No Way To Make A Living is a sociological space about work, generating discussion and exchange on what work, paid or unpaid, is like in today’s world

In 1982, Miriam Glucks­mann pub­lished a book about the exper­i­ence of women work­ing ‘on the line’ at a fact­ory in West Lon­don which pro­duced speedo­met­ers for cars. She had left her higher edu­ca­tion teach­ing job to work in this fact­ory, not with the inten­tion of pro­du­cing an eth­no­graphy, nor with any illu­sions of ‘join­ing the work­ing class’, but as some­thing which arose from her involve­ment in fem­in­ist and social­ist polit­ics. When she later decided to write about and pub­lish her account, she was obliged for legal reas­ons to do so under a pseud­onym, Ruth Cav­endish. Last year, Rout­ledge decided to repub­lish Women on the Line, with a new intro­duc­tion, and this time, under Glucksmann’s real name. Here Miriam Glucks­mann responds to some ques­tions posed by Dawn Lyon about the ori­ginal book and its repub­lic­a­tion in 2009.

Women on the Line is often described as a sem­inal eth­no­graphy of 1980s Brit­ish soci­ology of work. Its repub­lic­a­tion in 2009 has attrac­ted con­sid­er­able interest, espe­cially in the US. How would you describe the recep­tion of the ori­ginal pub­lic­a­tion of the book?

The enforced pseud­onym and anonym­ity the first time round meant that I got very little sense of its recep­tion. I couldn’t give any talks or pub­li­cise it at all. People wrote to Rout­ledge ask­ing to be put in con­tact with Ruth Cav­endish, and they for­war­ded everything to me but of course I wasn’t able to reply to any­thing! Yet for many years after­wards I often met people who knew me, and were famil­iar with Women on the Line, but were unaware of the con­nec­tion between us. It kept on hap­pen­ing right up to the appear­ance of the new edi­tion pub­lished under my own name. My sense is that the book was quite widely read both in the UK and abroad, and by fem­in­ist and other act­iv­ists as well as aca­dem­ics over the next few years, espe­cially given the greater interest in study­ing and cam­paign­ing around work dur­ing the 1980s.

In terms of ‘method’, although your work­ing at the fact­ory was not inten­ded as research, what do you think about the approach of ‘know­ing by doing’ as a way of under­stand­ing work, in your case, quite lit­er­ally work­ing on the line – espe­cially in a con­text in which the inter­view has come to dom­in­ate qual­it­at­ive research?

Know­ing by doing was cer­tainly cru­cial, in the sense that my under­stand­ing of what was going on in the fact­ory and how it affected the women would have been impossible without exper­i­en­cing it myself. The ‘doing’ included not only the work itself, but also the numer­ous inter­ac­tions with the women around me. The chat­ting that this involved ranged far wider than what would nor­mally be covered in an inter­view, and of course I wasn’t determ­in­ing the course of the con­ver­sa­tion either. How­ever, the inter­pret­ive ‘know­ing’ part of it relied also on my pre-existing know­ledge and ana­lyt­ical frames, and all the ‘doing’ was neces­sar­ily filtered through and medi­ated by what was already in my head, and my polit­ical pre­oc­cu­pa­tions and ques­tions in doing the job in the first place.

There are more pho­to­graphs in the repub­lished ver­sion of the book than in the ori­ginal. Can you com­ment on the place of images in rep­res­ent­a­tions of work, and on the rela­tion­ship between the writ­ten and the visual in this book.

I would have liked to include far more pho­tos than the pub­lish­ers would allow, and in col­our. The black and white ones don’t really do justice to the situ­ation and don’t come over nearly as well as the col­our ones on the cover. I hope it makes a dif­fer­ence to read­ers being able to see what some of my work-mates looked like, espe­cially those whose life stor­ies are recoun­ted. Sim­il­arly the spa­tial and phys­ical lay­out of the shop­floor, and some examples of machinery should help to bring the nar­rat­ive to life. There are so very few images avail­able of the faces of women doing this kind of work (like the one of Alice who is look­ing straight at me tak­ing her photo) so the more we can col­lect the bet­ter, espe­cially when the women are engaged in the pro­cess rather than being objec­ti­fied as ‘women work­ers’. How­ever, these pho­tos were taken dur­ing the strike/lockout, so every­one is look­ing more relaxed and hap­pier than they would have done if they had actu­ally been working!

The cov­ers of the two edi­tions are dif­fer­ent. What is the story of them?

Cover of ori­ginal pub­lic­a­tion, 1982

I have always dis­liked the cover of the first edi­tion because it is so mis­lead­ing. So many of the women came from the Carib­bean or Indian sub­con­tin­ent, yet the pic­ture sug­gests white women only. The first ver­sion was even worse as they were all given long blonde hair. I objec­ted and asked for black or Asian women to be rep­res­en­ted. The con­ces­sion was to give one of them curly hair, but I think she still looks white. Rout­ledge wouldn’t budge fur­ther. The por­trayal of the line was also mis­lead­ing show­ing the women facing it rather than at right angles to it, so con­tra­dict­ing my descrip­tion of how the spa­tial lay­out affected social and phys­ical interaction.

Cover of repub­lic­a­tion, 2009

So of course I am much hap­pier with the cover of the new edi­tion, which I chose and which uses two of my own pho­tos taken in the fact­ory back in 1977. I was sur­prised how well the ori­ginal neg­at­ives scanned in espe­cially as it was only a little insta­matic cam­era. In fact these are much bet­ter qual­ity than the ori­ginal prints. So that’s a les­son to keep old negs in a safe place! Now we have older black women on the cover, as well as a very young Irish worker, sug­gest­ing the age and eth­nic com­pos­i­tion, and you can see the line, and all the clut­ter. The ‘product’ is also clearly vis­ible, and of course this would not have been pos­sible in the 1982 edition.