Gendered labour, immigration, and deindustrialization in Montreal's garment industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For nearly a century, the garment industry was a driving force of Montreal’s economy, and a major employer in the city’s manufacturing industries. However, the Canadian government pursued a progressive trade liberalization policy in the 1970s, and the effects of increased import competition led to successive waves of closures in the domestic textile and clothing industries. Due to the historically entrenched gender norms that structured the Canadian garment industry, immigrant women workers were often the first to be laid off, bearing the brunt of restructuring. These closures occurred against the backdrop of a profound crisis in the industry’s institutions, increased labour intensification, and rapidly deteriorating working conditions. Tensions culminated in the 1983 garment strike, when rank and file workers organized against job losses and widespread de-unionization. Organizers drew on the language and politics of the women’s movement in Quebec to highlight the historic marginalization of women in garment manufacturing, and to articulate their resistance to deindustrialization. However, this study also aims to de-center wage labour within our understandings of life under capitalism, showing that women’s experiences of deindustrialization were also shaped by their unpaid reproductive labour within the home. The impacts of paid and unpaid labour combined often left workers with poor health outcomes, revealing the longer-term, “slow violence” of capitalism. Through oral history interviews with former garment workers, rank and file organizers, union officials and employers, I show that deindustrialization in Montreal’s garment industry was a highly gendered process, and that its effects were felt at the intersection of existing marginalities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".