Labour Landmarks in New Brunswick / Lieux historiques ouvriers au Nouveau Brunswick (review)

Labour Landmarks / Lieux historiques ouvriers is one of the many public history outcomes of a remarkable Community-University Research Alliance project that has sought to reconnect New Brunswick residents with their labouring past and present. The public memory of the work lives and activism of trade unionists is often peripheral to our understanding of ourselves as a people. The gales of creative destruction that rage around us risk cutting this connection altogether, as mills close and jobs are lost. Too often, cultural erasure follows. One need only search for signs of Moncton’s railway past to realize the extent of this removal. To (re)insert working people into public memory in the twenty-first century is therefore a highly political act.

For the past five years, the Labour History in New Brunswick Project – which includes university researchers, trade unionists, and heritage activists – has sought to make the history of work and labour in New Brunswick ‘more accessible to the academic community and the general public’ (http://www.lhtnb.ca). In seeking to draw attention to working-class history, the research project aims to validate the contribution of working people and to find strength in common struggle. Team members have done this in a variety of ways, producing illustrated brochures, encyclopedia entries, museum exhibitions, pedagogical materials, as well as scholarly writings.

‘Labour landmarks’ is in one of the project’s five major research areas, this bilingual book being the culmination of five years of research. David Frank and Nicole Lang indicate that there has been a relatively unrecognized tradition of commemoration in regard to the contribution and sacrifice of New Brunswick labour. As a result, Labour Landmarks / Lieux historiques ouvriers tours fifty sites of memory where ‘families, workers, unions and communities have recognized the place of workers in 20th-century New Brunswick history.’ The focus here is on plaques, memorials, and statues rather than murals, public art, or the built environment. The labour landmark idea originates in the work of Archie Green, though James Green has clearly been influential as well.

The book is filled with site-specific stories related to New Brunswick’s coal miners, loggers, fishers, firefighters, and railway workers. In the coal mining chapter, for example, we learn about the death of three boys who climbed into an abandoned Minto coal mine in 1932. Two of their would-be rescuers also died. After three hundred years of coal mining, the area’s land and people are marked by this shared legacy. Other labour landmarks celebrate the achievements of provincial trade unionists or mark the dangers of work. Some landmarks, like the world’s largest axe in Nackawic, have become symbolic sites of worker protest in the face of the crisis in forestry. According to Frank and Lang, ‘the labour landmark in New Brunswick points to a kind of unofficial public culture that owes its existence to local initiatives and support’ (90). In many ways, the book weaves these local stories together – marking the place of workers in New Brunswick history.

Rather than an exhaustive inventory of sites, Labour Landmarks / Lieux historiques ouvriers provides us with an introduction aimed at the general public. The combination of photographs and text work well together. All of these sites are also indicated on a colour map located in the final pages. If I had a critique of the book, it is its design: it is made to be read at home rather than on a road trip while visiting these labour landmarks. There are thus no specific instructions on how to find each of these fifty landmarks. I also think that the project might have made a stronger connection between the book and its website. There is a section on labour landmarks on the project website, but there are only a handful of unmapped descriptions at the moment. The website does allow online visitors to submit additional labour landmarks, but it is unclear how...