In February of this year I began a project of taking public transit as far as it would go from the city of Montreal and then photographing what I found. I was compelled partly by a desire to escape the developed, urban environment (this quickly proved fruitless given my chosen method) and also by my interest in boundary spaces.
St-Jerome is situated on the northern perimeter of the developed sprawl of Montreal, just before one enters the Laurentian mountains. The town dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when it was a farming community. For most of the twentieth century its economy revolved around rubber and tire manufacturing until the early nineties when the Uniroyal factory shut down. Since then, like many post-industrial towns that relied heavily on one industry it has been struggling to find a new existence for itself. It has become something of a bedroom community for montreal, and it like many places has tried to replace the lost industry with a consumer economy - strip-malls, dealerships of various sorts etc... but without a strong economic base, these ventures have floundered.
The phrase “jobless recovery” was bandied about after the recession in the beginning of the nineties and has resurfaced again. At the same time there is always a great deal of talk about creating jobs and full employment when the economy is sour. Both of these notions are part of the new conventional wisdom about the issue, a paradox which indicates the deeply fractured thinking involved in the new conventional wisdom. But I won't dwell on that too much here. Out of the two, the "jobless recovery" is probably the closest to reality. The obvious question to that statement, then, is how can it be a recovery if it is jobless? If what's negative about a recession is the fact that people are poor and out of work, then a jobless recovery would be no recovery at all. The obvious answer is that when we are talking about the economy in periods of decline or growth, we are talking about something other than the lives and welfare of the vast majority of people. Here we come to another sort of paradox or conundrum, which is that, because of the way the economy developed in many places - and for instance in St-Jerome as it became something of a one horse town for the rubber industry - there was loss of ability to make a living in a way that wasn't almost totally dependent on national or global capitalism, a reality which lingers, despite the fact global capital now has little need or use for large numbers of people in these areas as either producers or consumers. The majority of producers are now in Asia and rich urban centers contain the majority of important consumers, and yet, in North America at least, this idea of how to manage an economy is still deeply ingrained in the collective psyche, even in places that have been the most deeply wounded by it. Accordingly, across Quebec there are legions of people, who in the wake, not only of two recessions, but the larger trend of North American de-industrialization, find themselves without other support than welfare. They have nothing that anyone else wants to buy.
The problem for the contemporary worker has in many instances changed from being exploited to being unnecessary. Indeed, the St-Jerome of the eighteenth century, with its comparatively much smaller economy, was in certain respects better able to deal with these sorts of issues.
The commonsense solutions to the problem of how to make a life for oneself typically revolve around one's (or a community's) ability to fit him or herself into the economy, but this becomes problematic when the larger economy has little to no use for these individuals.
