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Labour landmarks are memorial sites, commemorations, plaques, and burial sites that provide access to the themes and meanings of workers' past experiences. They are instrumental in enshrining workers' "public memories," which are the separate experiences of groups within society, within the larger "collective memory" of the community. A general exploration of the commemorative landscape reveals a number of themes and allows a detailed discussion of several labour landmarks. In the course of this research, 21 separate labour landmarks were identified in the communities of industrial Cape Breton. The majority of these monuments are dedicated to workers in the coal and steel industries. The 1980s saw an expansion in the frequency of labour commemorations, which indicates increased attention to the experiences of workers in Cape Breton. Two monuments in the community of New Waterford reveal the many layers of historical memory in the town. The first is dedicated to victims of the 1917 mine explosion, while the second commemorates the man killed during the 1925 strike. The explosion monument, unveiled in 1922, inserts the public memory of coal miners into the collective memory of New Waterford. The William Davis monument, dedicated in 1985, reveals an existing working-class consciousness in the town and merges individual and public memories of Davis while reflecting on a major event in the town's history. Another monument, dedicated to Sydney's steelworkers, now rests on the site of the former steel plant, and commemorates a century of experience. This memorial is used as an example of how one might "read" a labour landmark to access its themes and meanings, as well as to reach an understanding of the past experiences of workers.
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This thesis is an historical examination of the multi-layered processes of deindustrialization in Sydney, Nova Scotia. The history of a steel plant formerly located in the centre of the city is used as a case study through which the mechanisms of deindustrialization are fully explored. In 1967, the provincial government of Nova Scotia nationalized the Sydney Works. This marks a significant divergence from previous studies of deindustrialization, which have traditionally focused on the wave of industrial closures in the North American heartland during the 1970s and 1980s. Framed by oral history accounts of former steelworkers, this dissertation reveals the combined impact of Canadian regionalism, political economy, and working-class cultures of resistance on local experiences of industrial decline. This represents a synthesis between the econo-political historiography of deindustrialization favoured in the 1980s and the cultural/representational approaches of the 1990s and 2000s. The title, “Deindustrialization on the Periphery,” speaks to the specific national and regional contexts that frame the decline of Sydney Steel. The longue durée of economic change on the rural resource frontier has been understudied. In Cape Breton, the devastation wrought by the end of industry has roots that stretch back to the early 20th century. Tracing these through the use of Harold Innis’ “staples trap,” my thesis reveals how deindustrialization stretches from decades before closure to the years after a mine, mill, or factory are shuttered for the last time. Workers and other residents in Sydney continue to face the bodily aftermath of workplace injury, occupational, and environmental illness long after the structures of the plant have been demolished. But so, too, have experiences of working at the mill and living in the neighbourhoods that surrounded its gates created particular forms of culture, solidarity, and identity. My research is more than a eulogy for a defunct steel town. It seeks to expose the tensions between different forms of memory and experience, and to examine how the industrial past remains inextricably connected to the “post-industrial” present.