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Mobility strategies and the importance of community ties: former pulp and paper workers in Miramichi, New Brunswick

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Abstract

This article explores how global shifts in capital, production, the labor market, and its segmentation relate to mobility strategies and community ties in a specific local context. Mobility strategies or the refusal to be mobile are, at times, used in order to maintain households in communities that have seen their labor market constrict. Decisions about mobility are not purely about economic rationality. In the mobility strategies employed by former pulp and paper workers from Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada, resistance to mobility is due to community and familial ties to place. Such local commitments may take precedence over, but are clearly impacted by, the ever-shifting tides of global capital.

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Notes

  1. This article uses ethnographic data collected in Miramichi, New Brunswick, Canada, and analysis that are part of my dissertation research entitled, The Maritimer Way? Mobility Patterns of a Small Maritime City. The research was conducted during 2009 and 2010, consisting 48 semi-structured interviews (evenly split between out-migrants and people currently living in Miramichi), as well as participant observation in Miramichi itself. There were 25 women and 23 men interviewed, ranging in age from 23 to 76, with a diverse range of educational attainment and employment. The largest groupings of interviewee employment were government/NGOs, teaching and former mill workers. While living in Miramichi, participant observation was conducted in various public and commercial locations, as well as at community events.

  2. Unfortunately, due to methodological differences in the 2006 Census and voluntary 2011 National Household Survey, information such as occupational groupings for Miramichi cannot be compared over the time period before and after the mill closures.

  3. Statistics on retrained or commuter migrant former mill workers are not available, as no statistics appear to have been collected on this specific group.

  4. In particular, this article discusses and emphasizes the history of the long boom and bust cycles of the forestry industry in Miramichi and New Brunswick. While other natural resource industries in the area have also gone through long and short boom and bust cycles (such as the fisheries and mining), these are not discussed at length in the interest of presenting a detailed analysis of the forestry industry.

  5. See McKay (2000) for a discussion of their historical and current relevance.

  6. Under the mercantile system, tariffs protected the colonial timber trade in New Brunswick (Wynn 1981: 10).

  7. Crown land refers to land that is not privately owned and instead managed by government.

  8. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty stated “‘There is no bad job’” during a press conference about upcoming changes to the Canadian Employment Insurance system (The Canadian Press 2012).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Pauline Barber Gardiner, Winnie Lem, and the anonymous journal reviewer for their thoughtful review and suggestions for this article. I also gratefully acknowledge the Sociology and Social Anthropology Department of Dalhousie University for helping to fund the original research used in this article.

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  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Prince Edward Island, 550 University Avenue, Charlottetown, PEI, C1A 4P3, Canada

    Natasha Hanson

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  1. Natasha Hanson
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Correspondence to Natasha Hanson.

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Hanson, N. Mobility strategies and the importance of community ties: former pulp and paper workers in Miramichi, New Brunswick. Dialect Anthropol 38, 41–57 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9328-3

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