitibi-Price.


We want to focus tonight instead on the positive things that are being done and can be done to help those employees.

The need to accept what had happened and get on with things was reiterated by the counselors. The host asked one of the counselors what kind of adjustment the laid-off workers have to make.

Whatever happened in the past has to now be regarded as the past. (Host: It's over). It's over. One of the injustices of this kind of environment is that sometimes the language used, for instance, the mill was not "mothballed," it was officially "idled," extends a kind of hope that possibly this will just be an aberration, that this will just be short term.... So the issue of change begins and ends, I think from our thinking, ends with attitude. The whole idea of remaining open to change and accepting the fact that whatever it is going to take to get you through the next 1 8 months or two years may be one strategy, but we are in a very rapidly changing country, continental economy, world or global economy, and we do not know literally what we'll be faced with in two years time.

Another counselor expressed the same idea thus: "Letting go of what has gone behind you so that you can begin to focus on that future direction."

Workers reiterated this idea in the form of stories about their former colleagues who had not adjusted quite so successfully. Some individuals told tales of being in social situations with colleagues who were still "bitching" about Abitibi and how they had been "screwed." It seemed to me that they told these stories to make the point that they (the "successful" adaptees) did not enjoy the interaction and saw it as one of the reasons such people were having trouble adapting. The need to "just get over it" was accepted by these workers as a necessary part of dealing with the layoff. The following excerpt is from an interview with Alex (all names are pseudonyms), a 40-year-old papermaker who had 12 years experience in the mill. His statement is typical of workers who had been through counseling and retraining. It represented the required attitude for dealing with job loss.

Alex: Mainstream was good. Because Mainstream was there to help people realize that the place was shut down and that's the big, big thing. Like they helped with the resumes and they had uh, but I think the biggest thing was for people to, like look them in the eye and hopefully they could realize the place was shut down you know. I think that was the whole idea of Mainstream.

Dunk: And tell them it's not opening again. A: Yeah, to get on with it you know.

Readers of Emi Iy Martin's F/exib/e Bodies (1 994) may recognize certain paral lels between this discourse about "letting go" and the "experiential training" course she describes. She cites a brochure produced by the Rockford Company whose employees were being subjected to the training. Success is said to require "letting go of old patterns and behaviors" and "looking forward to change as a challenge, taking risks and innovating" (Martin 1994:212). As she puts it: "Emphasis is on a qualitative break with the way one was in the past; like a caterpillar that transforms into a different kind of being, a butterfly, people are to be transformed" (Martin 1994:212). There is, however, a fundamental difference in the advice given to unemployed former mill workers and the discourse of Total Quality Management as described by Martin.

The experiential training course was intended to, and apparently had the effect of, breaking down barriers between men and women, and labor and management, and overcoming workers' fear of the unknown by having them physically experience the support of their coworkers. "The experience models physically the nature of the


new workers that corporations desire: individuals men and women able to risk the unknown and tolerate fear, willing to accept their dependence on the help and support of their coworkers. In a word, flexibilit/' (Martin 1994:213). The counsel for unemployed mill workers certainly emphasized the need for flexibility, but that flexibility was not to be based on an acceptance of dependence on the help and support of others. To the contrary, it was to be based on self-reliance, on accepting the fact that no person or institution was going to do anything for you. The lesson to be learned in this context is the necessity of taking care of your self. This lesson was certainly not lost on the workers.

D: I mean your description of this whole process is obviously a very positive one, so I don't know if this question needs to be asked but what would have made the whole process of going from the mill shutdown to getting reestablished to making the sort of career path easier for you?

A: I don't think (pause) I think acceptance, just accepting the fact. It was quite a while after the time it closed and I was, went to this party, with the guy I work with now [at a new job], and we're standing in the corner talking and he's still [saying] "ftn [slang for fucking] Abitibi this and they really screwed us." And I'm like "holy Christ man, like go away with it. Like move on man," like I already had, I wasn't working here then, but so many things were on the go, like getting on the go you know.

D: Yeah, right A: Life is what you make it if you can. Like nobody's going to give you anything.

That's kind of what he was looking at. Like they should give me a job. That's what I think a lot of people thought that Mainstream was going to do. That "hey we're going to find a whole bunch of jobs and like here's a job for you, and here's a job for you." It doesn't work that way.

In this context, the admonition to let go is inherently ideological insofar as letting go inevitably means that analysis of the circumstances leading to the closure is cur- tailed. The lesson to be learned from the experience of plant closure and job loss be- comes not a lesson about the social relations of production in late capitalist society but rather about the need to become an ever flexible, self-promoting, and above all ahistorical individual. Critique of the system has no place in such a model for living. Thus, here is a very concrete and immediate example of how working-class memory is suppressed, a phenomenon that, according to Herbert Gutman (1987), is charac- teristic of American (here, perhaps, we can extend this to Canadian) culture. Signifi- cantly, this is not achieved through a repressive state or other apparatus, but rather through a process aimed, according to its own practitioners, at empowerment.

Of course, not all the workers subjected themselves to the job-search counselors' logic or to the aptitude tests they administered. Of the 470 workers who lost their jobs, Mainstream Access reported that 217 attended their workshops in the year following the closure. Thus, many laid-off workers did not use the Mainstream Access counselors an action interpreted by many of the counselors, and the Industrial Adjustment Committee, as a sign of more serious problems and hence an even greater need for counseling.8

The most insidious feature of the counselors' advice, however, was not simply the expectation that workers forget what had happened, but that this expectation became another grounds for division among the workers. Letting go of the past is an individual act and thus provides a criterion for categorizing the mill workforce according to their individual characteristics. Stories about the training process and its outcomes reveal that these divisions are now part of workers' explanations of where


individuals ultimately ended up. Here, I want to focus briefly on the success stories and show how workers who succeeded now see themselves as different from their former colleagues and workmates who have not quite adjusted.

Stories about the training process take three different shapes. First, there are the stories of failure. For those who recount this version, the training process was not a positive experience. The courses available were not what they wanted, or they did not complete the courses for various reasons. Whatever the explanation, they perceived that the training they received had no bearing on subsequent employment.

Second, there are ambivalent narratives about the training process. In these stories, displaced workers typically indicate that they undertook the training because they felt that they should do something other than sit at home. These individuals say that they were not necessarily in courses they found helpful, although they present their training as a positive social experience. One of the common themes workers sounded in these stories is that they did not learn much in their courses, either because they already knew most of what was taught or because the materials presented were of little actual relevance to the jobs they sought. Many of these workers are also now engaged in activities that are only tangentially, if at all, related to their training.

Third, there are the success stories. In these stories, workers suggest that the training was useful, leading to new and better (although not usually in the financial sense) employment. The workers who tell this story have developed a distinctive sense of how they themselves differ from some of their former coworkers.

A: So it's easy if you can, it's not easy but there's work out, there's lots of jobs. If a person wants to work there's lots of jobs. There's lots of jobs out there. And it's part of, you have to [be] a worker. You have to be able to, no matter what it is. I don't mean a worker meaning swing a sledge[hammer], or like worker, you have to be able, whatever the job is, be able to do it. And it's not worker meaning physical. It's worker, meaning do the job. You know, you have to be able to produce whatever the job is.

D: Okay. So it's kind of a mental not attitudinal. I mean not everybody can like you say swing a sledgehammer but uh.

A: Yeah and adaptable. I think adaptability is the biggest thing. If you can look at something, whatever job, say it's starting here for instance [his new job on the maintenance staff at a public institution], there's nothing mechanical in my resume to come here and be a mechanic as far as here I'm a millwright. I'm not a millwright by trade. But when 1, like my father, is kind of do everything by yourself, and I've had snow machines and my own backhoe, and I do all the maintenance and, and snow machines and dirt bikes. It was just my upbringing. And [I was] never afraid to look at something, okay this thing's broken somewhere here, take it apart, see how it works, fix it you know. And that's what goes on here. You know like there's a difference if you've been here 23 years. This place is huge and so you go to someplace like . . . Iike over here now, and he [his foreman] says this access hatch hasn't been opened in 23 years. You don't know, you don't know what's up there and so [you] go up there and you look and you fix it.

Or later in the same discussion:

D: No not everybody can be flexible or adaptable in the way you've been. Like some people aren't very good at things or they can only do certain kinds of things. And it's a rather limited range. I'm just wondering about that.

A: Well when I took that refrigeration course and it was a large percentage of Abitibi [employees], and I was really proud when we were doing our little tests and everything and everybody was doing really well. And I was thinking well that's nice, 'cause everybody stereotypes mill workers. A large percentage in your


interviews, I don't know how many of them you're going to find in your interviews, but a lot of them are going to fall into that stereotypical, needed the seniority system or you would have been toast, and uh can't wouldn't move up if it wasn't for the seniority system.

The seniority system forms a key feature of most collective agreements between unions and employers. It was the product of the effort of workers to defend themselves against the arbitrary power of employers to promote, fire, and layoff employees according to their own dictates. It also implicitly rewarded workers for loyalty to a firm because job security and chances of success in the internal labor market increased with the length of service to the company. It is precisely an element of Fordist labor relations that is now seen as a rigidity, which hinders flexibility. The speaker cited here was active in the CPU, serving as an executive officer of his local during his tenure at the mill. Yet the experience of layoff and retraining has not taught him that collective institutions such as unions are necessary elements of a modern capitalist economy. Rather, he has concluded that they protect less-capable workers. The lesson he seems to have learned is that even though he recognizes that the widespread image of mill workers is a stereotype, the image is in fact largely true.

plant closure, experience, and consciousness

Workers' narratives about the mill closure itself are based on two interpretive repertoires. One of them follows the basic lines of the argument made by Abitibi-Price spokespersons and most frequently reported in the local press. It explains the closure by reference to a number of uncontrollable forces. These typically include a glut on the newsprint market, the age and condition of the Thunder Bay Division mill, the cost of upgrading it, and costs related to environmental regulations. The second interpretive repertoire explained the mill closure in political terms and included two lines of reasoning, neither of which appeared in the media or corporate statements. One was that because Thunder Bay was larger than many other mill towns, and contained three other mills (two of which at the time belonged to Abitibi-Price), it was politically easier for Abitibi-Price to close Thunder Bay than it would have been to close the only mil I in a smaller community.

The other pol itical explanation for the mi l l closure focused on one of the mi l l's two CPU locals, especially its president. Some workers went so far as to blame the closure on this one individual. When the CPU was formed in 1974, it preserved the division between papermakers (the operators of the paper machines) and other mill workers by allowing two locals in the mills. Local 1 34 of the CPU was the descendent of the International Brotherhood of Pulp, Sulphite, and Papermill Workers, one of two unions that had united in 1972 to form the United Paperworkers International Union and from which the CPU had split in 1974. The other CPU local in the Thunder Bay Division mill had its origins in the former United Papermakers and Paperworkers. This split can be traced to 1906 when the first papermakers union was founded. It divided the papermakers, with their hierarchical job structure and pay rates based on the size and speed of the paper machines that they tended, from the other workers in the mill.

Local 134 had a national reputation for its radicalism. It frequently voted against contract agreements that had been accepted by national bargaining committees. It also had a huge number of outstanding grievances against the company. The individual who was its president until just prior to the mill closure was also known within the company, the union, and the workforce as a troublemaker. He had been fired just before the closure for refusing to cross an Industrial Wood and Allied Workers of Canada


picket line and thus being absent from work without justification.9 Technically, he was not employed by Abitibi-Price when the mill was closed, although he was even- tually awarded the same compensation package as everyone else. There were many rumors about erratic behavior on his part. Nonetheless, he was clearly something of a populist among many workers. In his long career at the mill, he had frequently held executive positions in the union, including local president.

These two interpretive repertoires continue to dominate workers' discussions about why the mill closed. Those who invoke the political explanations point to the fact that the Thunder Bay Division mill, despite its age, always made money, a point not publicly disputed by Abitibi-Price. They argue, thus, that the closure had to be politically motivated because it did not really make economic sense. Promoters of this view include people who seem to admire and those who despise the local union president at the center of the controversy. They also come from both union locals, and, thus, this controversy should not be read as a simple reflection of longstanding internal union divisions.

A third interpretive repertoire used in the local media although far less often than the company's market-forces argument focused on two global issues. First, at the time of the closure, Abitibi-Price was owned by Olympia-York Development. Olympia-York was experiencing severe financial difficulties because of its shaky real estate investments, the most infamous of which was the Canary Wharf project in Lon- don. The argument made by certain experts in the industry was that the pulp and paper division of Olympia-York's holdings were being treated as a cash cow to finance its burgeoning debt load. Thus, plants such as the Thunder Bay Division were in out- dated condition because money that should have gone into upgrading them had gone instead to service debts incurred through losses on the real estate market.

The second feature of the global-dimensions explanation was the globalization of the forest industry, particularly the fact that Abitibi-Price itself had recently built a new newsprint mi l l in the southern United States, a mi l l that was just coming on l ine when the glut on the newsprint market developed in the early 1 990s.

Workers did not spontaneously offer what I have called the third interpretive repertoire when asked for their explanations of the plant closure; however, when they were directly asked if they were aware of these global developments all of them said they were. Thus, unlike the situation of the Pittsfield workers discussed by Nash (1989, 1994), it is misleading to say the workers were unaware of the global situation. When asked whether they thought global developments in the pulp and paper industry were important, they acknowledged they probably were but then frequently in- sisted that workers did not think about such things. The answers to this question reveal the often-commented-upon instrumental attitude many blue-collar workers have toward their jobs, but workers explicitly also provided two rationales for this lack of global consciousness. On the one hand, they mentioned a long run of relative security and prosperity, a run that gave rise to a (false) sense of permanence and perhaps even of ownership over a job at the mill.

A: Like the number, if you look at the numbers of people that are working in the mill and going home at the end of the day as opposed to the number of people that are sitting on the [union] committee, their visions are smaller. They just want to go to work and go home at the end of the day. I think there's a definite line there where they don't want, not that they don't want, or they can't or they simply don't want to or bother with it. Like they don't want to worry about that. They just want to work and go home, go to work and go home.


D: Sort of like a division of labor where it's a management job to do that assessment kind of stuff and it's their job to make the . . .

A: Yeah, yeah, but what happens I think like with Abitibi and old mills and stuff, these mills have been running for so many years.... Everybody was ... they had a right to be working there you know. They don't think it's a business. It's like it's just there. Like our trees and it's like our water . . . I don't know how to do it, it was there.

D: It's just part of the natural. A: Well yeah.

On the other hand, workers claimed that complacency about the "bigger picture" was the product of an acute consciousness of both their powerlessness and of how their inflexibility was a form of resistance to externally imposed changes. The following is an excerpt from an interview with Mike, a 42-year-old millwright with 23 years of experience at the mi 11.

D: One of the things that we're curious about is whether or not you think that the fact that the men knew about the kind of global situation, [the] Reichman [owners of Olympia-York] problems, or the fact that Abitibi was spending money building mills in other parts of the world and so on. Do you think that had much influence in their thinking, or the way they did their jobs, or at contract negotiation times?

Mike: On a scale of one to ten, zero. D: Really? M: Nothing. You went and you did your job, you put your eight hours in. If overtime

was required you worked it and you went home. But as for what went on in the other part. Sure we'd be frustrated that uh a lot of the monetary uh capital investment wasn't coming our way but that wasn't ours to be. And no sense and you could ask and request and [they] made certain changes up the line, but it just didn't fall on learning ears, or listening ears, it just you know . . .

D: So obviously you don't think it really, people weren't thinking, well it's not that they weren't thinking about it, but . . .

M: Well they might have known the Reichman's were in trouble but I think everybody . . . we never thought it'd happen to us. We thought we'd be the last one to be shut down. We were making money.

Later, in response to a question about whether or not flex trades were a concern in the mill, the same informant responded: "I think everybody was uh I think everybody was complacent, everybody liked the . . . status quo. People didn't want to see it change. They looked upon change as the little guy getting the shaft, and it was a way of eliminating more and more men."

These accounts are typical examples of how the mill workers discussed what, from an external perspective, appears to be a narrow-minded complacency. They suggest that the experience of these mill workers is a complex phenomenon. An apparent lack of concern about the global situation was not born of an ignorance of it, so much as a sense that either history showed it did not matter or that because one could not do anything about these issues, there was no point in worrying about them. Con- sciousness of the global picture and of class relations in the labor process here generated a retreat into complacency and a focus on things one may have had control over, such as the union. Given the sense that they had no control over the larger issues, it is not surprising that many of them focused their attention on the one issue the union president that perhaps they or their coworkers could have done something about.

Perhaps ironically, given the important role education is sometimes thought to play in the formation of class consciousness, the more intellectual of the workers were also the ones who seemed to express most clearly an antiunion perspective on the


mill closure.10 Their heightened awareness of the bigger picture did not translate into a more radical interpretation of the appropriate worker strategy. To the contrary, it simply reinforced the apparent salience of the neoliberal critique of unionized workers.

The following is an excerpt from an interview with a working-class intellectual. He was a papermaker with l9-and-a-half years at the mill. The son of small-scale dairy farmers, he, unlike the vast majority of his coworkers, had completed Ontario's grade 1 3 (university matriculation in the province), although he never, prior to the shutdown, pursued postsecondary education. Unlike most of the workers whose hob- bies involved various sports and do-it-yourself projects around the home or with cars, snowmobiles, or motorboats, Bruno spent his leisure time reading literature (as opposed to popular fiction), Xistening to classical music, and traveling. His home was (he has since relocated to the United States to pursue a career as a nurse) filled with knick- knacks from his travels to all the continents (excluding Antarctica). Mahler (he explained to me) played in the background as we discussed his experience of the mill closure and retraining.

D: Okay. If I could ask you then about the shutdown of the mill? If you could just tell me what you think the reason or reasons are or were that that mill was shut down?

Bruno: Well it would be it would be a very kind of subjective kind of answer probably. D: That's fine. B: Uh, I don't think like economically it was viable to keep it uh functioning for you

know probably a lot of reasons, the union being a big one. Like to me, they were totally ridiculous in their expectations, totally unreasonable. Well both unions, I mean [not] just my local, you know possibly the union in general. There's no reason in the world why guys with grade eight training should have been uh getting uh you know 20 bucks an hour, 22, 25 dollars an hour. No reason in the world.

D: So you think they were driving up the cost of labor. B: Basically yeah but and also it was cheaper for Abitibi opened up plants in the

southern states and they were just more viable you know. Certainly our wood was better, but their costs, not just labor, but utility and taxes and there was just more incentive and it wasn't efficient. I don't think our plant was efficient any- more, so they just shut it down. And we had some rednecks in the union too. I believe the last contract or whatever before the plant closed our local was the only one that was uh well 134 or one of them was the only one that was saying yeah this is a bunch of nonsense. We don't go with the rest of them and all this kind of stuff.

D: 1 34 voted against [the contract offer accepted by the national union]? B: Yeah . . . but to hear, you know, to hear, considering the economic climate at the

time, and where industry in general was going, to hear these guys talk at union meetings and this kind of stuff, "oh they're just bullshitting us about this," you know, it's you know, total, no sense of reality at all. To me that's the way I saw it. There's really no, there could have been, if there was some sort of atitude that was conciliatory or reasonable or expectations that were reasonable, I don't know it may have been some incentive to keep the plant going but uh I don't know, it just, well yeah I don't know. It's just there was no real sense of reality about anything. The union was off in their own little world.

D: Okay. And you mentioned the plant down in Alabama, one example, and Abi- tibi-Price at that time was actually engaged in a number of projects. That's probably the best known one. Did the guys at work talk about that at all? I mean, was there much of an awareness of the global picture so to speak?

B: Well I don't know about the global picture, but they knew that uh there was a plant there or being considered or whatever. Yeah I think there was talk of that.

D: But in the union meetings, like you mentioned in the union meetings?

894 amerzoan ethnologist

B: Ohno,notatall. D: So you didn't . . . I just want to try to understand this if the workers at any point sat

down and talked about the global situation, Abitibi investment patterns any of that kind of stuff.

B: Never, no, no. They just saw things peripherally you know where it affected them and that was it you know we've always got increases you know we've always been here uh that's what their expectations were.... You know other industries were cutting back wages . . . instead of asking for increases. That would have been unheard of, just totally unacceptable. It's almost iike, wel}, we've gotta be shut down [rather] than take a cut in pay. Which, I don't know.

The references to the rednecks in the union obviously suggest that there were divisions among the workers, despite the commonalities of their occupational culture. The adjustment process seems to have exacerbated these kinds of differences. Despite the benefits that some individuals gained from them, the counseling and training also functioned to provide a narrative for differentiation among workers. In other words, I am not claiming that the process of counseling and retraining destroyed a homogeneous, pristine workers' culture. It did, however, enhance the persuasiveness of a neoliberal interpretation of job loss and adjustment among some of the workers. Cer- tainly, the collectivist idea that Raymond Williams (1963) once claimed was at the heart of working-class culture has been severely compromised by the experience of industrial restructuring.

conclusion: class consciousness, experience, and resistance

In the classical version of working-class formation, the transition from class-in-itself to class-for-itself is the product of workers' experiences of the contradictions between the col lective production process and the private appropriation of the product (see the discussion in Dunk 1994:22-27 and Johnson 1979). Given the fact that since the late 1 970s the objective experience for many workers in the old industrial economy has been job loss and declining real wages, it would be reasonable, according to this line of thought, to expect a vigorous response by workers to the changes in actual employment situations; however, this has not been the case.

Thompson's account of the development of the English working class is undoubtedly the most famous example of the case for experience being the crucible that gen- erates active response. His critique of Althusserian structuralism stands as a classic defense of the idea that actors' experiences and agency are ultimately the motors of history (Thompson 1968, 1978). Other commentators have argued, however, that experience is more complex than Thompson allows. As Scott expresses it: "Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, always therefore political. The study of experience, therefore, must call into question its originary status in historical explanation" (1992:37). Both what constitutes experience and what experience means are produced by the cultural categories and discourses available to a given individual or group in a specific historical context.

To say this is not necessarily to retreat into the rigidities of a deterministic structuralism or Marxism. These preexisting structures do not necessarily predetermine outcomes in a narrow fashion. As in Levi-Strauss's (] 966) well-known analogy with the handyman's toolbox, they can be used in novel and creative ways as circumstances demand. But the nature of the tools and resources in the toolbox are likely to encourage certain kinds of responses to situations rather than others. Even in Thompson's work, discursive categories that existed prior to working-class experience are seen as

JC

Resaltado

JC

Resaltado


crucial to the way workers interpreted what was happening to them. Their sense of oppression was at least partly the product of the way concepts such as the "free-born Englishman" shaped their understanding of declining standards of living and status. Nash's study of the deindustrialization of Pittsfield shows how the experience of economic change and decline was experienced by the workers in the terms provided by the hegemonic corporate discourse. "I found that the majority [of workers] justified the reduction in employment and layoffs of thousands in terms of the decline in profit" (Nash 1994:24). The power of this ideological framework is the result of extensive corporate efforts to extend its particular world view as a universally valid interpretive framework and to the McCarthyite anticommunist witch hunts of the late 1 940s and early 1 950s, which eliminated radical alternative discourses (Nash 1989:93-123, 1 994:24).

As Biernacki's (1995) masterful study of the woolen textile industries in Germany and Britain shows, differing experiences of the wage relationship go much deeper than the existence of corporate and radical interpretations of the nature of economic relationships. Even such basic concepts as labor and what it is that is being bought and sold in the wage relationship is the product of cultural categories whose origins are outside of the wage relationship itself. The very practice of wage labor is influ- enced by varying notions of what labor is, and, thus, how it can be measured and re- munerated. The experience or absence of experience of oppression and exploitation i s then i nfl uenced by these cu Itu ra I categories.

Coming at the issue from a somewhat different angle, Sider (1996) has reasserted the key role experience plays in working-class culture, although his concern is to critique both Marxists and liberals who assume they actually know the nature of workers' real experience whereas workers themselves are unaware of their own history. Sider's point ultimately is that anthropologists need to attend to the specificities of cultural, political, and economic conditions if they seek to understand workers' experience. Sider implies that a Marxist or politically liberal orthodox historical narrative presupposes that workers have forgotten their own past. Thus, the problem in Sider's terms is less that experience is problematic and more that outsiders make presump- tions about what the true working-class experience ought to be and which elements of it should count as the most important.

In this article, I have presented and analyzed the representations of displaced pulp and paper mill workers as to the reasons for their plant's closure and their sense of what would make an appropriate response to that situation. I have emphasized the importance of counseling and retraining services as part of the system of the microphysics of power, as sources of a neoliberal discourse embraced by workers who see themselves as having successfully made the appropriate postlayoff adjustments. At the same time, however, experience has generated a frame of mind among the workers that eschews concern with the global issues that ultimately are determining their fate. They focus on local personalities and events to explain both the closure and the reasons some succeed and some fail in the adjustment process. Experience and discourse are inextricably bound up together in such a way as to generate, in this case, a fatalistic explanation for the plant closure and an individualized response to this event.

Working-class culture has never been homogeneous, even within given national or ethnic boundaries. Divisions based on occupation, skill levels, gender, ethnicity, and race have always created fractures in what theory predicted would be the smooth surface of class consciousness. Mill closures and coming to terms with the tough labor-market conditions of the new times might be expected to generate a heightened


sense of class solidarity. The experiences of layoff, counseling, and retraining however, are uneven and provide as many avenues for division as they do for solidarity. For the workers discussed in this article, it would seem that the neoliberal ideology expressed in job-search counselors' advice resonates for those who manage to make the adjustment in relatively sound economic and psychc)logical condition. They are survivors and winners, and thus now see themselves as fundamentally different from their former colleagues who have had less success. The experience of the closure and the process of adjustment was quite variable, and, after the fact, many of the workers claim to have learned the lessons neoliberal economists claim they need to learn.1l

Dealing with economic dislocation and industrial adjustment presents a real di- lemma for the labor movement and indeed for anyone concerned about easing the pain involved in change of this nature. Unions and other left activists often find themselves having to choose to stay out of the process altogether by not participating in such things as training programs and industrial adjustment committees and, thus, ap- pearing to abandon workers; or participating in structures and processes in which they often have little control over either the form or content of the programs and services workers receive. Moreover, even where they do have direct control of schemes aimed at helping workers adjust, they have not always thought out the long-term im- plications of the programs they themselves provide.

Faced with plant closure and job loss, calls for counseling and training for the affected workers are an obvious and necessary move. This is a two-edged sword, however, for the process of adjustment is a sorting process. Workers who once may have shared a consciousness, however weak, based on relationships with a common employer, union membership, or occupation are shuffled into new categories: those who can let go versus those who cannot; those who can adapt versus those who cannot; those who succeed versus those who fail. Given the lack of control over the forces af- fecting them, workers seem to turn their attention to things they might control, such as their unions or the personalities of individuals. The successful adaptees have had their identity as competent individuals reinforced, while the unsuccessful ones are casti- gated as conforming to widespread negative stereotypes about mill workers. Thus, counseling, training, and other adjustment programs, which are undoubtedly helpful in many ways and staffed by well-meaning individuals, also function to rationalize the leaner, more competitive times in which workers live.

notes

Acknowledgments. I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I also wish to thank Randle W. Nelsen for his help and support with the research on which this article is based.

1. Upgrading and retraining both refer to the activities unemployed workers undertake to improve their formally recognized skills. Usually this is done in training or educational courses and programs offered by public educational institutions or private-training firms. As discussed further in this article, the concept of flexibility is a key component of neoliberal labor-market strategy. It refers both to a regulatory regime that allows employers to respond quickly and inex- pensively to market forces through such actions as layoffs and to the need for individuals to be highly adaptable so as to be able to respond promptly to changes in the labor market.

2. Potter and Wetherell define interpretive repertoires thus: "Basically a lexicon or register of terms and metaphors drawn up to characterize and evaluate actions and events" (1987:138), or "recurrently used systems of terms used for characterizing and evaluating actions, events and other phenomena" (1987:149).

Industrial adjustment and industrial restructuring both refer to the process by which firms respond to economic forces. They involve closures of factories, mills, or other sites of industrial


production and the reorganization of production within these units. In both cases, workers are often dislocated either because of job loss or because they must adapt to new shop-floor activities and regulations.

3. I say partly because there are other issues that come into play at times, as well, particularly postwar affluence and the power of ethnic and racial divisiveness. I do not deal with these issues here because my focus is on the instrumentalist hypothesis and the relationship between consciousness and experience. Goldthorpe et al . (1 968a, 1 968b, 1 969) provide the classic statement on the instrumental orientation among workers. See also the critical comments in Critcher 1 979:30-34.

4. I use the past tense because the newer or renovated mills are much cleaner. Also, extensive computerization and other technological changes have eliminated many of the dirtier jobs and, consequently, much of the employment that these jobs entai led. For example, onsite wood chippers used in the bush have eliminated the wood rooms and groundwood sections of many mills, eliminating some of the most dangerous, noisy, and dirty jobs in the mills, and as much as one third of total mill employment.

5. Approximately four hundred workers were immediately displaced, 17 of whom took early retirement. Later, a further 70 workers were let go from the company's woodlands division as a result of a decline in the need for loggers.

6. The literature about the relationship between class and other variables that comprise working-class identities is voluminous. The argument against the relevance of class as an element of identity is asserted vigorously, although not convincingly, in Pakulski and Waters 1996. See Dunk 1994:20 42 for an overview of the theoretical issues. Also see Critcher 1979, Halle 1 984, Livingstone and Mangan 1 996, Roediger 1 991, and Skeggs 1 997 for discussions and analyses of these issues.

7. As indicated earlier, displaced mill workers were eligible for up to three years of financial support from the Unemployment Insurance Commission. To qualify, workers had to be continuously registered in educational, training, or counseling programs that were approved by caseworkers at the Unemployment Insurance Commission. Attendance in classes or sessions was mandatory. Even the caseworkers recognized that many workers participated in these programs only so that they could receive unemployment insurance payments and that the programs often did not have any relationship to workers' aspirations or needs. Given this factR it would appear that one of the functions of the programs was to monitor the displaced workers.

8. The minutes of the meetings of the Industrial Adjustment Committee reveal that this was a central concern of all the committee members.

9. The Industrial Wood and Allied Workers of Canada represented workers in Abitibi's Woodlands Division. Most of them were loggers. They were on strike at the time the mill was closed.

10. Elsewhere, I have discussed the prominence and logic of anti-intellectualism among male workers in northwestern Ontario (Dunk 1994:1 32-1 51). My argument is that anti-intellectualism is a class response to the unequal division between mental and manual labor. It had the unfortunate consequence of limiting the development of a progressive critical class consciousness among manual workers. Obviously, it does not logically or empirically follow that more in- tellectually-oriented workers necessarily become more radical.

11. Speaking of the Youth Training Scheme (YTS) in Britain in the 1980s, David Lee (1989:168-1 69) says:

The more permanent control of aspirations and behaviour through youth training may in fact be occurring in the more buoyant areas of the country. Our case study, being based on a relatively prosperous locality, suggests that because YTS typically did lead to a job at the end its effect was to create among the youngsters a sense of what we have called "moral rescue" ("what YTS did for me") and to emphasize the separateness of YTS refusers and the unemployed "who do nothing to help themselves." Although not youth, the effect among those mill workers who perceive themselves to have

successfully adapted is similar.


references cited

Abella, Irving M. 1 973 Nationalism, Communism, and Canadian Labour. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Albo, Gregory 1994 "Competitive Austerity" and the Impasse of Capitalist Employment Policy. In The So-

cialist Register 1994: Between Globalism and Nationalism. Ralph Miliband and Leo Panitch, eds. Pp. 60-93. London: Merlin Press.

Alderson-Smith, Gavin 1991 Writing for Real: Capitalist Constructions and Constructions of Capitalism. Critique of

Anthropology 1 1(3):213-232. Attewell, Paul

1990 What Is Skill? Work and Occupations 17(4):422-448. Biernacki, Richard

1995 The Fabrication of Labor: Germany and Britain, 1640-191 4. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bourgois, Philippe 2000 From Jfbaro to Crack Dealer: Confronting the Restructuring of Capitalism in El Barrio.

In Anthropological Theory: An Introductory History. R. Jon McGee and Richard L. Warms, eds. Pp. 315-329. Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing.

Braverman, Harry 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Critcher, Chas 1979 Sociology, Cultural Studies, and the Post-War Working Class. In Working Class Cul-

ture: Studies in History and Theory. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson, eds. Pp. 13-40. London: Hutchison.

Cutler, Tony 1992 Vocational Training and British Economic Performance: A Further Gnstalment of the

"British Labour Problems"? Work, Employment and Society 6(2):161-183. Dunk, Thomas

1994 It's A Working Man's Town: Male Working-Class Culture. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

1996 Culture, Skill, Masculinity and Whiteness: Training and the Politics of Identity. In The Training Trap: Ideology, Training and the Labour Market. Thomas Dunk, Stephen McBride, and Randle W. Nelsen, eds. Pp. 101-124. Halifax: Fernwood.

Foucault, Michel 1977 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books.

Goldthorpe, John H., David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt 1968a The Affluent Worker: Industrial Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press. 1 968b The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behaviour. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press. 1969 The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Green, Francis, and David Ashton 1992 Skill Shortage and Skill Deficiency: A Critique. Work, Employment and Society 6(2):

287-301 . Gutman, Herbert G.

1987 Historical Consciousness in Contemporary America. In Power and Culture: Essays on the American Working Class. Hebert G. Gutman. Pp. 395-410. New York: Pantheon Books.

Halle, David 1984 America's Working Man: Work, Home, and Politics among Blue-Collar Property

Owners. Ch icago: U n iversity of Ch icago Press. Harvey, David

1 989 The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwel 1.


Hoare, Quintin, and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, eds. 1971 Selections from the Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publish-

ers. Human Resources Development Canada

1994 Agenda: Jobs and Growth Improving Social Security in Canada. Ottawa: Human Re- sources Development Canada.

International Labour Organization 1998 World Employment Report 1998-99: Employability in the Global Economy, How

Training Matters. Geneva: International Labour Office. Johnson, Richard

1979 Three Problematics: Elements of a Theory of Working-Class Culture. In Working Class Culture: Studies in History and Theory. John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson, eds. Pp.201-237. London: Hutchison.

Lafer, Gordon 1992 Minority Employment, Labor Market Segmentation, and the Failure of Job-Training

Policy in New York City. Urban Affairs Quarterly 28(2):206-235. 1994 The Politics of Job Training: Urban Poverty and the False Promise of the JTPA. Politics

and Society 22(3):349-388. Lee, David

1989 The Transformation of Training and the Transformation of Work in Britain. The Trans- formation of Work? Stephen Wood, ed. Pp.156-171. New York: Routledge.

Lenin, Vladimir I. 1970 What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement. In V. 1. Lenin: Selected

Works in Three Volumes. Vol.1. Pp.119-271. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Levi-Strauss, Claude

1966 The Savage Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholas. Livingstone, David, and J. Marshall Mangan, eds.

1996 Recast Dreams: Class and Gender Consciousness in Steeltown. Toronto: Garamond Press.

Marchak, M. Patricia 1995 Logging the Globe. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press.

Martin, Emily 1994 Flexible Bodies: Tracking Immunity in American Culture From the Days of Polio to the

Age of Al DS. Boston: Beacon Press. May, Martha

1982 The Historical Problem of the Family Wage: The Ford Motor Company and the Five Dol lar Day. Femi n ist Review 8(2):399-424.

McBride, Stephen 1992 Not Working: State, Unemployment, and Neo-Conservatism in Canada. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press. Nash, June

1989 From Tank Town to High Tech: The Clash of Community and Industrial Cycles. Al- bany: State University of New York Press.

1994 Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity. American Anthropologist 96(1):7-30. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

1994 The OECD Jobs Study: Facts, Analysis, Strategies. Paris: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Pakulski, Jan, and Malcolm Waters 1996 The Death of Class. London: Sage.

Palmer, Bryan 1992 Working Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour History,

1800-1991.2nd Edition. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Potter, Jonathan, and Margaret Wetherel I

1987 Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour. London: Sage Publ ications.

9oo american ethnologist

Price Waterhouse 1994 The Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry: A Focus on Human Resources. Ottawa: Sup-

ply and Services Canada. Pye, David, Chris Haywood, and Mairtin Mac An Ghaill

1996 The Training State, De-industrialization and the Production of White Working-Class Trainee Identities. International Studies in Sociology of Education 6(2):133-146.

Roediger, David 1991 The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class. New

York: Verso. Sassoon, Donald

1996 One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the Twentieth Century. London: Fontana.

Scott, Joan 1992 Experience. In Feminists Theorize the Political Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds.

Pp. 22A0. London: Routledge. Sider, Gerald

1996 Cleansing History: Lawrence, Massachusetts, the Strike for Four Loaves of Bread and No Roses, and the Anthropology of Working-Class Consciousness. Radical History Review 65(1):48-83.

Skeggs, Beverley 1997 Formations of Class and Gender. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Swift, Jamie 1995 Wheel of Fortune: Work and Life in the Age of Falling Expectations. Toronto: Between

the Lines. Thompson, Edward P.

1968 The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 1978 The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Usher, Graham 1990 Employment Training: Britain's New Bantustans. Race and Class 32(1):45-56.

Williams, Raymond 1963 Culture and Society 1780-1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

accepted August 23, 2001 final version submitted November 19, 2001

Thomas Dunk Department of Sociology Lakehead University Thunder Bay, Ontario Canada, P7B SE1 thomas. dunkilakeheadu. ca

Dunk

Documents

monthly review

american anthropological

sa job foryou

cambridge

mainstream

economic cooperation

university

economic change