Empty spaces: Divergent responses to industrial transformation in North America, 1969-1984.

This thesis explores the meanings that North Americans derived from mill and factory closings between 1969 and 1984. In doing so, it finds that the significance drawn from industrial transformation was filtered through one's nationality. In the United States, plant closings generally signalled the end of the industrial era. As the physical stature of blast furnaces and smokestacks made them stand tall in people's minds, the fall of industry from its privileged position in the American economy played itself out in their ritualistic demolition. Dramatic images of failing blast furnaces, in turn, lent authority to those who claimed that the industrial era had ended. Canadians, by contrast, interpreted plant shutdowns in nationalist terms. Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, shutdowns were blamed on American economic domination. In the face of economic dislocation, workers on either side of the Canada-United States border struggled to retain their dignity and identity. Yet strategies of collective resistance differed dramatically as the narratives of displaced workers revealed. In the United States, the anti-shutdown movement was confined to the local by invoking a notion of "community" tied to place. This "miniaturization" of community proved to be a feeble weapon for workers facing job loss. Indeed, the nation's political, business and union leadership felt little attachment to communities based in towns or cities other than their own. Hence, the "community" strategy, predicating on emotional appeals to people and place, failed to politicize a contractual---and therefore private---matter between an employer and his or her employees. To constrain the destructive tendencies of capitalism between 1969 and 1984, another weapon was needed, namely the ideal of a "national community." The motive power of community to validate and legitimate resistance to plant shutdowns by enlargening the radius of trust was greatest in Canada. By literally wrapping themselves in the Maple Leaf flag, Canadian workers won important legislative victories that forced companies to soften the blow of displacement. In the final analysis, then, an emerging economic nationalist discourse incorporated plant shutdowns into the very centre of its anti-imperial critique of foreign---usually American---multinational corporations. For a time, the nationalist resistance to plant shutdowns enforced what could be called a "moral economy" on companies operating in Canada. Economic nationalism thus acted as a kind of ideological rust-proofing that denied the "Rust Belt"---the image and the reality---entry into Canada and slowed the pace of industrial change and the accompanying social disruption between 1969--1984