About Rural Work
Rural work may conjure up images of farmers working their fields, but
the reality is much more diverse. Rural communities employ teachers,
health care workers, construction workers, electricians, restaurant
servers and store clerks, just as cities do, but under conditions
differently affected by distance, weather, infrastructure development
(e.g. public transportation), as well as the range of job options
available. Some work is more directly linked to rural areas: the
aforementioned farmers and those they employ as wage workers, most
miners, loggers and fishers, people who process meat and vegetables,
and a growing number of automobile parts workers.
Rural
regions are themselves diverse, and consequently they generate
different kinds of jobs. Manufacturing industries have a long history
in rural Ontario, but restructuring and globalization are bringing
about an inexorable shift towards the service sector, and for the
residual manufacturing sector, to non-union industries competing with
low wage offshore production (W and L). These communities are feeling
the force of the flourishing service sector, especially and
unfortunately, only at the low end. But manufacturing is by no means
out for the count. In some respects, it’s in rural areas that
manufacturing as a sector is growing most strongly. In southern Ontario
particularly, manufacturing – mainly associated with the auto industry,
has been expanding. And auto industry manufacturing, especially parts,
is located as much in small rural communities as in the larger urban
centres. One of the trends identified has been a ruralization of some forms of manufacturing, especially auto.
Economic
volatility is the norm in rural Southern Ontario, especially in the
automobile industry, but it is also linked to other critical rural
issues that undermine peoples’ livelihoods. These include
- BSE and the closure of the border to beef products;
- pressure on water supplies, waste treatment and the environmental quality of intensive farming and manufacturing;
- the increasing inability of family farms to provide any kind of stable employment,
- new greenbelt policies that restrict changes in land use.
The
research highlighted here starts from the premise that globalization
and restructuring are changing the face of work in rural communities,
no matter what that work is. One of the consequences of globalization
is that corporations are searching for new kinds of labour, and there
are a number of reasons why rural Canadian communities provide a “rural advantage”.
There are at least three aspects to this advantage:
First, is a demographic
factor: Rural communities provide a source for labour that has been
used for only quite specific purposes in the historical past, such as
in agriculture, textile mills, and resource extraction and processing.
Rural communities provide a new source of labour that is relatively
stable. In southern Ontario the rural to urban migration has slowed
overall, and is even reversing in some places. Younger men and women
are seeking opportunities that permit them to stay where they grew up –
attachment to rural places is strong. Young women, in particular, are
well educated, but often have to leave to fulfill their career
aspirations. Immigrants are being encouraged to move beyond the urban
centres.
Second, is the production factor:
Manufacturers, especially, are given considerable incentives to locate
in certain rural communities. They are given municipal tax breaks,
already serviced industrial lots and sometimes buildings. Provincial
and federal governments are heavily, and often not so visibly, involved
in enticing industry. They get even more approbation if they do this
for areas with higher levels of unemployment. Further, southern Ontario
is well served with highways, and, of less importance, rail lines. And
those highways link to US border points. So the entire southern Ontario
region is within easy access of major markets – their own and those
beyond the border.
The third factor is labour: Both factors
above combine with a set of labour-related advantages: a worker
population with less union experience and militancy (although this is
by no means absent), and lower living costs driving wage expectations.
The continuing existence of a subsistence base provides the capacity
for un- or underemployed workers to fall back on smallholdings and
seasonal farm work. These factors combine with rural ideologies that
privilege class-based collectivities less, and family and community
interdependence more: reliance on family for childcare, etc. is common,
at least partly because other forms of childcare are difficult to find
in rural communities, but also because an ethic of community (real or
imagined) prevails. Ideologies of work and community combine with
ideologies of gender that are deeply engrained and fix for women in
rural Canadian communities roles and relations that remain more deeply
entrenched in traditional expectations and less affected by shifts in
ideas about gender than are women’s roles in urban centres. In a number
of respects, traditional ideas about women’s and men’s roles are
difficult to dislodge, and affect women’s ability to participate in
their communities in certain ways. These ideas form the backdrop
against which women participate in the labour force.
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