After industrial citizenship: Adapting to precarious employment in the Lanarkshire coalfield, Scotland, and Sudbury hardrock mining, Canada

This theorizes a continuing understanding of just employment and the according of importance to working conditions rooted in the expectations of industrial citizenship, albeit without the power to enforce its standards of workforce voice and economic security. […]the transition from industrial to post-industrial society continues to be mediated by cultural norms, values, and expectations with origins in the industrial era.11 These considerations are developed through examining, first, how miners and former miners have responded to economic restructuring and changes in their labour market position and, second, the extent to which the legacy of occupational culture continues to provide a frame of reference and understanding. First came a gradual divestment of non-business interests such as community housing and development work; then a divestment of many daily aspects of operations; and finally, outsourcing of skilled trades. Unionized Inco workers at this time numbered approximately 4,000.57 The total number of directly employed mineworkers stood around 6,500 – a far cry from the height of employment in the 1970s (Figure 2). […]as in Lanarkshire, the restructuring of the sector was dependent on the offering of economic rewards to individual workers in return for breaching previously accepted norms of joint regulation and collectivism. […]a positive assertion of resistance and collective identity, outside of the existing mining industry itself in Lanarkshire, also persists in a weakened form. […]Aronowitz’s conclusions are partially visible in terms of the loss of the resources that had sustained past class struggles, but less so in a total absorption into the values of market citizenship that were only partially internalized.86 The narratives of workers from Sudbury and Lanarkshire indicate the centrality of workplace control and elements of codetermination in management to the structures of industrial citizenship in mining regions.