Something happened last week that has not happened since 1968. A strike shut down 13 locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway between Lake Erie and Montreal trapping boats in the shipping artery and preventing others from entering on either end. 

Workers with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector union, walked out on October 22nd. They were in a dispute over wages with the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corp. A deal was reached one week later on October 29th, but reflecting on the impact of the strike makes clear the under-discussed prowess of the Great Lakes economy.

The Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence Seaway carried over $12 billion of cargo in 2022; estimates were that the strike last week caused a loss of $100-110 million per day. On Wednesday, October 25th, Seaway management reported around 115 vessels that were stuck in the St. Lawrence river or Lake Ontario. Other vessels stalled included a U.S. Naval Warship, the littoral combat ship the USS Marinette, that sat in Cleveland’s port waiting to head into international waters.

This is a particularly busy time of year on the Lakes and Seaway given the fall harvest season. Of great concern was the hold-up of grain shipments that were headed to destinations around the globe. Grain shipments from the Great Lakes regions have been growing in recent years. In November 2022, the Great Lakes Seaway Partnership announced that grain shipments were up almost 25% from 2021. This increase is due in part to the war in Ukraine and changing climate patterns in other grain producing areas. 

An article in the Detroit Free Press last week during the strike reflected the wide economic impact: “We have grain that feeds the world that’s not moving. We have salt that goes on winter roads for safety that’s not moving. We have iron ore for steelmaking that’s not moving,” said Jason Card, spokesman for the binational Chamber of Marine Commerce in Ottawa.

While an article from Great Lakes Now reflected a very human position: “We want a fair and decent wage that shows the value our members bring. There’s a lot of labor unrest in North America right now and people are sick and tired of the ivory tower people getting everything while the rest of us get peanuts,” said Unifor spokesman John Hockey.

Economic interconnectedness reflects human interconnectedness. Human interconnectedness reflects the ways individual people understand how they, and their talents and labor, matter. May we always remain mindful of this as we navigate our daily lives and communities and ponder wider global dynamics.

Credit for all pictures today: pexels.com

Earlier this month the Alliance for the Great Lakes Ambassador program (of which I am a part), held a monthly “deep dive” session on environmental justice.

According to the US Commission on Civil Rights, environmental justice is: 

… the fair treatment of people of all races, income, and cultures with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies, and their meaningful involvement in the decision-making processes of the government.

The truth is that many people are not afforded access to safe and clean water from the Great Lakes and are not protected from the pollution that is a byproduct of the lake economies, or the adverse dynamics of the lakes and their waterways. Disproportionately affected are low-income communities and communities of color.  

Two storylines from Chicago starkly illustrate this reality.

The first is an opinion article on the Alliance’s website from 2019, “Flooding Hits Hardest in Chicago’s Communities of Color”. For a variety of reasons, many Great Lakes cities struggle with stormwater management. Flooding can bring any number of health or economic challenges to individuals already facing many. The article details flooding that occurs in the city’s Southeast neighborhoods during and after severe storms. Some of these neighborhoods are highly industrial and so floodwaters may bring toxic hazards as they run over Superfund and brownfields sites. 

For me, the statistics below speak for themselves: 

{In Chicago} Just thirteen zip codes represent nearly three-fourths of all flood insurance claims. Over three-quarters of a million residents live here – including 200,000 children and 100,000 elderly. Over a quarter of households are below the poverty line. And 93% are households headed by a person of color.

By contrast, seventeen Chicago zip codes had the fewest flood claim payments between 2007 and 2016 (less than one percent combined). Only 30 percent of residents in these areas are people of color.

The second storyline is one I heard though an interview on the Alliance’s podcast, Lakes Chat, in 2022. Oscar Sanchez is the Community Planning Manager with the Southeast Environmental Task Force.

In his role, Mr. Sanchez was part of a group of activists who fought the relocation of General Iron, a metal sheeting company in Lincoln Park on the north side of Chicago (General Iron has now rebranded as Southside Recycling). General Iron had a large number of violations including for air pollution and questionable operations. The local community (mostly white, more affluent) no longer wanted General Iron as a neighbor. Initially General Iron received support, including incentive funding, from the City of Chicago to relocate to the southeast part of the city (mostly Latino with surrounding Black neighborhoods, not affluent).

But the identified site for relocation was across from a park and a high school and down the street from an elementary school. The local community was a working one where it was hard for people to get involved as they managed day to day struggles. It was, as Mr. Sanchez said, hard for them to fight back, but people were scared. So a coalition of activists from across the community took on the cause. 

After the organized resistance, the city denied the original permit request from General Iron in 2021. This decision was a win for Mr. Sanchez and his local communities in their fight for environmental justice. The win remains a tenuous one; final decisions remain in limbo as General Iron moves their case through the courts (as of September 2023 news articles).

The heart of the matter sits with a question Mr. Sanchez poses in the interview regarding stark differences in city and regional planning and policy between the north side and south side of the city: 

Just because we are poor doesn’t mean we should be treated poorly…  If it’s not good for one community, why is it OK for a different community?    

It’s a worthy question that should be asked again… and again… and again.