According to Williams, the Isotype charts used in the book are ‘not introduced for decoration, though their colours do certainly enliven the page’. She continues: ‘if you look at them with attention you will find that they suggest all sorts of relationships between different bits of our complex society that probably would not jump so vividly into your mind simply from looking at rows of figures or reading descriptions of facts’ (1945: 10). Visual sociology in a nutshell!

The charts that stuck me most were two entitled, ‘The Changing Home’. The first, immediately below, represents a pre-industrial world in which the home is centre-stage. With the establishment of schools, and the extension of production including food production beyond the home and for more than subsistence needs, there is an overlap in what takes place ‘Inside the Home’ and ‘Outside the Home’ by the ‘19th Century’.

In the second chart (below), the first half is devoted to ‘Today’ (as in 1945). There is a strict and persistent gendered division of labour and recognition of work performed in different socio-economic modes and spatial contexts inside and outside the home: childcare and education, cooking and baking, laundry, making clothes, and food production. What is especially fascinating is Williams’ exploratory representation of ‘The future?’ (in the second half of the chart below) imagined in a context of the scarcity of workers (1945: 110–111). It shows an ever-increasing shift to all activities (except cleaning) taking place outside of the home, with men and women equally positioned in the public sphere. We might also read her chart to imply that the vacuum cleaner is an autonomous object, the agent as well as the instrument of its work!

What we now know is that there are many combinations of the activities in Williams’ charts taking place as paid or unpaid work inside or outside of the home, as formal employment or as informal activities undertaken by friends, family or voluntary workers (Glucksmann, 1995, 2005). Perhaps what Williams didn’t fully anticipate was the complexity and variety of these relations — or the ongoing gender segregation in who does what, wherever it takes place.

References
1. Glucksmann, M. (2005). ‘Shifting boundaries and interconnections: extending the “total social organisation of labour”’, in L. Pettinger, J. Parry, R.F. Taylor and M. Glucksmann (editors) A New Sociology of Work? Oxford and Malden, MA.: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review.
2. Glucksmann, M. (1995). ‘Why “Work”? Gender and the “Total Social Organisation of Labour”’, Gender, Work and Organization 2(2): 63–75.
3. Williams, G. (1945) Women and Work, London: Nicholson and Watson.

The beginnings of a banner in the creative area

During term time days quickly gained a routine, involving large evening meetings as well as smaller morning ones both concerning our strategy. Here tasks were decided upon and divided up between the group to volunteers who would report back on them at the next meeting. By the end of the first full day it was decided to form taskforces for certain areas such as communication through Twitter and Facebook, direct action, and poster and banner making. There was some resistance to this separation of tasks at first for fear of creating static committees and wider divisions within the Occupation. It was decided that these groups should remain fluid in order to allow new members of the Occupation to join in, and thereby stop any entrenched division of labour and also maintain lines of communication across them. Within these groups there was never a discussion of ability. Instead, anyone who wished to do a task or help with something was welcomed to do so regardless of previous skills. This worked both to enable the development of new skills but also their synthesis with existing skills, as well as the deployment of skills in ways which were unexpected by allowing the space for this creativity both in actions and ways of working. This was something refreshing for many students used to working individually or in highly prescriptively organised ways.

Interestingly despite the organisation of these tasks there was a stronger resistance to the organisation of domestic tasks, with many preferring instead to see that these activities would simply get done on an individual and informal basis. As such, the majority of these daily tasks would be carried out individually or by a small group of people, apart from large clean-up operations which were conducted most mornings, or when members of the Occupation had simply had enough of the coffee cups littering the building. This was in part a reflection of the group resistance to any pressure for certain members to perform certain jobs through the enforced expectations of a cleaning rota or cooking duties for instance. Although this became an effective system where the tasks did get completed it still lead to an unequal system where some spent a significant amount of time cleaning up after others. This small group, which would do regular water collecting, cleaning and on some occasions cooking, was composed of both males and females although women were often more strongly represented within these tasks and in expressing concern over these tasks, bringing them up in the organisational meetings. The group dynamics concerning these issues were giving rise to a certain amount of resentment from those conducting them leading to an unsustainable situation in the long term. In many ways resistance to organising these tasks and so taking responsibility for ensuring the equal spread of work can be seen as reflective of society as a whole. This created a disappointing situation where despite other efforts to challenge wider norms, forms of domestic work were still seen as lowly making them beneath discussion and organisation.

Group meetings

After several days of lobbying we were able to open up one of the downstairs conference rooms. This became a quieter sleeping area at night and our study space during the day. This was felt to be a huge priority of the Occupation due to its aims but also due to the timing of the actions which took place just days before many students’ end of term deadlines, so we recognised the need to help students work for their study commitments whilst making their political statement. This was demonstrated in the image here which shows that whilst meetings were ongoing some were unable to tear themselves away from their work but at the same time continued to contribute to the decision making process. Notice members on laptops continuing to work whilst also contributing to decision making but also the use of laptops within the meetings to check information or write notes.

The space provided more than a chance to do the solitary work often expected for essays. We saw many students working together in ways sadly often not witnessed within our current higher education system, with students from first year to PhD being able to help one another. One particular example was an experienced French speaker and two native French speakers helping to coach someone who had taken a French wild module and was feeling unsure about his chances of success in an upcoming test. Visitors and occupiers in the Senate also built their own library, and encouraged seminars both by staff and students. The feeling was very much focused on attempting to recreate the Senate as a free space of learning. The emphasis lay on an encouragement for all to join in as much as they could. There was never a compulsion to do so, instead there was an understanding that all would contribute what they could, however they could.

After two weeks of Occupation free access to the building and connection to the internet was denied by the University after the commencement of legal proceedings. From this point on, numbers were radically reduced as were the activities of those inside. Communication needed to be organised around a phone tree of close outside supporters and dongles with reduced internet access. The key work inside at this point noticeably shifted towards courting the media where the focus was on communication and publicity. Interviews were even conducted through windows and articles were written in national newspapers. This came to a head with the decision to end the Occupation attracting wide media attention. Yet the question of future actions was also discussed as those inside undertook a large scale clean-up operation to return the building to its former meeting room character and plans began to be made for meetings for the new term.

These working patterns were particular to this space providing a fluid dynamic but one which was reflective of wider hierarchies of intellectual, political and domestic work. Now that the group is working outside of this space it remains to be seen if the same fluidity and lack of demands can be made of individuals for tasks and how stable organisation will take place.

*All photos have been allowed for public use and where possible the photographer’s permission has been granted for their use within this post.

‘I am doing this work because I am a Dalit’

This powerful BBC Radio Today programme interview with a woman latrine cleaner in rural Bihar (and accompanying pics) reminds us just how strong and ‘resilient’ caste and gender are in determining occupation in present day India. The razzle dazzle of modern India, with its call centres and software development firms feel a long way away from here. And when I first studied sociology, everyone thought that, as India industrialised and entered the world economy, caste would be replaced by class. It seems not. Scratch the surface, and we see that many jobs are still caste-related, and that caste and class intertwine. Traditional gender ascriptions and notions of purity and pollution are also caught up in an endlessly reproducing spiral: someone will always be positioned on the bottom.

On a recent visit to New Delhi this October, I was taken aback to learn from colleagues at Jawaharlal Nehru University that caste is alive and well at all levels of employment. Caste restricts access to particular occupations, excludes from others, and blocks entry to high positions. We learned of villages where one caste survives by providing ‘courtesans’ for a neighbouring higher caste, and of ‘traditional’ communities in Rajastan whose sole means of livelihood is sex-work: the women sell sexual services and the men live off them. The women latrine cleaners are just one more sad example of caste determining people’s lives and livelihoods.

Dawn Lyon, Pun Ngai, Carol Wolkowitz, Anna Pollert, Miriam Glucksmann

The republication in 2009 of Miriam Glucksmann’s ethnography of factory work, Women on the Line (originally published in 1982 under the pseudonym, Ruth Cavendish) was the starting point for a panel discussion on researching gender and work at the Work, Employment and Society Conference, which took place in Brighton in September 2010. I approached Miriam with the idea for this panel as on rereading Women on the Line, which I first encountered as an undergraduate in the late 1980s, I was struck by how relevant it remains for current understandings of work, including the ways in which configurations of gender, class, race and age make for different experiences of work. The original text is unchanged but the republished book includes a new introduction and additional images. (There is a discussion of the republication with Miriam here.) The photographs taken at the time of the original study indicate how habitual ethnographic practice included photography and a keen attention to the visual ahead of ‘visual sociology’ developing as a novel form of sociological enquiry, and the inclusion of these photographs in the new edition of the book gives the reader glimpses into factory space, and the age and ethnicity of the women workers. In addition, Women on the Line is interesting as a form of sociological writing that is a narrative account of factory life but one that also makes a theoretical contribution ‘between the lines’ to analysing work, and Miriam reflects critically on the gain of formalising sociological concepts in the new introduction.

Miriam Glucksmann

Miriam Glucksmann (University of Essex) started the panel presentations with a reflection on the global changes in women’s work since the publication of Women on the Line. For more than 30 years, she has researched work, historical and contemporary, local and global, and with a range of methods. She remains centrally concerned with how and why work is undertaken in different socio-economic modes (paid, unpaid, formal, informal etc), and the shifts and connections across these modes in time and space. Glucksmann set out the context of understanding women’s work in the late 1970s, and the problem of the women’s movement’s failure to attract working class women which is what prompted her to leave her teaching job and work in the factory she later wrote about (so not something she intended as an ethnography at the outset). With reference to her recent research on ready-made food, she highlighted how class and gender configurations have changed over the past 3 decades, with looser gender divisions in workplaces in the 21st century, and the increased presence of both men and women migrant workers in assembly-line work.

Anna Pollert (University of the West of England), the second speaker, discussed her own ethnography of women factory workers, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (1981), which was a fascinating counterpoint to Glucksmann’s. Motivated both by politics (socialist feminist) and pedagogy (to respond to the lack of books available for teaching at the time), Pollert’s study was an explicit piece of research, based on (non-participant) observation in which she sought to analyse wider issues of political economy through the micro-level of the workplace. She discussed the unstable, unfolding and contradictory nature of becoming a woman worker through the intersections of class, gender and age, in which there is both subordination and potential for change; and drew attention to the ordinary, the unspoken, and the unheard, themes which remain relevant in her more recent research on vulnerable, low-paid, unorganised workers.

The panel continued with a contribution from Pun Ngai (Hong Kong Polytechnic University), author of Made in China (2005), an ethnographic study of young migrant women engaged in factory work in urban China. Both as a researcher and an activist, Pun’s work has addressed the challenges faced by women factory workers, including the issue of material working conditions. She argued that current conceptualisations of agency that do not adequately grasp real constraints miss the complexity of the lived reality of gender and class, and that gender is central to the making and remaking of class in the present context of urban China. For instance, through the specific and highly gendered ‘dormitory regime’, rural to urban migrant women workers experience both alienation and solidarity.

Carol Wolkowitz (University of Warwick) concluded the panel presentations with a reflection on the role of the body in production, a central concern in her own recent work, notably in Bodies at Work (2006), and a significant if implicit dimension of Glucksmann’s account in Women on the Line, now made explicit in the introduction to the new edition. Wolkowitz had reread Glucksmann’s text through this lens and drew attention to Glucksmann’s use of auto-ethnography and of her own body to access the experience of women factory workers. In particular, she made connections to contemporary scholarship on the ‘feeling of doing’, the embodied person’s ‘haptic apparatus’. She then argued that analytical continuities in understanding work over the last 30 years are stronger than changes, notably the ongoing intensification of labour including in contexts other than factories. However, she also noted differences such as an increase in the performative nature of work, and the implication of the body and the self in aesthetic labour arising from amplified forms of control in the workplace; and the increased place of ‘touch’ in work, itself connected to new and/or more widespread forms of ‘body work’, i.e. work on the bodies of others.

A key area of discussion was the practice of ethnography, picking up on some of the speakers’ comments on the problems of doing ethnography today. The question of access is a very serious one with implications for the production of sociological knowledge about working lives in the 21st century, if researchers do only ‘what is possible’ rather than that which is conceptually or politically compelling. There was a lively discussion about the difficulties posed by institutional processes of ethical approval (which do not equate to ethical sociological practice), and calls for a critical and challenging approach to these constraints!

This was a great session. It was well attended (in spite of the 9am slot!) and its success was confirmed by numerous comments from people in the audience about how informative and enjoyable they found it to be. Thank you to the contributors, the conference organisers, and to everyone else who participated.

In the show customers (‘punters’) are shadowy figures: one walks into a café, later we see one of the sex workers being punched from inside a car. Steven Wright, the man eventually sentenced for all 5 murders is almost disembodied in the show; we see his car prowling, then we see his hands on the wheel, and eventually his face, his body, his voice emerge. This relative invisibility makes it easy not to consider who are the punters. If we did, we’d see that they are very ordinary men, they are men you know.

The other punter who appears in Five Daughters is Tom Stephens, the initial suspect. He lurks with flowers at the edge of a police cordon, later we see him driving away with one of the women, hoping to protect her from the unknown threat. The real Tom Stephens was interviewed by the Sunday Mirror:

Michael Duffy (interviewer from Sunday Mirror): You seem a smart, well-educated man. How is it that you can spend time with these people? How is it that you can find common ground with them?

Tom Stephens: I’m sad and lonely. I made compromises on my morals to go down (to the red light area) the first time, so I suppose getting involved with them isn’t a huge leap.

Michael Duffy, Sunday Mirror, 17/12/2006

Duffy and Stephens conspire to deny that punters play any part in the moral denigration that they easily ascribe to the prostitutes. For Duffy ‘these people’ are the inverse of smart and well-educated, they are abject. Stephens knows the red light district is a damned place, but it holds such an attraction for him. In this way, neither recognises what customers contribute to the moral status of those who sell sex. In my research into Punternet, a website where men write customer service reviews of commercial sex, this is quite common. Men speak of brothels as good when they are clean, safe and discreet and of prostitutes as good when they offer gifts beyond the formal contract. And they speak of each other as potential harmers, who could damage ‘good’ girls if they don’t treat them right. It’s never them who cause harm.

Wacquant says this sort of thing shouldn’t surprise us, it is “unexceptional” to say we all live in a moral world (Wacquant, 2002: 1472). Public discussions of prostitution tend to circulate a sterile debate between ‘free choice’ and ‘trafficked’ exploitation in a way which negates the complexity of prostitution by presenting it primarily as a question of worker’s agency. Addressing prostitution is impossible without addressing customers, and addressing customers requires understanding of how they constitute the market as moral and negotiate their own roles and identities within that.

References

1. Sanders, T. (2005) Sex Work: A Risky Business. Cullompton: Willan.
2.  Wacquant, L. (2002) ‘Scrutinizing the street: poverty, morality, and the pitfalls of urban ethnography’. American Journal of Sociology, 107(6) 1468–1532.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/825/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815#comments Mon, 26 Apr 2010 08:00:12 +0000 Scott Taylor http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=815 Researching women and work can be really puzzling. There is a series of things I genuinely don’t understand: how it feels to earn your living in a workplace where you are the only woman or in a small minority; what it’s like frequently finding yourself the only person of your sex in workplace contexts; the emotions generated by spending lots of time in ‘between men’ cultures, where conversations tend to focus on masculine activities or are conducted according to masculine norms. In doing academic work I’ve tried to gain a better understanding of women and work, by making sex, gender, sexuality, and gendered inequality part of students’ lives and understandings through my teaching, along with doing some research into why women leave prestigious professions like law to go into more satisfying work[1]. More recently, whenever possible, I’ve been making small changes and differences in my own workplace and working practice (but not through positive discrimination, dear me no, that would be illegal in the UK). But it doesn’t seem to make much difference, academic work… imagine that… or anything I do in my own working context, business schools… wonder why…

I think I started to understand women and work a little better when in 2004 I went to visit the Women’s Library in east London with my partner – it’s in a lovely building in Old Castle St, E1 (a converted wash-house, I’ve just found out) in a backstreet within sight and sound of the City, but definitely not on the main drag. A location that seems unpleasantly appropriate, given the cultural hostility to women in the UK financial industries – reading Linda McDowell’s Capital Culture is one of the most disturbing introductions to gendered discrimination or inequality in that milieu. All business school students should read it… anyway, I like that the library is within reach of everyone working in the Gherkin and the other various glass and steel phallic symbols around there.

Being in the library is a lovely sensory experience – quiet, calm, pleasant. (I’m thinking here ‘the way libraries used to be’ but that makes me sound old and grumpy.) In any event, a very nice place for thinking. The impression from reading pieces on this website is that academics interested in the experience of work never switch off their brains — Dawn Lyon in a B&B quizzing an innocent hotel inspector about his work, Lynne Pettinger getting lost and starting to think about work and sound,Tim Strangleman walking around galleries thinking about organizational death. The experience I had in the library that day was similar.

The exhibition was a corker — called Office Politics: Women in the Workplace 1860–2004, it was a brilliantly put together mixture of furniture (with desks designed specifically to ensure women’s modesty and protect men’s marriages – as an antidote, this is good fun: http://www.linux.otherspace.co.uk/officepolitics/), antique office machinery, clothes, self-help books, all sorts of stuff to position women in relation to work, organization, men. So much stuff I didn’t know about. And also, a little paper timeline with key events marked over the 150 year period. One event and date stood out for me – 1961, Barclays removes the marriage bar.

You’ve probably heard of the marriage bar, but I hadn’t. Turns out there used to be a formal rule in lots of organizations that women had to leave on getting married. No question, no debate, no exceptions — marry and you have to go. And the year when the board of Barclays decided this wasn’t really a good idea — 1961 – just 2 years before my mum got married, not long before I was born. Well within living memory. In some organizations you could come back as a temporary employee without any benefits or security (‘Thank you sir!’), but for most the bar was a barrier that couldn’t be jumped or worked around. The Foreign Office was especially reluctant to remove it, waiting until the Sex Discrimination Act in the early 1970s sort of outlawed its implementation. Hmm.

So, marry and go do some domestic and reproductive labour, or stay single and you can stay in your job. With a colleague from Exeter, Emma Jeanes, I started to do some digging in the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex, an archive that’s been called a ‘structure of feeling’ rather than a systematic dataset. One diary lodged there, written between 1938 and 1944, tells a wonderful story of a woman working in the civil service. She fell in love with a married man, became pregnant, and told her boss – who promptly asked for her resignation under the marriage bar rules. This woman, who must have been very sparky, refused, on the reasonable basis that she wasn’t married but pregnant, and there was no rule about pregnant women having to leave. Rational argument for a bureaucratic setting! She kept her job, gave birth to twins, and continued to work for the Civil Service, by all accounts doing a very good job (in both spheres of life, work and family – her children are currently editing her diaries for publication, when they can find time — they’re both senior academics, at Imperial College and Oxford). Another diarist, who stayed single and therefore kept her job, was brave enough to call herself a ‘Feminist’ (with a capital F) in her workplace in 1940s Glasgow. (Weirdly, this diarist lived at the top of the hill my mother was born at the bottom of – strange feeling to read her diary, as she describes sitting on the bus going past my granny’s house.) I really like this woman, from reading her diary, because she prods her colleagues all the time about their views on women and work – making trouble, causing conflict, challenging, then writing it all up. She would have made a good academic or researcher. Her brother did, from what she says – he worked at Glasgow University, first in the engineering faculty, then as an industrial psychologist of all things. Whereas his sister seems to have spent her working life as a clerk, writing wonderful diaries and being a Feminist. 

We’re not entirely sure where this research is heading, but it does feel like it’s taking us into interesting areas empirically and theoretically. We’re finding that women writing about their experience of work responded to the marriage bar in very different ways. Some argued for it, telling workmates that it was unethical for a woman to ‘take a man’s job’ when she didn’t need to earn independently; others were strongly opposed, wanting to maintain financial and social independence from husbands. The women report very different responses from their male colleagues, from extremely conservative to relatively radical. Above all, reading the diaries has given us a healthy respect for the variety of human experience and response to regulation. In short, as ever, we’re finding that a societal and organizational desire to impose a norm, to create a divide according to biological sex, was continually contested, circumvented, and undermined.

We’re on the lookout now for people who actually had to leave work because they got married. So if you know of any friends or relatives with this experience who would be willing to tell their stories, please contact either me or Emma Jeanes.

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[1] Taylor, S. (2010) ‘Gendering in the holistic milieu: A critical realist analysis of homeopathic work’, Gender, Work & Organization, 17(4).
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/815/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/800 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/800#comments Sun, 25 Apr 2010 20:19:08 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=800 I know a few Nottingham lads, mostly living in London these days. My friends had granddads who worked in one of the big Nottingham light industries: for Players, Boots or Raleigh, unless they were unlucky and had to go down the mines. I’ve had a lot of fights with my Nottingham friends about the cultural identity of the midlands. Being from Yorkshire means I look down on the light industries; the midlands are not northern enough, they just aspire to be (see Stuart Maconie’s Pies and Prejudice). My friends reckon that the shared coalmining heritage, as the picture suggests, brings Nottingham into the north, and that just begs the answer “scabs” (see GB84 by David Peace for a fictionalised account of the miners’ strike for more).


Alan Sillitoe[i], who died today, makes the case for Nottingham being psychogeographically northern better than anyone else. The world of Arthur Seaton in Saturday Night and Sunday morning already discussed on the site, is what my friends’ granddads had when they were back from the war: they were skilled on the production line, got a good pay packet and tipped it up to their mothers, and then to the wife, getting 5 shillings back for fags and booze.

In ‘Mr Raynor the school teacher’, one of the short stories that are part of ‘the Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner’ collection[ii], there are hints as to the changing relations of power in post-war Nottingham: the incipient decline in authority and the rise in women’s employment concomitant with increasing sexualisation in the public sphere. Mr Raynor’s class don’t mind how his attention drifts from teaching, they’re not committed to school. Mr Raynor is one of the few almost-sympathetic authority figures in Sillitoe’s early work; sympathetic because he isn’t quite in control (as the student Bullivant, with his “Teddy boy ideas” susses out). It’s an open secret that Mr Raynor likes to watch the girls working at the department store across the road from his school. The shopgirls come and go; work for them just fills in a space between leaving school and getting married (or getting pregnant). He has his favourites amongst them and the story focuses on his memory of the best:

As she walked she had carried her whole body in a sublime movement conducive to the attraction of every part of it, so that he was even aware of heels inside her shoes and finger-tips buried perhaps beneath a bolt of opulent cloth.

Sillitoe, 2007: 69

The shop worker here is as much the object of consumption as the bolts of cloth and the suits she sells. As the class misbehaves and distracts him, Mr Raynor tries hard to hold onto the image of the nameless girl, who is both the cause of his distraction and the thing that keeps him going through the daily grind. The voyeuristic gaze isn’t enough, though by the time the (married) Mr Raynor has plucked up the courage to talk to his favourite, she’s stepping out with a young man and he’s missed his chance. And then, this emancipated, sexy young woman, earning her living at the coalface of the new consumer society, becomes a woman punished: she’s killed by her young man. Mr Raynor mourns her, but his life continues its cycle of keeping just enough control of the classroom to leave time for more daydreaming.

References

1. Maconie, S. (2007) Pies and Prejudice: In Search of the North. Ebury Press.
2. Peace, D. (2005) GB84. Faber and Faber.
3. Sillitoe, A. (2007 [1959]) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Harper Perennial.

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[i] I saw Alan Sillitoe at the Essex Book Festival in 2008. He gave a charming talk about his writing, tolerated all the questions being about his early work very patiently, and ended by demonstrating his hobby: morse code. It was a splendid vision of his private passion.

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[ii] The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner itself speaks to the chip on every rebel or awkward sod’s shoulder.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/800/feed 3 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708#comments Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:45:55 +0000 Lynne Pettinger http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=708 H&M, the Scandinavian fast fashion brand has just opened a store in the town I live in. It opened a few days after a fire killed 21 employees of a knitwear factory in Bangladesh which is subcontracted by H&M to make those cute stripy jumpers, and that really useful little black cardy.



My friend called me last Saturday,

‘let’s meet in Hennes’, she said.

I agreed. I thought I’d just have a look and not say anything to her. But I couldn’t help myself (story of my life).

‘I’m not buying anything here, after all those people died’.

That made it impossible for my friend to even try anything on (I think she might go back without me; and I will confess to her now I was wearing something I’d bought in H&M last year the next time we met).

I’ve read Naila Kabeer’s (2000)The Power to Choose, and was persuaded so well by her arguments against reading Bangladeshi working women as cultural dopes, stepping blindly into exploitative paid work whilst carrying the burden of housework and facing down challenges to their reputations as good women. Kabeer’s incorporation of how culture is “woven into the content of desire itself” (2000: 328) is persuasive. Women chose paid work outside the home and still counted as good, they liked working in a clean place for good wages far more than labouring in a field, and took pleasure in contributing to meeting their family’s desire for more income.

Kabeer gives the garment workers agency and voice. They are not an innately malleable, grateful, reserve army of nimble fingered knitters; they are not victims of a disorganized capitalism where feminism and neoliberalism combine to turn “a sow’s ear into a silk purse by elaborating a new romance of female advancement and gender justice” (Fraser, 2009). For Fraser, the normalisation of the dual income family working for low wages in insecure employment marks a failure of feminism, for (without realising it) privileging choice no matter what.

When War on Want describe sickening factory conditions and I read of these injuries and deaths, this is damage, and Fraser’s is the line that persuades me. As I don’t want my consumption practices to cause harm, that means no to H&M. In turn that means job losses, either because political pressure on H&M makes them choose a new subcontractor (one less famous for its working conditions), or because of the fall in demand caused by my bleeding, liberal, western heart. This is damage too. I’m not adding much to an unanswerable debate other than easing my own conscience by playing out the tensions: strong conclusions are impossible when there’s only a choice between forms of damage.

References

1. Fraser, Nancy (2009) ‘Feminism, Capitalism and the Cunning of History’. New Left Review 56.
2. Kabeer, Naila (2000) The Power to Choose. Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market Decisions in London and Dhaka. London: Verso.
]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/708/feed 0 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/674 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/674#comments Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:58:56 +0000 Dawn Lyon http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=674


‘Christy, Southwest Airlines’ — Brian Finke



I was looking for images of ‘bodywork’ recently for a seminar discussion with students and came across Brian Finke’s collection on Flight Attendants (see: http://www.brianfinke.com/). I was drawn to this photograph because of the circularity of the different forms of labour it reveals. Bodywork as the work of maintaining a body in the right shape for the job (Shilling, 1993) – also a form of ‘aesthetic labour’ (Witz et al, 2003) — is clear, quite literally, in the pre-defined form of the eyebrow. At the same time, bodywork in Wolkowitz’s (2002) elaboration of the term, where one person’s body is the site of another’s person’s labour, is shown in the hands undertaking the shaping of the eyebrow. But this looks like something that’s happening (or staged as happening) between colleagues. So it also suggests a moment at work infused with intimacy, a back-stage time of informal preparation and relationship, before the aircraft interior itself becomes a formal workspace and the performance really begins.

References
Shilling, C. (1993) The Body and Social Theory, London: Sage.
Witz, A, C Warhurst, D Nickson (2003) ‘The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization’ Organization, 10(1): 33–54.
Wolkowitz, C. (2002) ‘The social relations of body work’, Work, Employment and Society 16(3): 497–510.

]]> http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/674/feed 1 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/616 http://nowaytomakealiving.net/post/616#comments Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:45:02 +0000 Miriam Glucksmann http://nowaytomakealiving.net/?p=616 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.

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