Concentric Circles Of Crisis

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES OF CRISIS Part One

Drop a stone in the water and it will make perfect spreading rings. Concentric circles move outward, ordered, spaced, and in a rhythm of natural contemplations that diminish as they move away. None are as powerful or of the same consequence as the center, but they are all still there if we choose to look closely. Canso Town is the easternmost edge of the North American continent. It is the place where the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cables came ashore from Europe. And Canso, then surrounded by a rich and fertile sea, had been a robust community and a famous fishing port since 1605. In the 1970's and 80's however, the town began to fall apart and hard times settled in to stay.

My morning radio mentioned a walkout at the Canso fish plant and I wandered into town later that afternoon to get a sense of the situation. According to the local newscast, there had been a dispute over wages and the union was still waiting for the fish processing company to begin negotiations on a contract that expired 6 months earlier. Coming down the streets of surprisingly few trees and making the turn at the plant, I didn't see more than a dozen people in front of the parking lot. Behind them, an old pickup truck had been placed precisely in-between the posts of the front gate—and that made all the difference. The picketing workers were backed by its steel, crumpled in part with faded paint and rusty blotches, but the little truck served its purpose by allowing only one person at a time to squeeze past. A refrigerated semi stood across the street with its engine idling, waiting to carry away a load of shrimp, but still unable to get inside the lot They were a casual collection of men and women, old and young, mostly thin with some still in hairnets, having just exited the factory. Many were dressed in lightweight uniforms anticipating the warmer weather that hadn't yet arrived. They talked in groups of two or three; each crew taking a turn staring back at the frustrated man hunched over the wheel of his silver cab with darkened windows. This morning's agreement between the pickets and the driver had apparently already taken place with each side pretending to ignore the other. The workers were pleased that I was interested and explained in frustration why they had walked out. Since I was a newcomer and not Canadian, they were cautious, but the need to tell their stories quickly washed any reluctance away and they shared their

accumulated disappointments and grievances. The company offered 5 cents an hour for each of 3 years which came to a raise of $100 a year—if they worked a full 2000 hours —which no one really did and many were lucky to put in half that time. Those hundred dollars buys two tanks of gas in Canso, if you make believe payroll taxes or other expenses don't exist. A hundred dollars doesn't go very far when you drive the 60 miles in and back from Guysborough like most of the employees. Work is a matter of seniority and the Canso townsfolk usually didn't have enough to get the good jobs or the hours, so two groups passed each other every day, the people in town leaving to go somewhere else, and the car pools heading into Canso, hoping there'd be enough work to make the trip worthwhile. Sure, there was overtime. At her own whim, the sea could be bountiful, but the fish, the shrimp, and the crab often travelled long distances only to be caught by foreign boats. The Canso fleet of 16 draggers disappeared when the old plant ran into trouble; real trouble in the form of running out of fish. Today, Canso still has one resident boat belonging to the Trawlersmen Association to drag for shrimp, and the rest of them were now spread out from nearby Lunenburg to Africa. When the boats left, so did their 240 jobs. Without boats, and without fish, Canso town lost many more jobs in a grimly insistent whorl like something that swallowed ships at sea. Without jobs, businesses creaked and folded, a melancholy fog drifted in, homes were sold, and people started moving away. In the early 90's a new employer came to Canso. They bought the old plant, got subsidies from the province to buy machinery, and talked the workers into lower pay to help the new company on its feet. It wasn't as much a honeymoon as a forced marriage; there wasn't as much joy as relief, and there wasn’t as much a sense of any future as just being able to get back to work.

••• There are volumes of stories and studies about why the fish disappeared from the ocean; they range from the greed and waste of local fishermen to the interception of the great schools of migrating fish by huge fleets of foreign floating factories, any one of which processed more catch in a day than the Canso plant could in a month. It didn't matter much where the truths lay; it all translated into no jobs here at home, no money to pay the bills, no reasons for families to stay. History gives us an infinite number of turning points that force people from their homelands. Some are abrupt and catastrophic; others like here, painful and protracted with the dilemmas of friends, relatives, and property to be left behind in the hope of

something better further away. The Irish were pushed by famine; the East Europeans by wars. Again it didn't matter what were the causes, people came in waves with the tiny precious remnants of their cultures and all the vulnerabilities of those uprooted and soon to be bewildered and exploited. Many left their homes to keep their families intact, or to stay alive themselves. Others had elegant dreams, or clutched the fragments of understandable self-deceptions that justified leaving home and searching anew in a foreign land. It didn't matter so much what propelled them; it was what they found at the end of the journeys that made all the difference. Canso town and the sea shared their fortune and took in many strangers. They fed newcomers and in the excess and exports, gave them money enough to build and buy magnificent things beyond the simple needs of staying alive. In time, and quickened over many intervening years, survival was taken for granted; sophistications settled in, spreading out in small gentle circles. Nova Scotia has been a land rich in resources: The abundant sea, its forests, its coalmines and mineral wealth, and mostly its enviable position as easternmost harbors between Europe and mainland Canada. Canso drew on the arriving immigrants too, and if the language was the same, the first stop was seductive enough not to travel further. People stopped to catch their breath; worked a bit to save some money, and often they stayed. It was as simple as that. But, that isn’t to say it was easy. Forests were cleared of big trees to provide the lumber for the buildings. Ships were put together and sailed. There were no machines to speak of fishing was six months long at best. Frozen lakes were sawn into two-foot blocks of ice and packed in large houses insulated with sawdust. What food wouldn’t keep was salted and formed the core cuisine for generations of children who escaped the summer black flies in nearby ponds and streams. The Irish Catholics beat the Irish Protestants to Halifax and shaped the big city from the beginning. A significant part of Canso in turn, well before the word subdivision was invented, became Irish Town and was filled with husbands of common surnames and wives like Mary Walt and Mary Frank to keep the women sorted out properly. The English arrived at Canso 200 years later with their transatlantic cable company, and bought the first of a white-collar class to a place that worked mostly with its hands. Times were good—and even poor and difficult times qualified as good times in a land that had no illusions about hard work. In the ugly alternative however, there were hard times. Hard times. A very special phrase for the months when hard work made no difference and the struggle was visceral. In almost any conversation when the phrase "hard times" was mentioned,

there was a sudden seriousness and the voices became more quiet. There was a shared sense of pain that bound these people together. In the younger folk, those less than 60, feelings were echoes of the stories and attitudes of parents. The ones directly touched by the Depression were unarguably scarred by hard times. To them as children, hard times were something to be hated. It wasn't rational; it was something buried in their souls.

••• Hard times are returning to Canso, but some will say they've been there for a while. It doesn't matter where the truth lies, it is an anguish that slides all too easily into despair. That's the problem. Just let the sense of hard times approach too closely and a paralysis begins to set in. Hard times are intimidating in their contemplation and gruesome in their presence. Hard times drove many immigrants here, and new hard times will drive common people away again The workers in front of the gate sensed the arrival of hard times. They picketed not so much about the wages, but because of a rumor that the company would take away the red fish machinery. Red fish are one of the staples of the local fisheries and have always been a source of additional work. If the machinery to process red fish left Canso, that would be a loss of work for a number of people and the seniority bumping would turn middle-age workers out in the streets. So the pickup blocked the gates more to keep the company from moving machinery out, not as much to stop the shipping of fish after processing. And the fact that it did was very useful in showing the company that the workers still had the power to affect the operations of an employer who couldn't find the time schedule negotiations over the past six months. The company also saw only a few workers on the picket line. In response, and to maintain that division between employees, the plant was later shut down for a day, the machinery moved, and the plant reopened on an overtime day to blunt the complaints of lost wages. In essence, the company's message was simple, "All we need to do is to buy a padlock.” And the message was understood. The union representing the workers, the Canadian Auto Workers, was obviously caught in the middle with little bargaining leverage. The machinery was leased or acquired by subsidies; the company had other plants for relocating operations if it wished. The viability of Canso was hardly of any concern beyond the infrastructure support and most of the workforce came from out of town. This short lived, spontaneous protest probably did move the company to the bargaining table, but that may have only stalled hard times. In the mind of the company, the workers were now impudent and irritating, and well on the way to being intractable. In the decision-making processes of management, Canso probably moved closer to being written off. Hard times moved a bit nearer and the paralysis burrowed a little deeper.

Out there in the workplace, unions are a corrective force, one that moderates the complaints and demands of labor proportional to the circumstances. Unions also provide protection against the arbitrary whims of management and a return to the days when labor had no voice. There seems to be a natural antagonism, which could be healthy as a rivalry, but there is also a bitterness that can defy settlement and accommodation. Companies view labor's offenses as territorial, as questioning a business' right to dictate, as treasonous to management's sense or order and economy. As best they can —and as fast as they can—businesses replace humans with machines at a cost of capital investment. If the margins are too thin or the capital isn't available, management simply puts up with labor and adopts a war mentality. The prejudices run deep on both sides: labor with power is intolerable; business left unchallenged is evil. It doesn't matter where the truths lay. Once set in motion, the results of prejudice and rigidity lead to hard times for someone. Here in Canso, the people know it. The owners of the fish plant know it as well, but for a company, there are not the same personal losses of uprooting and moving away. This independence gives a spine to their position that cannot be offset by people who know hard times as part of their heritage and are not sure of their own strengths. The stone dropped in the water in Canso spreads the ripples of fear and despair. The circles move from Canso down the shore and touch Little Dover; they drift north and kiss Guysborough, and they chill all they touch. Some of the ripples spread west along the rocks and bluffs, drifting into the harbor of the city of Halifax, the center of Provincial government that houses the makers of Nova Scotia laws. There, just recently, a very substantial stone was dropped into the water and those circles will be very big indeed. The enormous weight of Bill 68 will swamp the unions and scour the economy. An uncommonly bad poker-hand bluff, it is filled with cloying excuses under a banner of public responsibility that will propel and accelerate hard times. Bill 68 suspends the right to strike, allows a final unilateral settlement by government, and exempts itself from court review. Planned or not, Bill 68 has all the stuff and substance of a horror movie character— Hard Times played by Freddy Kruger in a Canadian version of Dracula—one of those on the edge of your seat movies—and damn, there’s not a wooden stake in sight.

Bob Wulkowicz © July 2001