Industrial Sunset: The Making of North America's Rust Belt, 1969–1984

Barb Bloemhof is an assistant professor in the Department of Sport
Management at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario.

Industrial Sunset is a study comparing the social history of plant
closures in the American Midwest and southwestern Ontario in Canada.
High finds that American blue-collar workers tended to experience the
plant closures as a personal tragedy that lasted for years after the
event, while Canadian workers found ways to form community against the
companies and empower themselves collectively to achieve in some cases
better settlements. In most cases described in the book, Canadian
workers had a smoother adjustment to the closures than American workers,
although all workers experienced disruption and hardship when their jobs
were removed.

High identifies two factors that explain the differential experience:
first, the strong community and political voice of the union presence in
Canada, as contrasted with a post-McCarthy absence of extensive social
collectivism in America; and second, the Canadians’ rallying image of
a struggle against decisions by expatriate multinational bosses versus
Americans’ absence of such a common enemy. He does not explore the
significance of population density and occupational diversity in
Canadian closure situations in contrast to the somewhat higher
dependence on one employer and lower proportionate population density in
American manufacturing cities, possibly because of a lack of data on
those factors. Another potential problem is the need for different
models to account for these differences in a formal way.

The book has a tendency to explain using jargon and specialized terms
that make the message ambiguous in places. Additionally, the argument
deviates from the times and places introduced as the focus of the study,
including a conclusion that introduces ideas not developed in the text.
In places, the absence of a time reference makes the sequence of events
unclear. A summary timeline and more context-setting descriptive
statistics would have helped the argument. Still, the book is worth
reading to learn about the experiences of those displaced: the argument
that High makes is convincing.