Capitalism Comes to the Backcountry: The Goodyear Invasion of Napanee

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University and the
author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

In January 1990, Goodyear Tire and Rubber opened a new “super
factory” on the outskirts of Napanee, a small town on the shores of
Lake Ontario east of Toronto. Designed to allow the company to keep jobs
in North America by meeting the competition of cheaply produced Korean
and Brazilian tires, the Napanee plant cost $320 million and was capable
of turning out 15,000 tires a day. Local politicians and even local
high-school students had rallied behind the project in the tradition of
19th-century “boosterism.” Federal and provincial politicians
sweetened the deal with duty subsidies and other largesse. None of the
local residents who would be earning $17 an hour as tire builders seemed
to have much doubt that what was good for Goodyear was also good for
Napanee.

Labor historian Bryan Palmer thinks otherwise. What in fact had
happened was a “massive hegemonic act of primitive accumulation” by
a foreign corporation at the expense of the working class.
“Profit-takers, dividend mongers, and accountants” had in fact duped
local schoolchildren and “the state” into supporting a project that
was against their class interest. Particularly offensive was
Goodyear’s paternalistic company culture, with its emphasis on
“teamwork” as the key to increasing productivity in the face of
foreign competition. This “act of colonization” in the interests of
global economic restructuring offends the immutable conflict of worker
and boss so central to labor historians.

To this outpouring of warmed-over ’60s anti-corporate rhetoric,
Palmer adds a dash of ’90s “deconstructionism,” complete with a de
rigueur quotation from Michel Foucault. Capitalism gets its way because
its “hegemonic field of vision” carries all others before it; it
creates “the gaze” that legitimizes capitalism’s wants. Hence, the
image becomes the reality. The Goodyear blimp pictured on a billboard
planted in a Napanee meadow thus “penetrates, phallic-like, the
willowy calligraphy announcing the town.” To reinforce the point,
Palmer employs deconstructionist illustrations: “staged photographic
collage of the new domesticity of capital” produced by “work
artists”—shadows of padlocked plant gates, with managers depicted as
automatons and actors portraying despair. The task of the historian is
to contest the hegemonic “visions” of others, to deny the ability of
“meta-events” to “make” history.

The one-sided, didactic, counterintuitive tone of this book will offend
many, and none more so than the people of Napanee, who will object to
the condescension of an author who assumes that the citizens of the
“backcountry” are incapable of knowing what is in their own best
interest.