Abstract

For nearly a century, the garment industry was a driving force of Montreal’s economy, and a major employer in the city’s manufacturing industries. However, the Canadian government pursued a progressive trade liberalization policy in the 1970s, and the effects of increased import competition led to successive waves of closures in the domestic textile and clothing industries. Due to the historically entrenched gender norms that structured the Canadian garment industry, immigrant women workers were often the first to be laid off, bearing the brunt of restructuring. These closures occurred against the backdrop of a profound crisis in the industry’s institutions, increased labour intensification, and rapidly deteriorating working conditions. Tensions culminated in the 1983 garment strike, when rank and file workers organized against job losses and widespread de-unionization. Organizers drew on the language and politics of the women’s movement in Quebec to highlight the historic marginalization of women in garment manufacturing, and to articulate their resistance to deindustrialization. However, this study also aims to de-center wage labour within our understandings of life under capitalism, showing that women’s experiences of deindustrialization were also shaped by their unpaid reproductive labour within the home. The impacts of paid and unpaid labour combined often left workers with poor health outcomes, revealing the longer-term, “slow violence” of capitalism. Through oral history interviews with former garment workers, rank and file organizers, union officials and employers, I show that deindustrialization in Montreal’s garment industry was a highly gendered process, and that its effects were felt at the intersection of existing marginalities.