From Paycheck to Pink Slip: Exploring Displaced Workers' Experiences of Living and Working Through a Factory Closure

Abstract

This dissertation examines the lived experiences of displaced workers during three factory closures in the Greater Toronto Area in 2019. The concurrent closure of these factories impacted nearly 3,000 direct workers, motivating this dissertation’s investigation into how displaced workers both affect and are affected by closure processes in one of Canada’s significant manufacturing regions. This study understands these closures as part of broader processes of deindustrialization and economic restructuring that have transformed manufacturing work and workers’ lives. Building on extensive scholarship documenting workers’ experiences of deindustrialization, this study examines how contemporary displaced workers navigate factory closures in urban contexts, focusing on the period between closure announcement and final shutdown. Moving beyond purely structural analyses, this study contributes to understanding how displaced workers navigate this liminal space by examining their sense-making processes, emotional, behavioural, and affective responses, and subject formation during displacement. Integrating feminist political economy and affect theory frameworks, I analyze in-depth interviews with 12 displaced workers to explore how they actively negotiate and respond to factory closures and closure processes. I organize their narratives into five thematic areas: first, how varied announcement practices operate as affective events that constitute displaced worker subjectivity and hierarchies of deservingness; second, how workers’ affective responses circulate and attach to specific anchors during closure procedures; third, how workers are reconstituted as particular kinds of subjects through intensified gendered performances and work ethic; fourth, how workers engage in both traditional and alternative forms of resistance; and fifth, how closure processes reconfigure temporal experiences of work. Across these themes, I demonstrate how workers’ social locations influence their experiences of displacement, while their collective responses both reproduce and challenge existing power relations. I argue that while factory closures disrupt workers’ attachments and relationships, workers are reconstituted within intensified subject positions through familiar performances of gender and work ethic, while simultaneously constructing counter-narratives that reimagine manufacturing’s future. I conclude by suggesting the need for more inclusive union organizing models that recognize diverse worker experiences of job displacement. This work has implications for unions, policymakers, and communities confronting similar industrial transitions.