As Labour Day comes to an end, a thought or two about vanishing jobs

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows and vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks
Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain't coming back to
your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown
Your hometown

Bruce Springsteen, My Hometown
Born in the USA 1984

Insert your local industry into the textile mill slot and you may just find that the story in the song; now some twenty two years later, really hasn’t changed all that much.

One need look no further than Prince Rupert to see how industrial change and economic conditions, have changed the face and fibre of a city and how we look at work now.

We of course are not alone, globalization has changed a lot of the way that work is done in this country, small towns continue to see their base shrink, their families leave and their towns reduced in what they once were.

True, there are boom areas where they can’t find enough workers to fill the jobs available, but not every family can pull up stakes and head for the next available pot of gold. Mercenary work it seems is only for the young and the single.

Ever increasing urbanization also holds a draw for workers and therefore for employment as well. As Canadians flock to the cities, leaving behind their rural towns and roots, it becomes less and less enticing for an industry to locate in the smaller areas.

For those that stayed behind in their hometowns, other prospects eventually come up in those once booming areas, but in many, that pool of workers looking for employment, surely outnumbers the actual level of jobs available. In many cases those new jobs now come with a greatly reduced rate of remuneration, from the days of the past.

It’s a situation that isn’t all that new, over the years jobs have come and jobs have gone. Industries disappear as it becomes cheaper to manufacture, harvest or conduct business in some other part of the world, normally a place with an even more desperate need for employment than from where those jobs relocated from.

Then there are those jobs that plain just don’t exist anymore, once industries that employed hundreds, maybe thousands now have but a handful to do a more modernized version of the work. The tyee has tapped into that vein for stories on this Labour Day. A photo essay from Richard Warnica from Edmonton, who has discovered a website dedicated to disappearing jobs.

Titled Lost Labour it examines those jobs that have evolved over the years to the point of vanishing or so changed as to be unrecognizable of their early days. Warnica uses the visual presentation of photos from Ramon Elozua who has catalogued hundreds and hundreds of pictures of Labour down through the years.

Even more detail can be found on Elozuas’ website which breaks the photo journals into categories, each offering unique glimpses into the way that a continent worked through the many decades.

It makes for an interesting and reflective ending to a Labour Day weekend.