International Journal of Environmental Studies

ISSN: 0020-7233 (Print) 1029-0400 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/genv20

The deindustrialised world: confronting ruination

in postindustrial places

Madras Sivaraman

To cite this article: Madras Sivaraman (2019): The deindustrialised world: confronting
ruination in postindustrial places, International Journal of Environmental Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00207233.2019.1594281

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2019.1594281

Published online: 12 Apr 2019.

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 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

The deindustrialised world: confronting ruination in postindustrial places, Edited

by Stephen High, Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Perchard, Vancouver, University of
British Columbia Press, 2017, ix+377 pp., £70 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-7748-3493-3

These collected essays were first presented at a conference organised in Montreal in

May 2014 by Concordia University. All the essays have an emotional tinge, and reflect
realities of de-industrialisation across continents. These are sad pictures of job losses
amongst workers who were all by and large less educated, the loss of connectivity between
families who worked hard in the same industry and who lived in the shadow of their places
of work—whether factory, shipyard or mine—and the transformation of the communities
and the towns themselves. The suppressed anger of some of the authors against the capitalist
mode of production is palpable.
The introduction starts with the observation ‘Deindustrialisation has marked the crucial
rupture in the lives of tens of millions of working -class families, including those of many of
the contributors to this volume.’ Cathy Stanton in her paper ‘Keeping “the industrial”: New
Solidarities in Post Industrial Places’ quotes Jefferson Cowie and Joseph Heathcott’s note in
their Introduction to Beyond Ruins: The Meaning of Deindustrialisation: ‘The point of
departure for any discussion of deindustrialisation must be respect for the despair and
betrayal felt by the workers as their mines, factories and mills were padlocked, abandoned,
turned into artsy shopping spaces, or even dynamited (p. 157).’ Other authors in the same
book describe how in Hamilton in Canada and in the steel town of Pittsburgh in the US, the
smoke stacks and factories which blighted the environment have been transformed into
glittering new townships with new service-oriented organisations taking the place of factories
and yet providing higher paid jobs. The role played by the local bodies and the political leaders
in harnessing the strength of the governmental organisations led to huge investments by
outsiders. Deindustrialisation became a curse to some and a blessing to others.
In the concluding chapter ‘Afterword’, the editors have referred to the ‘enormous
political upheaval across Europe and North America’ on growing income disparities, the
socio-economic consequences of trade liberalisation, tax havens and so on. They allude to
the questions being raised on the EU, Scottish independence etc. They have referred to the
requirements of a moral economy to be understood as a trade-off between manufacturing
industries with their pollution and the measures to prevent its long-term consequences for
humanity as a whole.
The three parts of the book into which the papers have been organised—Living in and
with Ruination, The Urban Politics and Deindustrialisation and the last The Political
Economy of Deindustrialisation—seem to overlap one another in terms of contents. If
anything, this reinforces their argument that deindustrialisation is dehumanising. Some of
these chapters have been written by persons with first-hand experience of the shutting down
of factories, and the consequent uprooting of families, and deal with questions of a lifetime,
affected by new types of jobs and the socio-economic conditions of the families that were
permanently affected. This is painful nostalgia.
The papers do not describe the overall welfare of the families who ceased to be blue collar
workers. What happened to these workers when the factories and the mines closed? Were
they paid adequate compensation and a lifetime pension by the owners? Was there any

Published online 12 Apr 2019

2 BOOK REVIEW

social security system guaranteed by the state for the economic security of those who could
not be reskilled for re-employment? Where did they go when their old townships became
glass towers? There are references to their sickness and sufferings as a consequence of
polluted working environments as in coal mines and in steel mills.
The countries that went through this phase of deindustrialisation were all developed
countries. They continued to grow even during this traumatic phase for the blue collar
workers, with their GDP and per capita incomes growing inexorably. Inevitably the question
could be whether as GDP rose as well as per-capita incomes the benefit also went to those
displaced workers who were re-skilled and re-employed in higher paying jobs. Or while the
displaced factory workers languished, were the new jobs with higher pay packets taken over
by the younger generation and also by migrants? Is this the reason for the growing
inequality in incomes across many countries?
Robert Storey’s essay ‘Beyond the Body Count? Injured Workers in the Aftermath of
Deindustrialisation’ is highly critical. During deindustrialisation injured workers have not
only lost their strength to bargain collectively but also have been ignored. For example, the
government in Ontario has paid scant attention to the desperate situation of the workers. Storey
laments ‘The point is that capitalist forms of production, capital labour processes, have injured,
maimed, sickened and killed workers since their inception – in economic times that were good
for workers and economic times that were bad for workers’ (p. 52). Storey is angry at those who
minimise this by saying that as many jobs have been created as have been lost.
In ‘Environmental Justice and Worker’s Health’, Lachlan MacKinnon has brought out the
dilemma facing workers in coke oven plants in Sydney, Australia, or in the US. The story is the
same whether the workers were seriously affected by the toxic fumes or found to be potential
cancer victims. They should cry for justice and compensation for illness. They should not be
silent out of fear. But if you or I were in their shoes, what would be our wish—to take further
risks or to hope for justice? The law courts are a slow and costly machine. This may be the
situation even today in the emerging market economies. Even trade unions have been
perplexed whether to fight for their rights to workplace health or be constrained by the fear
of job loss. MacKinnon describes the struggle of the Sydney Coke Oven workers for justice
along with the associated problem of environmental damage by the coke ovens. So there is
a conflict about the effects of deindustrialisation on the workers and the injuries caused by
environmental pollution. This conflict occurs even in developing countries in the case of
thermal power plants, cement plants and new steel mills. All of these employ large numbers of
workers with deleterious effect on their bodies and cause environmental pollution. One of the
political features of deindustrialisation everywhere is the loss of collective bargaining power.
Andrew Parnaby in ‘Growing Up Even More Uncertain: Children and Youth Confront
Industrial Ruin in Sydney Nova Scotia’ shows how the young children appealed to the
government to stop the closure of the Dominion Steel and Coal Corporation (DOSCO) in
Sydney, Nova Scotia, and interestingly succeeded in forcing the provincial government to
purchase DOSCO with Ottawa’s assistance. The children profoundly felt the potential
disruption to their families on the closure of the Plant which caused them anxiety.
Deindustrialisation not only affects the workers but disrupts family life and creates grave
uncertainty for children. (This probably is a factor in Britain’s Leave vote in the 2016
Referendum on the EU.)
In the ‘Afterlives of a factory: Memory, Place and Space in Alencon’ Jackie Clark has
dealt with the conversion of a coal mine and factories in France, particularly the movement
to convert at least some of the Molineux factories into museum and heritage sites. UNESCO
declared the Nord-Pas-de-Calais (now renamed Hauts-de-France) coalfields a World
Heritage Site in 2012.
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES 3

The railway train continues to hold the fascination of children and the old alike. In
‘Romance of the Rails’, Lucy Taska describes how people persevered with their efforts to
romanticise the steam engine when they were getting replaced by the diesel and electric
locomotives. Taska argues that the Thomas the Tank Engine stories kept the past alive when
the shift was taking place. In truth, the steam locomotives of India’s railway system, and
those of e.g. Poland probably did more because they were maintained for relatively remu-
nerative tourism by railway enthusiasts. It was a risk-taking British entrepreneur who saved
The Flying Scotsman. On the other hand, the Canadian Pacific Railway—one of the great
railway experiences—fell into the depths of memory without government help.
When technology and science start overtaking human ability to absorb them in useful
ways, those affected by adopting contemporary technologies (particularly the older genera-
tion) are left with only nostalgia for the past, a craving to live their memories. They get
reflected in glittering modern museums for the old or imprinted in poems and articles that
strive to keep memories alive; or in enthusiastic railway conservation! And one may note
that Australia’s India Pacific and Ghan railway journeys show a commercial approach to
railways which seem to be paying their way. This is also apparent with Beijing to Lhasa and
the Trans-Siberian Railway, Moscow to Vladivostok.
Part 2 of the book is devoted to urban politics of industrialisation, that is, the local
politics of places where the old order was yielding place to new rather than political aspects
of deindustrialisation at a macro level, except to some extent in the UK and Scotland where
Thatcherism was imposing the market-dictated economic policies of laissez faire.
It would have been useful if some research had examined how national governments reacted
to the socio-economic impact of deindustrialisation leading to acute unemployment in places
where steel mills and mines, employing hundreds if not thousands, pulled their shutters down.
Some of the younger generation could get reskilled and moved on but the older people had to
contend with their fate. There is nothing to show how they changed their lives and whether they
did get enough as pension or social security payment to live the rest of their lives. The British
cases of Corby, Shotton, Port Talbot and Redcar are tragic indeed.
Some of these papers have been written by those who saw their fathers losing jobs in
the process. They have naturally attached more importance to the emotional side of
deindustrialisation and less to the economic impact except for referring to the high
levels of unemployment in the regions affected. But Sylvie Contrepois indicates in her
‘Regeneration and class Identities’, a study of deindustrialisation in the Corbeil-Essonnes
-Evry region near Paris, that the concept of deindustrialisation has to be used cautiously.
In that region traditional industries were replaced by high-tech industries. These gen-
erated new activities and what she calls the withdrawal of the capitalist bourgeoisie from
the local scene. She shows how the political life of the region changed over to right wing
politics after 30 years with Serge Dassault of Dassault Industries taking over as mayor.
The municipality ceased to support trade union movements. Marie Le Pen has done very
well in the Pas-de-Calais.
The impact of deindustrialisation on the US is captured well in Andrew Hurley’s ‘The
Transformation of Industrial Suburbs’ since the Second World War. What Hurley calls the
evisceration of the US manufacturing industry resulted in a loss of two million factory jobs
in the final third of the twentieth century. It was also a period of acute unemployment. But
today the United States boasts very low levels of unemployment in spite of millions of
migrants into the country with knowledge-based service industries replacing the old smoke
stack industries. Hurley refers to the displacement of people by new urban developments
and the localised nature of work places changed with employees commuting from long
distances to their offices of gleaming glass.
4 BOOK REVIEW

Erudite these papers may be, but it is not clear what the authors want to convey as their
philosophic or economic conclusions on this upheaval. Localised manufacturing industries,
with work and home being side by side (like a Lancashire mill town or a Durham pit village)
have gone. Now more modern technological establishments offer higher incomes to prob-
ably better skilled workers. The environmental conditions in the steel mills and mines where
workers were constantly exposed to toxins were unsustainable. Yet the unions were in
a dilemma: to fight for compensation and justice or remain quiet for fear of losing jobs. No
paper has pointed out the triple problem before a country and its policy makers: namely, the
job losses and uprooting of entire settlements with the economic and social consequences
entailed, the growing environmental pollution caused by the manufacturing industries with
impact on climate as well as posing grave health hazards to the workers and the people in
the area and the transformation being brought about by technological leaps in communica-
tions, transport, health, finance and education. Yet technological change impacts everything
and provokes hope for a higher standard of living for all.
No author has dwelt upon the troughs and lows of industrialisation over the last
three centuries when the world has grown from the steam age to the digital age and now
to a growing dependence on alternative energies. This cycle of creative destruction to
echo Schumpeter is part of the historical process. It is not tied to any single phase of
economic history as the papers seem to suggest. Countries and societies jump from one
trend of growth to another higher growth path with every major technological change
and it is inevitable that some get hurt. The world now faces Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Robots are replacing personnel in banks, e-commerce, plant operations, automobiles etc.
with the growing fear of mass displacement of people from all the new jobs that were
created in the wake of deindustrialisation. These essays stand out for their emotive
appeal to those who despise capitalism and its brutal ways and there are many sharp
references to it.
The editors conclude ‘Consider our collection a tentative step toward envisioning
a new direction forward for deindustrialisation studies in connecting personalised experi-
ences of closure and loss with an awareness of the broader trajectory of industrialisation
and global capitalism. We hope we have achieved a wider scope of the subject broadly
termed deindustrialisation (p. 356).’ This observation has to be looked at through the
perspective of the contribution of the services sector to the GDP of advanced nations,
which is in most cases over 70 per cent. The resource based manufacturing where the job
losses have occurred has yielded place to high-tech manufacturing employing highly
skilled workers. This structural change has not stopped. AI and robots are invading every
area of employment and replacing positions occupied by people. The Industrial
Development Report 2018 of the UNIDO states boldly that ‘Manufacturing employment
in industrialised economies accounted for almost 5 per cent of global employment in
1991 but just 2.2 per cent in 2016. Notable job shedders included all five of the top
industrialised economy manufactures (the United States, Japan, Germany, the Republic
of Korea and Italy). Although the United States has the largest number of manufacturing
jobs among the five (Figure 7.13), its 2016 share of manufacturing jobs in total employ-
ment was the lowest (9.6 per cent). Germany had the largest share (19.2 per cent).
Among other industrialised economies, the countries with the largest shares of manu-
facturing employment in total employment were Czechia (25.8 per cent), Slovakia
(22.3 per cent) and Slovenia (21.3 per cent) (p. 168).’ [1]
Perhaps the next conference on deindustrialisation should bring forth some papers
reflecting views of scholars on how to deal with joblessness and social trauma arising out
of the new transformational changes that are happening in every country developed and
 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES 5

less developed alike, in the processes of manufacturing with AI and robots, not people.
The losers in this event will be white collar workers with skills acquired through expensive
formal education and training in universities. What will be the social and political
consequences of this change? Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic
Forum, has described it as the fourth Industrial Revolution. How revolutionary can things
be without anarchy?
This book looks ahead. The picture is not comforting at all.

Reference
[1] https://www.unido.org/sites/default/files/files/2017-11/IDR2018_FULL%20REPORT.pdf

Madras Sivaraman
madras.sivaraman@gmail.com
© 2019 Madras Sivaraman
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2019.1594281