Finding Work in the Age of LGBTQ + Equalities: Labor Market Experiences of Queer and Trans Workers in Deindustrializing Cities

Abstract

Despite legal protections and growing acceptance in many industrialized countries, LGBTQ + workers continue to face considerable employment disadvantage. We explain this contradiction by detailing labor market processes that limit employment prospects for LGBTQ + workers in Sudbury and Windsor (both small cities with industrial histories). Drawing on 50 semistructured interviews and 662 community survey responses from LGBTQ + workers, we show how LGBTQ + employment opportunities are constrained by a constellation of multiscalar factors. These include the absence of good work opportunities outside of blue-collar work in deindustrializing labor markets, associated persistent cisnormativity and heteronormativity, and inconsistent protection from discrimination and social acceptance at work. As a result, respondents self-selected out of blue-collar workplaces, avoided and left jobs when they experienced or anticipated discrimination, and chose to remain in jobs with supportive employers rather than find a new job in a potentially homophobic or transphobic labor market. This article extends current understandings of labor markets economic geography by connecting production histories to persistent cisnormativity and heteronormitivity, and by showing how the search for emotional safety in cities with inconsistent social acceptance perpetuates economic disadvantage for queer and trans workers.

Key words:

• transgender
• gender
• queer
• deindustrialization
• nonbinary
• labor market
• trans

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Ben Owens, Mélodie Bérubé, Adrian Guta, Randy Jackson, Nathaniel Lewis, Sarah McCue, and Adriane Paavo for their contributions to the larger Work and Inclusion project from which this work is derived. John Antoniw, Lee Czechowski, Angela Di Nello, Laurel O’Gorman, Leah McGrath Reynolds, and Kai Squires provided research assistance. Community members Bobby Jay Aubin, Derrick Carl Biso, Dani Bobb, Vincent Bolt, Lynne Descary, Debra Dumouchelle, Dana Dunphy, Mel Jobin, and Paul Pasanen contributed to the design of interview questions and participant recruitment. The Sudbury Workers Education and Advocacy Centre, Unifor, and United Steelworkers provided indispensable in-kind support of space and staff time to help with the project. This article also benefited from the insightful and constructive comments from the anonymous reviewers. The research was funded by a Partnership Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada, Award no. 890-216-0073 Institutional Ethics Approval: McMaster University Research Ethics Board (MREB) clearance no. 2018 071