"Now that we've burned our boats.
• In the 1950s, when Newfoundland premier Joey Smallwood was frantically attempting to industrialize that province's economy, he often promised "two jobs for every Newfoundlander" and suggested that fisherman burn their boats and take the "soft and lucrative life" of a factory worker.
Today, many of the boats are gone and there are several Newfoundlanders for every job. Newfoundland, of all the provinces, has experienced the human and economic cost of unemployment most harshly. Of all Newfoundland's workers, the fishermen and shoreworkers have perhaps suffered the most dislocation and insecurity.
In 1977, the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labor decided to commission a special inquiry into unemployment. Called the People's Commission on Unemployment, it was chaired by Father Desmond McGrath, who appointed a community development worker, a trade unionist and a professor to serve with him. During a year of hearings, the commission met with the people of Newfoundland, heard their experience and suggestions first hand, and produced a report. It's called "Now that we've burned our boats." Here are some excerpts.
The
Background
WHAT do we mean when we say the "unemployment rate?" We might consider the unemployment rate to be all of those adults (15 years of age and older) in the province who have neither full-time nor part-time jobs.
If that was how we defined it, then Newfoundland would have had an unemployment rate of 57 percent in 1977 because only 43 out of every 100 adults in the province had a job. There were more adult Newfoundlanders without a job than there were who had work. In 7977, the Newfoundlander who had a job was the exception rather than the rule . . .
Unemployment and the conditions that cause it are nothing new in Newfoundland. Times have often been hard, and even in good times, large numbers of Newfoundlanders have had to go to the Canadian mainland or the "Boston States" because there was no work for them at home.
To understand the present situation it is necessary to look back over some of the decisions that have been made and the policies that have been implemented. For most of its history, Newfoundland has been an "underdeveloped" part of some empire or nation.
"Underdevelopment" is first and foremost an economic phenomenon. It means that major sectors of our economy are controlled by large corporations who develop them so as to further their own self-interests, regardless of the implications for the people of Newfoundland.
These implications may be favourable (as in the creation of employment in the paper mills at Grand Falls and Corner Brook) or unfavourable (as in the traumatic effects of mining shutdowns at Bell Island, St. Lawrence, and Buchans), but the point is that the effects upon the province are irrelevant to the corporations concerned.
Underdevelopment also means that the brunt of economic and social dislocation within a peripheral or hinterland region such as Newfoundland has to be borne by the least powerful and least privileged sectors of the population, our fishermen and our industrial workers. In this respect, chronic unemployment is a symptom of chronic underdevelopment.
Underdevelopment by itself, however, is too general a process to explain the specific problem of Newfoundland's case. The form of that underdevelopment has to be understood in terms of the consequences of a long-standing pipe-dream of the province's governments and people: the dream of an industrial Newfoundland.
For almost a century, our development program has been based on the dream of an industrial Newfoundland. A necessary corollary of this has been that other possible strategies, particularly the rationalization of the fishery and the other primary resource sectors, have been ignored or neglected . . .
The government made excessive concessions to attract outside investments: land grants, low royalty rates, low taxes, cheap power agreements. Many of the
Union Forum photo
• A lucky Newfoundlander — one with a job — steers his skiff into port. The inshore fishery has been devastated by investment policies.
ventures were extremely risky and from the start were likely to prove unviable.
In the meantime, the government's obsession with rapid industrialization left it with few resources and few ideas for improving the fishery. To the extent that it had a policy, it was one of industrializing the fishery, too, through transforming it from an inshore to a deep sea operation, and from locally cured salt fish to centrally processed frozen fish.
Such policies meant a shift from a labour-intensive to a more capital-intensive industry, with the elimination of thousands of jobs. The fishery also suffered from a "retreat of capital", as wealthy St. John's merchants took their money out of the fishery to invest, instead, in the new economic opportunities opened up by Confederation — in construction, real estate, and as middlemen agents for the mainland firms that profited most from the new consumerism.
Newfoundland's development strategies have been based not only on blind faith in the merits of industrialization, but also upon the premise that the society should be transformed in preparation for that industrialization. Young people were educated for skilled and professional jobs: isolated villages were resettled into larger centres to provide pools of industrial labour; roads and electricity were put in place to open up the Island to industry; the inshore fishery was dismissed as archaic and allowed to decline.
As industries failed, however, the new
work force rapidly became a largely unemployed work force. And the process of urbanization made the situation worse because it cut many rural Newfoundlanders off from the only occupation which had been a reliable source of employment for centuries: inshore fishing.
They had become too educated, too urbanized, too consumer-oriented, and, more recently, too dependent upon subsistence social security payments (unemployment insurance and welfare benefits) to think of returning to the inshore fishery, the merits of which they had forgotten.
Added to unemployed industrial workers and erstwhile inshore fishermen, we now have unemployed teachers, unemployed university and trades school graduates, unemployed construction workers and unemployed clerks from small businesses that have failed.
The Sea
Numerous briefs to the Commission addressed themselves, with some measure of confidence, to the future of the province's fishery. The declaration of a 200-mile limit and the unionization of the province's fishermen and plant workers create the potential for a fishing industry from which Newfoundlanders can benefit in full measure.
One man's testimony
Unemployment robs workers of dignity, strains family life, creates division between friends. Here is one unemployed fisherman's testimony.
"Martha and me got no friends. Late years they've all got too high class for folks like us. A few years ago, when all hands was fishin', we had friends. Everyone was alike, but now look at them. They all got jobs and cars and the best o' dress. What have I got? They wouldn't take me on a job. Said I was too old for hard work — and I got no education to get a soft job.
"I worked hard all my life. Went in the skiff with me poor father, rest his soul, when I was only eight years old. I fished all me life till five years ago. Now look what I'm" come to. When a man my age gets that there's nothing left for him only able-bodied relief, he might as well tie a rock around his neck and jump overboard, cause he's not living anyway. He's only bidin' alive.
"We are poor and it's no use making out that we're something we're not. We're not like everyone else . . .
"We don't eat like them, nor dress like them, nor live like them. So maybe we're just as well off without them. We don't belong to their class anyway."
The fishery offers the possibility of an industry where the economy can serve society; where Newfoundland rural and family life can be maintained and strengthened; where existing patterns of settlement, and social life can be integrated with a rewarding and secure base of employment for many.
The fishing industry certainly offers promise. The fisherman must be recognized for the professional skills and contributions he offers to our economy.
The fishermen's union has gone a long way to re-establish the centrality of the fishery in Newfoundland society.
While the fishery offers hope for jobs and rewarding employment, the type of development which is pursued within this industry is pivotal to the kind of future we all will share. Will we have a fishing industry which enhances the quality, character and structure of our rural communities or will this industry be organized around the principles of centralization and industrialization that have plagued the province for decades?
The
Conclusions
Our observations and hearings have shown us in detail what anyone may observe partially from day to day: that our economy is not serving Newfoundland well. While some of us enjoy unprecedented affluence, others are denied all but the meanest levels of living. Working people are arbitrarily divided into "haves" and "have nots" by luck and geography. Young people are brutally moulded into consumers by a multi-million-dollar advertising industry, and then told they are not needed as workers.
As unemployment and underemployment increase, social benefits that generations of people fought for are restricted and cut back. Adequate education for our children, access for all to quality medical care, income support systems that provide proper nutrition and housing for all, health and safety in the work-place, the right to employment at a fair wage — some of these we have just begun to establish and others we regard as rights, yet all are being eroded or threatened. We are told to tighten our belts and hold our breath until the economy gets back on the right track. In a large measure, however, the conomy serves interests, both public and private, that by their very nature give scant consideration to the future of Newfoundland and its people. And if people hold their breath long enough, they suffocate.
We believe that the economy should not be the master of our destiny, but rather that it should serve the goals and aspirations of us all. We have no divinely-inspired blueprint by which this may be brought about, but if it can be done at all, it will have to be done by the concerted effort of the whole society.
The Commission calls upon all political parties, provincial and federal, in and out of office, to give full and unconditional commitment to a social and economic plan for Newfoundland that guarantees every Newfoundlander the right to employment in humane conditions at a fair rate of pay.
Details of such a plan will require much working out, but, in our opinion, certain principles will necessarily be involved:
• The pursuit of economic goals that will reduce dependence upon economic and political institutions whose primary interests conflict with those of Newfoundland and her people. This clearly implies a reduced dependence on multi-national corporations.
• Commitment to a development strategy that will use both renewable and non-renewable resources to build a diversified economy in which both rural and urban sectors play a full part with rural life-styles being strenghtened and preserved.
• Commitment to the principle that existing social services constitute an irreducible minimum. This clearly means that planned cut-backs in the public service and education be discontinued immediately.
• Commitment to the principle of equal pay for work of equal value.
• Commitment to equality of treatment for all, employed or unemployed. This would imply an end to any actions that create divisions between workers and those out of work, such as the current advertising campaign about UIC "cheaters".
The challenge of our future is to shape political, social, and economic structures that will better meet the needs of all our people.
• "Now that we've burned our boats" is available for $2.50 from the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labor, P.O. Box 6114, St.
_ John's, Newfoundland, A1C 5X8.
THE FISHERMAN — NOVEMBER 17, 1978/5