Gender and Working-Class Identity in Deindustrializing Sudbury, Ontario

Abstract

In this article I explore the making of a gendered working-class identity among a sample of male nickel miners in Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. Through 26 oral history interviews conducted between January 2015 and July 2018 with current and retired miners (ages 26 to 74), I analyze how the industrial relations framework and social relations of the postwar period shaped – and continue to shape – a masculinized working-class identity. I then examine the ways in which economic restructuring and the partial deindustrialization of Sudbury’s mines have affected workers’ ideas about gender and class. I argue that, amid growing precarious employment in both the mining industry and the regional economy more broadly, the male workers in this study continue to gender their class identities, which limits attempts to build working-class solidarity in a labor market now largely characterized by feminized service sector employment.