Right-wing populism, organized labor, and white workers in Sudbury, Ontario: A cautionary tale from the 2018 Ontario election
Abstract
This article uses the context of the 2018 provincial election victory of Doug Ford's Progressive Conservative government in Ontario, Canada, to understand the potential appeal of right populist ideas among some workers in Northern Ontario. The article is based on analyses of in-depth interviews with nickel miners at Vale Ltd, members of the United Steelworkers (USW) Local 6500, in Sudbury. The political context of these interviews is particularly relevant because of the USW's historical political alliance with the New Democratic Party (NDP), Canada's labor-based party. Some workers utilize the populist, and at times nativist, political messaging of Ford and his government to critique their Brazilian-based employer's attacks on the union. Additionally, Ford's anti-union rhetoric resonates with workers' frustration over uneven recent collective agreement concessions. Although the link between the union and Party helped secure the NDP legislative seats in Northern Ontario, the inability of the union to arrest Vale's attacks leaves workers open to the appeal of right-wing populist ideas.
1 INTRODUCTION
Doug Ford's June 2018 electoral victory in Ontario had many mainstream media commentators wondering if right-wing populism had spread to Canada (Kassam, 2018). Winning 40.6% of the popular vote and 76 of Ontario's 124 electoral seats, Ford's Progressive Conservative (PC) Party achieved an electoral majority and reduced the outgoing Liberal Party to seven seats, ending 15 years of neoliberal centrist rule in Canada's most populous province (CBC, 2018).1 Conforming to many of what Thomas and Tufts (2016a) characterize as right-wing populism's key “elements,” Ford's campaign utilized vague rhetoric centered on “the people” confronting urban and bureaucratic elites. The Conservative leader discursively positioned public sector unions in particular as representative of an out-of-touch elite, supposedly ensconced in undeserved material security and divorced from the struggles of ordinary “taxpayers” (Breen, 2019).2
Ford's rise to leader of the Progressive Conservatives, however, did not represent a full populist makeover of that Party. The PCs' electoral campaign blended familiar Conservative policy priorities, such as cutting taxes and social spending, with right populist-inflected demands, most notably canceling a gas tax partially used to fund public transit infrastructure and rolling back recent reforms to public school sexual education curricula and labor standards. Importantly, Ford's campaign was vague about its intentions to impose public spending cuts. While on the one hand Ford's PCs promised to find “efficiencies” to reduce government spending; on the other hand, the new PC leadership had seemingly learned lessons from former PC leader Tim Hudak's failed 2014 campaign. During the latter provincial campaign, Hudak had proudly committed to cutting 100,000 public sector jobs in order to finance a large tax cut, which he predicted would generate one million new private sector jobs—a proposal the electorate ostensibly found objectionable (Brennan, 2014). The Ford PC campaign was thus an example of the uneven and particular nature of right populism's growth and appeal in Canada. Although Ford remained ambiguous concerning potential public job losses, his campaign rhetoric nevertheless frequently attacked the provincial labor movement, especially public sector unions.
In many respects, Doug Ford consolidated at the provincial level what his late brother Rob managed at the municipal level in the city of Toronto. Though infamous for a video of him smoking crack and his U.S. late night television appearances, Rob Ford also honed his own brand of big city right-wing populism. “Ford Nation,” both municipally and provincially, has played heavily on the urban/suburban-rural divide, discursively pitting downtown urbanites against rural Ontarians and suburbanites (Kipner & Saberi, 2014). The Fords' innovative flourish on this trite narrative has been to appeal to voters in the heavily racialized and recent immigrant enclaves of Toronto's suburbs. In doing so, they have spoken to the material insecurities of many working-class people (particularly people of color) who have been driven out of the city's downtown core by gentrification and exclusionary re-development and into the downwardly mobile inner suburbs of Toronto (see Kipner & Saberi, 2014). By attacking union leaders and the better compensation and greater job security of public sector unions, Ford has attempted to appeal to these mostly non-union, and often precariously employed racialized working-class voters (Saberi, 2017; Thomas & Tufts, 2016b). This strategy in many respects extends a familiar populist trope of positioning unions as part of a “bureaucratic elite” swindling “the people,” which also has appeal among many in white, rural Ontario (Thomas & Tufts, 2016a; Tufts & Thomas, 2014).
Once elected, the Ford Government's attacks on workers were, however, not confined to the level of rhetoric, or to public sector union members. Upon assuming office, Ford swiftly reversed a relatively modest package of minimum employment standards reforms introduced by the previous Liberal Government through Bill 148 (The Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act). These cuts included canceling a scheduled minimum wage increase to $15 per hour, withdrawing the right to a minimum of two paid sick days for all employees, rolling back protections for temporary help agency workers, and reversing several other limited measures aimed at cushioning the impacts of precarious employment. Ford also directed his Ministry of Labour to seize its blitz of proactive workplace inspections, which had been increased under the Liberals as a measure to better deter what studies had uncovered as widespread employment standards violations (Vosko et al., 2020; see also Mirchandandi & Bromfield, 2019). Along with this, the PCs canceled a scheduled hiring of 100 new Employment Standards Officers, whose task it is to enforce the Employment Standards Act through workplace inspections and investigations of employment standards violation complaints filed by non-unionized workers with the Ministry of Labour (Mojtehedzadeh, 2018).
The above attacks on workers made clear the new government's economic policy objectives, aptly if boorishly encapsulated in its rebranding of Ontario as “open for business.” However, as Thomas and Tufts (2016a) point out, right populist political consolidation is often an uneven process. Indicative of the unevenness of right-wing populism's electoral success in Ontario was the New Democratic Party's (NDP) vote gains and new Official Opposition status in the legislature after the 2018 election. Polling had indicated that the labor-affiliated, left of center party was leading in the weeks leading up to the election. The NDP ultimately finished with just under 34% of the vote and 40 electoral seats. While Conservatives made major gains among their traditional suburban and rural voter base (and continued their consolidation in some of the racialized outer suburbs of Toronto), the NDP was successful in the industrial and deindustrializing regions of the province, which have traditions of class-based voting and relatively strong unions. In particular, the NDP won seven of nine electoral seats in Northern Ontario where various resource extraction industries dominate and industrial unions affiliated with the Party have historically had a formidable presence. In addition, the New Democrats made headway in urban centers, sweeping the seat-rich downtown core of Toronto and picking up seats in Kingston, London, and Ottawa (Fodor, 2018).
In Ontario's June 2018 election, right-wing populism and a relatively tepid social democracy both made gains, while the centrist neoliberal Liberal Party of Ontario suffered an embarrassing loss. How do we understand this outcome? In certain respects, this seems to conform to the predictions of some that an “extreme centre” might be giving way to political forces to its right and left (Ali, 2018). Liberal Party atrophy after 15 years of rule, and a relatively common governing trade-off between the latter and the Conservatives, is also certainly part of the explanation. Yet, a more nuanced analysis suggests that various realignments could be at work, exacerbating contradictions within as well as between classes.
This article aims to address in particular right-wing populism's appeal among certain sections of the working class in Ontario through fieldwork with white rank-and-file workers and union members in Sudbury, Ontario. The Greater Sudbury Area and “Nickel Belt” in Northern Ontario are home to the richest deposit of nickel on the planet. At its peak, Inco, the largest nickel mining company in the region, directly employed nearly 20,000 United Steelworkers (USW) union members. After decades of deindustrialization, outsourcing and mining mechanization, just over 3,000 unionized workers remain at what is now Vale Ltd., the Brazilian multinational corporation that purchased Inco in 2006 (see Leadbeater, 2008; Saarinen, 2013). Analyses of in-depth interview data with 26 workers at Vale reveal an interesting dynamic: right-wing populist ideas have a noticeable purchase among those rank-and-file workers interviewed for this study, yet, the longstanding relationship between the USW and the NDP continues to assist in delivering electoral victories to the latter in the region. The dynamics at play in Sudbury show the role that working-class organizations can still play in stymieing the political consolidation of right populism, while also exposing the ways that right populist ideas can spread when workers face growing economic insecurity, a more globally-integrated capitalist class, and a labor movement and allied political party perpetually playing defense.
2 RIGHT POPULISM AND WHITE WORKERS IN THE ERA OF TRUMP AND FORD
Right-wing populism's spread across North America and Europe has encouraged a public—though often highly impoverished—discussion about white workers' role in rightward political shifts (Vance, 2016; Williams, 2017). Popular and media commentaries frequently position the working class as homogeneously “white,” obscuring the multiracial character of the actual working class (Roediger, 2017). The “discovery” of the white working class among mainstream commentators in the wake of U.S. President Donald Trump's election, in particular, has produced more confusion than clarity. The narrative that white workers turned out for Trump in large numbers is belied by the evidence. As Davis (2017) commented, “The phenomenon is real but largely limited to a score or so of troubled Rust Belt counties from Iowa to New York where a new wave of plant closure or relocation has coincided with growing immigrant and refugee populations” (p. 153). Furthermore, Post (2017) has pointed out that Trump's election was characterized by an electorate, which was economically better-off overall than those which produced Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012, as lower income voters disproportionately did not cast ballots in 2016. Although a white backlash partially coterminous with growing right populism helps explain Trump's victory, this is attributable to the potency of white racial identity more so than class, as majorities of whites across income groups voted for Trump (Davis, 2017). Indeed, some scholars have characterized the right populist insurgencies from the Tea Party onward as an older, middle-class phenomenon rather than a working-class one (see Skocpol & Williamson, 2011). As Post and Davis both argue, the few thousand or so workers in Rust Belt states who helped secure Trump's electoral college victory have become popular representations of what the whole “working class” (read white working class) supposedly did or thinks.
The concept of a 'white working class' has thus been justifiably subjected to considerable criticism (Roediger, 2017; Winant, 2017). The working class has historically been and remains multiracial and heterogeneous. Yet, critical interventions from historians, political scientists and sociologists have also traced the material foundations of labour segmentation and inequality within the working class, noting in particular how whiteness and maleness have afforded certain workers labor market advantages and economic and social privileges (Vosko, 2000). A key set of texts, loosely centered on the concept of “whiteness” has been especially influential in this regard (Allen, 2012; Roediger, 2007). David Roediger's work, in particular, has pushed working-class studies scholars to think critically about white racial identification and its place in labor history. According to whiteness scholars, whiteness has functioned both as a ruling-class strategy to divide workers, and as an interest around which white workers mobilized in place of broader class interests. Sections of workers have thus engaged in what Silver (2003) refers to as “boundary drawing strategies” (p. 24) to protect their narrow, sectionalist interests, even though doing so weakens the power of the broader working class.
As many scholars have pointed out, both whiteness and maleness have served as bases upon which workers made claims for fair treatment and better wages. Forrest (1995), for example, argues that workers' masculine demands for “breadwinner” status were central to the establishment of the postwar system of union security in Canada. Similarly, Meyer's Manhood on the Line (Meyer, 2016) shows how reactionary ideas about masculinity and race shaped white industrial workers' responses to assembly line work and their forging of a militant shop floor culture. Such research demonstrates that there is both a material foundation to racial and gender inequalities within the working class and subjective biases among sections of white, male workers which perpetuate racial and gender divisions (see also Camfield, 2016a, 2016b). In other words, the “white working class” might be an unhelpful theoretical and political concept, but whiteness (and masculinity) has frequently functioned historically as a basis of identification and has often impeded the articulation of working-class interests and the political formation of broad working-class alliances.
Thus, insofar as some—often electorally important—sections of white workers are open to right-wing populist appeals, it is worth probing the cause. Again, popular commentaries often fail to unravel the material context within which some workers might be moving toward the populist right as a response to neoliberal economic policies (Maisano, 2017). In response to deindustrialization, center-left parties—such as the U.S. Democratic Party—have abandoned white working-class voters in search of professional middle-class voters through which to assemble electoral majorities (Cooke & Pilon, 2012). In Canada, the NDP's trajectory has been mixed and varies regionally. Yet, following its brief term in government in the early 1990s, the Ontario NDP has largely tacked toward the center as well (Savage, 2010). In response to a lack of policies which could address working-class concerns, a segment of white workers have fled center-left parties and now vote based on social and cultural preferences, rather than material interests (Kentworthy, Sondra Barringer, Duerr, & Schneider, 2014). To varying degrees, right populist discourse targeting elites and other vaguely defined “others” may be appealing to these workers. Some white industrial workers experiencing downward mobility or economic hardship could be clinging to some of the very attributes upon which their former relative privilege rested. As we will see below, right-wing populism has mixed appeal in Sudbury precisely because of the way that white unionized workers were integrated into the postwar system of “industrial pluralism” in Ontario (Fudge, 2005). The working-class institutions that were part of this class compromise, that is, the United Steelworkers union and New Democratic Party, remain to some extent bulwarks against Conservative electoral consolidation and right-wing populism. However, because of the historical segmentation of the Canadian labor market, the formerly privileged position of white male workers, and the growing weakness of organized labor in the face of deindustrialization and global capitalist integration, right populist ideas find favor with some unionized miners in Sudbury interviewed during this research.
3 UNION-PARTY RELATIONS AND THE GROWING SPACE FOR RIGHT-WING POPULISM
Before moving to an analysis of the data from interviews with rank-and-file nickel miners in Sudbury, it is helpful to briefly contextualize the institutional relationship between the New Democratic Party and the United Steelworkers union in Canada, and in Ontario more specifically.
The NDP is the successor to the Canadian Commonwealth Federation (CCF), a democratic socialist, farmer-labor party originating in the province of Saskatchewan in the 1930s. As Eidlin (2018) argues, the CCF-NDP emerged in part due to the Liberal and Conservative parties' repressive response to Depression-era labor militancy. In contrast to the United States where labor was integrated into the New Deal Democratic coalition, Canadian labor was compelled to form its own class-based political party. After national support fell throughout the 1950s, the CCF moved toward the center and negotiated a deal with organized labor out of which was formed the New Democratic Party in 1961 (Naylor, 2018). According to Cooke and Pilon (2012), the founding of the NDP should be viewed as an attempt to create a left of center party, which could displace the Liberals and approximate the political landscape in the United Kingdom, though this has never materialized nationally.
It is difficult to speak of the NDP's strength or its relations with unions in English Canada as a whole because of significant provincial and regional differences (Evans, 2012). The NDP has regularly formed governments in the provinces of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia, yet has only been elected once each in Ontario, Nova Scotia and Alberta (Savage, 2010). With the exception of Nova Scotia, the NDP is largely shut out of the Atlantic provinces. Among the various provincial and federal sections of the NDP, relations with organized labor vary quite widely. The discussion here is thus limited to the New Democrats in Ontario.
The labor movement's connections to the Ontario NDP are complex. While some unions have formal or close ties with the NDP, others have no relationship at all. Unions can officially affiliate with the Party and, theoretically, influence the shape of its program. However, as the Ontario NDP has moved toward the center (particularly since 1990), and as campaign finance laws have restricted or banned union contributions, the role of unions in the Party has undergone changes (Pilon, Ross, & Savage, 2011).3 The result of these political shifts has been the growth of various union-led “strategic voting” initiatives, which, in effect, have largely functioned to move votes from the NDP to the Liberals—or to further weaken class-based voting (Savage & Ruhloff-Queiruga, 2017).
The NDP was elected to a majority government in Ontario in 1990, but faced with a severe recession and a backlash from business and finance, instituted its Social Contract Act, 1993, which imposed wage restraint on public sector workers and curtailed their unions' rights to strike (Evans, 2012; Panitch & Swartz, 2003). This expectedly caused divisions between the Party and the labor movement, but also between different unions. The Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) passed a resolution calling on its union affiliates to break ties with the NDP, which a bloc of private sector unions led by the United Steelworkers ignored (see McBride, 1996). In the process, the longtime strategy of the majority of the Ontario labor movement of electing the NDP was shattered as the Party imposed austerity and attempted to balance the provincial budget on the backs of public sector workers (Watkins, 1994; see also Savage, 2010). As a result, in subsequent election cycles portions of the labor movement—particularly the building trades' unions, teachers' unions and the Ontario Public Service Employees Union (OPSEU)—have pursued various strategic voting initiatives, directed greater sums of money at Liberal Party candidates, and have generally focused on keeping Conservatives out of office instead of electing members of any particular party.
When the hard right government of Conservative Mike Harris took power in 1995, the OFL and others in and outside the labor movement organized “Days of Action” involving strikes throughout the province to protest the government's imposition of an intensified program of neoliberal austerity. The NDP, partly as a result of the OFL's earlier stance when the New Democrats were in government, did not support the Days of Action, and through key allied unions, sought to contain the protests. The Steelworkers were among these loyal labor allies. In Sudbury, USW Local 6500 at Inco used its power on the Sudbury and District Labour Council to withdraw support for the Days of Action march that took place in Sudbury in March 1997 (Nesbitt, 2018).
The fallout from the Ontario NDP's time in government fractured union-party relations. However, the United Steelworkers have remained the NDP's most steadfastly loyal union partner, and continue to reject other unions' strategic voting initiatives and support for Liberal Party candidates (Savage & Ruhloff-Queiruga, 2017). In the most recent provincial election, the NDP counted on USW support in Northern Ontario, as well as Hamilton and other industrial and deindustrialized regions. This combined with popular disaffection with the outgoing Ontario Liberal Party of former Premier Kathleen Wynne, helped produce the NDP's second best electoral outcome in the history of the province. However, as we will see below, the growth of right populist ideas is noticeable among white workers in Sudbury interviewed during this study, despite the continued influence and electoral success of the NDP in the region.
4 SUDBURY: A CASE STUDY IN RIGHT POPULISM'S APPEAL AND LIMITATIONS
Nickel mining has been a staple industry of Sudbury since the town's founding (Clement, 1981; Swift, 1977). However, after decades of deindustrialization, the nickel and copper mining industries—once primary employers in Sudbury—now engage far fewer direct employees (Leadbeater, 2008). The Brazilian multinational conglomerate Vale Ltd. currently employs approximately 3,000 unionized miners and other workers (members of United Steelworkers Local 6500) at its highly mechanized Sudbury operations, down from a peak of nearly 20,000 in the late 1970s when former Canadian-U.S. mining firm Inco owned the mines (Saarinen, 2013; United Steelworkers of America, 1987).
Vale acquired Inco in 2006 amid a rush of foreign direct investment into Canada, targeted primarily at resource extraction industries (Stanford, 2008). As well, the current owners have accelerated a process begun under Inco of employing growing numbers of temporary contract workers hired from third party mining supply and service firms (Robinson, 2005). These contract workers perform a variety of jobs and tasks formally done by unionized employees (Condratto & Gibbs, 2018). “Contracting out” has thus been a consistent point of contention between USW 6500 and Vale/Inco, and, combined with attacks on the pension and bonus systems, precipitated a year-long strike in 2009–10 (King, 2017; Peters, 2010). In short, over the past twenty years workers have faced significant workforce reductions and employer attacks on their bargaining unit, as well as the arrival of a new foreign owner with a much more aggressive approach to labor relations (Aguzzoli & Geary, 2014).
In total, 26 workers were interviewed during this research between January 2015 and July 2018. Participants ranged in age from 26 to 74 years, with an average age of 48.2, and only one worker (age 45) between 38 and 49 years of age. All interviewees were male, reflective of an industry that only began hiring women in underground jobs in any sizable number over the past couple of decades (Keck & Powell, 2000).4 Interviewees were all “white,” somewhat typical of a town where visible minorities make up only 6 % of the population, in contrast to Ontario as a whole where 29.3% of people are visible minorities (Statistics Canada, 2016). Of the 26 interviewees, only five had held an elected or volunteer position in their union local. Qualitative in-depth interviews, lasting between 45 and 90 minutes, were used to collect workers' career histories, family backgrounds, perceptions of work and changes in the nickel mining industry, as well as their thoughts and concerns about their union, the globalization of ownership at Vale, and other challenges facing workers at the mines. Further, in the course of discussing the history of nickel mining and unionization in Sudbury, some workers also reflected on the politics of their union, recent political developments in Ontario, as well as union leadership and its relationship with the NDP locally.
In the analyses that follow, I identify thematic areas around which key right populist “elements” (Thomas & Tufts, 2016a) group in workers' interviews. First, during the interviews workers articulated class conflict—particularly in light of the most recent strike in 2009–10—through the prisms of nationalism and national difference. Workers commonly pointed to Vale's Brazilian ownership as part of their explanations for recent workplace conflicts over pay, benefits and pensions, collective agreement language, union coverage, and the labor process. Relatedly, workers narratively used the foreignness of their new employer to explain the lower pay and labor standards of workers in the Global South. In this way, the interviewees discursively positioned laborers in the Global South as part of the threat to the living and working standards of nickel miners in Sudbury. The workers interviewed in this study seemed to find in the vagueness of right populist rhetoric a language through which to articulate new class conflicts. However, this was frequently a nativist discourse centered on nationalism and regional differences, at times containing racialized connotations wherein the “others” are united by their foreignness not by class positions (e.g., the conflict can simultaneously be with Vale's owners and its workers in the Global South). That the interviewees described economic and workplace conflict in this way is in part the result of the uneven development of global capitalism and their formerly relatively privileged position within it. Yet uneven capitalist development's manifestation in the form of cross border labor and wage competition renders practical solidarity difficult for workers in Sudbury to imagine. Additionally, the portions of workers' narratives that deploy nativist and economic nationalist rhetoric to explain their current plight are related (yet distinct) from the variant of progressive left nationalism once prominent in certain sections of the Canadian left and labor movement (Kellogg, 2015). In Sudbury, where a multinational mining corporation based in the Global South has imposed deep contract concessions on workers, the latter's popular understanding of economic nationalism seems emptied of whatever ostensibly progressive content it might have previously possessed and has become interwoven with racialized mappings of the dynamics of contemporary capitalism (see Frank, 2000; Kellogg, 2019).
Last, workers interviewed during this study sometimes used the anti-bureaucratic language frequently deployed by Doug Ford and the Conservatives when discussing their own union and its leaders. For those with conservative political tendencies, anti-bureaucracy can often be a veil for anti-union politics. As I argue below, this anti-bureaucratic discourse finds favor with miners to an extent because of the significant losses experienced by the union since 2010 (and even before). Particularly in a context where benefit and pension “tiers” have been introduced into collective agreements and a growing number of workers are employed by non-union, contract mining supply and service firms, structural impediments to solidarity can slip into outright hostility toward the union (King, 2017; see Gindin, 2008). The inability of the United Steelworkers Local 6500 to defend workers from multinational corporations' attacks leaves some workers open to the right-populist, anti-union messaging of politicians such as Ford and others in the PC Party.
4.1 National “others” and “third World standards”
They [Vale] basically thought that coming in here, they could just do as they like, basically treat us like they treat their own workers in Brazil, and that we would have to accept that. But this is Canada, that's not how things work here […] These guys have different ideas, lower standards, you know?5
In this example and many others, workers interpreted class conflict with their new employer through the lens of nationality. For some workers, the vague language used by right populist politicians seemed to provide a ready-made discourse for expressing dissatisfaction with Vale. Whereas older interviewees with work experience at the previous Canadian-based Inco mining company spoke of previous strikes with more emphasis on the regional differences between owners based in Toronto and union members employed in Northern Ontario, many other interviewees described conflict with Vale as a matter of national differences. “This is Canada” and “they [Vale] don't get how things work up here” were common variations on a general theme of which tended to conflate class and nation.
One worker, worried about the long-term deleterious effect of allowing foreign corporations such as Vale to buy resource extraction operations in Canada, asked, “What's this place gonna look like if we let all these foreigners in here and basically just mine all the ore and make off with the profits? Who reinvests for Canadian workers, you know?”6 There is a certain resemblance in this excerpt to older left nationalist rhetoric once prominent on the Canadian socialist left (see Bullen, 1983). This version of ostensibly progressive left nationalism largely based its critique and political program on opposition to American capital's dominance in Canada's “branch plant” and resource economies. Yet, as Kellogg (2015) points out, the material basis for a critique which views Canada as the victim of foreign capital has long since eroded. The increasing globalization of capital flows and production supply chains represent a transformed political-economic context in which nationalistic economic critique can become knitted to forms of right populist nativism and racism. For example, during the interviews for this study, workers deployed a variation of a “Canada first” rhetoric popular in some online spaces and on sections of the populist right (Kellogg, 2019) to understand the class antagonism between themselves and Vale — a discursive framing not especially conducive to a class politics equipped to addressing the pressing issues that workers face at the mines in Sudbury.
Additionally, many workers expressed nostalgia for former owner Inco when presenting their criticisms of Vale's business practices in Sudbury. As Portelli (1991) contends, narratives about the past and present are often interwoven in ways whereby comments about one commonly contain clues about the meaning of both. For instance, another worker remembered what he described as the “good work that Inco did for the communities around Sudbury”—meaning, as he went on to elaborate, the former Canadian owner's various charitable donations to community centers and other public facilities. Despite also describing in detail Inco's ruthless efforts to crush a strike in 1978, when this worker discussed Vale and the perils of new foreign ownership at the mines he nostalgically positioned Inco as a comparatively benevolent employer concerned about the wellbeing of the community.
Workers also frequently included Vale's workforce in the Global South as among the problems entailed by working for a foreign multinational. In this way, Global South workers were at times narratively positioned as a threat to the pay, standards and conditions of “good, Canadian jobs” in Sudbury. In some instances, workers' narrative reliance on “Canadianness” carried implicitly racialized tones. For example, one interviewee speculated, “I guess in Brazil you can pay people two dollars a day and people accept that. This is Canada though! But they don't get that, I guess,”7 while another predicted, “It's gonna be like over in China when a mine collapses and hundreds of people die. That's the mentality of Vale, it seems. 'Just bring in new guys, who cares?'”8 Interviewees deployed such narratives about nationality and citizenship as a means of both explaining and criticizing Vale. These workers discursively used their 'Canadian-ness' to mark their deservedness of respect, while simultaneously characterizing Vale as lacking care for the standards of labour in Canada. Such rhetoric echoes some right populist discourse directed at racialized immigrants and migrants (Denvir, 2020). Vale's workers in Brazil and other countries of the Global South were often simultaneously presented in interviewees' narratives as both passive victims of their employer's substandard wages and working conditions and as potential threats to the standards achieved by Canadian workers in Sudbury who were formerly employed by Inco.
The growth and normalization of nativist rhetoric as right populist politicians have moved into mainstream politics seems to have influenced the ways that workers understand and describe their challenges at work and beyond. However, the overlapping of right populist anti-immigrant sentiment and workers' nationalist-tinged critiques of foreign ownership needs also to be understood within the context of the legacy of postwar industrial relations and political institutions in Canada. In part, nationality is available to workers as a meaningful identity because of the ways that industrial unions integrated workers into the postwar system of regulated capitalism and institutionalized collective bargaining (McInnis, 2002). Insofar as the Canadian working class won reforms and made material gains under this system of “industrial citizenship” (Fudge, 2005), they did so largely through the nation-state (or sub-regional states) and industrial relations legal machinery.9 For some workers, right populist nativism provides a compelling explanation for the political and economic changes wrought by decades of neoliberalism and free trade, as well as what they expressed as national betrayal by governments “selling out” to foreign multinationals. Moreover, unions have hardly been immune to nationalist framings of recent class struggles. For examples, Unifor's (formerly the Canadian Auto Workers) campaign against the General Motors plant closure in Oshawa, Ontario relied on similar political messaging around opposition to “Mexican” produced automobiles—even going so far as buying television advertisements during the NFL Super Bowl calling for a boycott of GM cars built in Mexico (Di Trolio & Nesbitt, 2019).
Although the United Steelworkers international union has done much to promote international solidarity through labor exchanges and global union alliances (particularly through the Steelworkers' Humanity Fund and as part of the Gerdau Unity Council), there often remains a disconnect between these higher level linkages and campaigns and the material conditions of rank-and-file union members (Marshall & Garcia-Orgales, 2009; Needleman, 2008). The challenges of bridging this gap between institutional policy and local organizing is evidenced by the difficulties workers had contextualizing how international solidarity work could impact the local conditions at the Vale mines in Sudbury.
Rather than understanding Vale's attacks as motivated by profit maximization in the context of the internationalization of capital, many workers instead described a foreign outsider with backward labor practices undermining “Canadian workers'” union gains. Instead of building solidarity across the borders of an unevenly developed capitalist economy—which USW 6500 has to some degree attempted to do (and the USW international office certainly does)—some workers seemed convinced that isolation from foreign owners and workers is the more realistic or desirable strategy (see Frank, 2000).
4.2 Anti-bureaucracy and business unionism
Honestly, I don't see the point. The union pumped all these guys up […] and then the strike…and they lose all this stuff. Like, they got stuff taken away last strike, stuff that my dad fought for, that these old-timers fought for […] New guys like me, no defined benefit [pension], lower wage, capped bonus… Maybe they got their pensions secured and that's all they cared about. I don't know.10
Many of the younger miners interviewed expressed how global competitiveness, downsizing, mechanization, and growing precariousness have left them feeling economically vulnerable and uncertain. Uneven contract concessions additionally seem, in the words of some younger workers, to lend credibility to the right-wing populist argument that unions protect those at the top with the most seniority and security. Premier Ford, before and after the election, has consistently disparaged union leaders while appealing directly to workers (unionized or not) in what appears as an attempt to divide union members and strategically direct his anti-establishment message at leaders in the labor movement. As one worker remarked: “I get what he [Ford] is saying, like, sometimes it seems like these guys [union leaders] are 'do-nothing,' you know?”11 In this way, the inability of unions to defend workers from employer offensives leaves space for vague right populist appeals to workers and attacks on the labor movement.
This type of anti-bureaucratic messaging from right populist politicians—cynical as it may be—might resonate with the material conditions faced by workers, particularly in the nickel industry where there has been ongoing job loss amid deindustrialization, mechanization, and subcontracting. Among the Vale miners interviewed during this research, populist anti-union themes took on an additional generational character. Workers below the age of 45 frequently described economic uncertainty, declining employment opportunities in the mining industry in Northern Ontario, and a new employer determined to bend the union to its will. For these interviewees, the most recent strike was particularly representative of these economic trends. The outcome of the strike has left young workers in some cases angry at, and in other instances, indifferent toward their union. One worker, for instance, concluded, “The union doesn't feel like it's for me. I wasn't on strike [he was hired after 2010], but I hear from guys, it was a loss. I stay away from all that” [union meetings and activity].12 This worker and several other younger interviewees expressed how they felt disconnected from the union and were thus dismissive of its organizing and other practical activities leading up to the next round of collective bargaining. Although some of these workers still nonetheless acknowledged that the union plays a role in representing them and protecting their workplace rights, many interviewees described the union as inadequate and uninterested in them as members. Such beliefs about the union contribute to de-mobilizing workers and limiting their participation in union activity. Additionally, anti-union sentiment feeds into a generational discourse wherein older workers lament young workers' lack of commitment, while the younger members describe the union as largely serving the interests of older members with more seniority. This generational dynamic is of course rooted in the material conditions of several decades of periodic employer attacks and the uneven demographic distribution of the economic harms that have been the result. However, the generational explanation discourse through which workers expressed these issues often narratively coincided with the anti-bureaucratic and anti-union political rhetoric of right populist politicians, such as those currently in government in Toronto.
On the other hand, there were workers interviewed for this study (largely those over 45 years of age) who remain supportive of their union and the New Democratic Party, locally, provincially and nationally. Their commitments are sustained in part by what they expressed during their interviews as a belief that the Party advocates for the Steelworkers, and miners more broadly, in the Sudbury region. Several workers claimed to have voted for the NDP in the last provincial election, even while they simultaneously found fault with their union local. Beyond the mines, the USW continues to provide critical electoral support to the NDP in the region, as described above. Indeed, the Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) for Sudbury is a former Vale worker, USW Local 6,500 union activist, steward, and past President of the Sudbury and District Labour Council (Sudbury.com, 2017). The historical linkage between the union and the NDP thus continues to play a role in securing the Party electoral success in Northern Ontario. However, as the interview data analyzed in this article suggest, the defensive weakness of the union leaves some workers open to right populist rhetoric from the Ford Conservatives and other right-wing populist politicians like him.
5 A CAUTIONARY LESSON IN NORTHERN ONTARIO
For over two decades scholars have been debating the fate of social democratic parties as their blue-collar, working-class voting bases shrink amid deindustrialization (see Kentworthy et al., 2014; Przeworkski & Sprague, 1988). In what ways the class structure has fragmented as a result, how voter preferences might change, or what mechanisms or policies social democratic parties might pursue to stitch together electoral coalitions are issues still to be resolved. Yet, as the case of Sudbury and unionized nickel miners there demonstrates, the institutional linkages forged in the postwar period between sections of labor and social democratic parties still play a role in securing working-class votes and electoral seats in Ontario. This by no means remains a sure thing. The very processes that have fractured the working class, such as deindustrialization and the growth of precarious employment, have also opened political space for right-wing populist ideas as unions and labor-affiliated parties struggle to craft policies to address blue-collar workers' material concerns.
The interview data drawn upon in this article suggest that part of the rhetorical appeal of right populism—particularly its anti-immigrant nativism and racist aspects—stems in part from the gendered and racialized segmentation of the postwar class compromise in Canada, and is exacerbated by the uneven global integration of capitalism. Unionized, largely white, male workers secured relative material benefits from the consolidation of union security and the growth of the Canadian welfare state (Vosko, 2010). However, industrial citizenship tied many of these workers to a particularistic understanding of working-class interests, to the detriment of a broader project of class formation (Fudge & Vosko, 2001). Moreover, sections of the labor movement leadership and intellectual left in Canada previously embraced variations of left nationalism, which, under new political and economic circumstances, at times bleed into right-wing inflected calls for economic nationalism (Kellogg, 2019). In the narratives of workers in Sudbury, the vague political and economic polarities of right populist rhetoric mapped (somewhat uneasily) onto the new class relations of increasingly precarious employment at a now foreign-owned corporation. In interviewees' accounts, local and national identities often displaced class as a lens through which workers see not only the actions of their employer but also the reorganization of work and ownership on a global scale. Right-wing populist nativism, in particular, seemed to some to offer compelling explanations for the erosion of material security since the takeover by Brazilian-based multinational Vale (even though deindustrialization and growing worker insecurity had been issues in Sudbury long before Vale arrived). Frustrated with a union that many workers described as ineffectual after an historic defeat in 2010, these workers also agreed with some of Doug Ford's anti-bureaucratic, anti-union rhetoric.
The 2018 Ontario election thus provides a cautionary tale. The continued presence of working-class institutions—an industrial union linked to a left of center, labor-based political party helped secure the NDP seven of nine electoral ridings in Northern Ontario (as well as seats in other historically working-class or postindustrial regions of the province), producing the Party's second best electoral vote in Ontario history and Official Opposition status in the legislature. On the other hand, the nominally right-wing populist Doug Ford and his Progressive Conservative Party managed to secure an electoral majority and are busy attacking workers' rights and intensifying neoliberal austerity in the province (Albo, Evans, & Fanelli, 2019). That Ford's right populist political and economic messages appealed to some workers in Sudbury—and in less unionized regions of Ontario—should consequently raise serious concerns.
ENDNOTES
- 1 Due to Ontario's (and Canada's) first-past-the-post voting system, fairly close popular vote percentages can result in major legislative seat differences, depending on how votes are spread across electoral ridings. Parties with well under 50% of the popular vote can therefore form majority governments.
- 2 When Ford and his new government's spending cuts provoked public and union opposition (particularly the government's cuts to education), he attempted to disparage “union thugs” [union leaders] in the media without raising the ire of rank-and-file teachers. See Breen (2019).
- 3 Unions can officially affiliate to the NDP and, theoretically, influence the shape of its program. As the Party has moved toward the center (particularly since 1990), and as campaign finance laws have restricted or banned union contributions, the role of unions in the Party has undergone changes. See Pilon et al. (2011).
- 4 The study's snowball sampling methodology, though not intended to exclude female informants, nevertheless contributed to this result, as the social networks of male workers tended to be made up entirely of men. On female employment at Inco, see Keck and Powell (2000).
- 5 To protect anonymity and confidentiality, the names of all research participants are pseudonyms. Peter, 60 years old, interviewed by author, February 7, 2015.
- 6 Charles, 71 years old, interviewed by author August 15, 2015.
- 7 Matt, 31 years old, interviewed by author August 14, 2015.
- 8 Yves, 28 years old, interviewed by author June 20, 2017.
- 9 Nationalism and socialism have an intertwined and complicated history in English Canada, with many left movements inside and outside the NDP seeing nationalism (particularly in opposition to American domination) as an essential prerequisite to an independent socialist Canada. See Resnik (1977) as a classic example. On the socialism of the nationalist Waffle movement inside the NDP see Bullen (1983).
- 10 James, 34 years old, interviewed by author February 8, 2015.
- 11 Ben, 36 years old, interviewed by author July 8, 2018.
- 12 Dave, 26 years old, interviewed by author July 8, 2018.
Biography
Adam D. K. King is Post-Doctoral Visitor in the Department of Politics at York University in Toronto, Canada.
