Jackie West (ed.): Work, Women and the Labour Market, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, £4.95; Ruth Cavendish: Women on the Line, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981, £5.95.
Work, Women and the Labour Market is a book to dip into rather than read from cover to cover. Although its audience is likely to be mainly academic, it is not obscure or esoteric. All the contributions are based on concrete research about women working in different situations, and together they cover a wide range of theoretical and political problems. Many also offer strategies for action: a healthy move away from 'pure' contemplative sociology.
The issues covered include the relationship between gender and notions of 'skill'; the impact of new technology in the office; the double oppression of racial and sexual discrimination experienced by Asian and West Indian women; and questions of personal and everyday life. One chapter, called 'The "understanding" employer', vividly describes the details of childcare arrangements for [illegible] their husbands' worlds of wage labour [illegible] special action to ensure that women's demands are recognised and make their mark in the working class struggle. The book does not make gripping reading, but it is one of very few books which looks at women and work, and combines theoretical analysis with real voices and experiences.
Women on the Line by Ruth Cavendish is a personal account of the author's experience of working in a factory. It is vivid and lively and evokes very well the atmosphere on the shop floor, the relationship between women workers, the debilitating pressure of the work, and the endless stretching of the minutes.
But for all this, it is impossible to avoid comment on the book's paranoid anonymity. After consultation with libel lawyers, not only has the name of the firm in question been disguised, but elaborate steps have been taken to make the work process and products completely unrecognisable.
True, many sociological studies have used the convention of pseudonyms for companies and towns — such as 'Chemco' and 'Provincial' in Nichols and Beynon's Living with Capitalism. But this has always followed a written guarantee to management of disguise as a condition of entry for the purposes of research which was not given in this case. More importantly, there is a growing tradition of investigative analysis of the realities of [illegible] worlds of wage labour — including Haraszti's A Worker in A Worker's State, Beynon's Working for Ford, Beynon and Wainwright's Worker's Report on Vickers, and my own Girls, Wives, Factory Lives — in which making names and pointing the finger are central to the meaning of the books.
To cave in to the potential threat posed by the libel laws, as the publishers of this book have done, is to set an appalling precedent for research and investigative journalism. And to turn an apology into a 'political point' as Cavendish attempts to do in a preface entitled 'Freedom of Speech' and to claim that 'the book itself now stands as evidence of the limitations on freedoms of speech and who benefits from these limitations', is a feeble whimper and an insult to those writers and publishers who have taken, and still are taking, [illegible] extremely damaging which is a great pity as it is well written. I can well appreciate the skill that must have gone into organising the author's anecdotal diary material into a book. The distinctive character of women's work and the 'women's factory' come over well, and there was a familiar ring to the likes and dislikes between individuals, the many private, idiosyncratic, and often fatalistic ways of surviving a life out of control, the importance of food and sweets and the clock, and the need to plan and regulate the small space of private life that was left. The divorce of the rank and file from the union and the failure of a strike are also convincingly chronicled — except, that is, that we are not even allowed to know the name of the union! The sexual and racial oppression of the women do come across, but as we cannot tell what anyone is doing, they could for all we know be sci-fi characters acting out a fiction.
True, there is much that is shared in common between all 'semi' or 'unskilled' work, and indeed all commodity production. But the fact that, in the author's words, 'operations like calibrating torque and screwing down transistors are intentionally gobbledegook', and that the products of the firm, UMEC, are UMO's (Unidentifiable Mechanical Objects!) means that the core of the book — wage labour — loses credibility. An element of remoteness lurks at the heart of a book which depends on the concrete for its conviction. I wonder, at this point, for whom the book is intended; I cannot imagine political or union activists seriously discussing unidentifiable places, processes, products and profits — particularly not at £5.95 for 172 pages. And as a (now unemployed) lecturer, I am doubtful that a class of sceptical students would be convinced of the realities of a factory and the lives inside it by a book about work which hides that work.
Finally, the political level of the book is poor. Despite the fact that the writer has been 'active in socialist politics and the Women's Liberation Movement since the late 1960s' and had given up 'teaching in a polytechnic to work as an assembler in an attempt to gain a concrete understanding of the daily life of working class women' as the blurb-writer tells us, there is a complete lack of political analysis or commentary. Her reticence to make any intervention at shop-floor level when she clearly had the background and experience to make at least some contribution smacked of a workerist deference to manual work. The narrowness and shallowness of Cavendish's analysis and concept of class conflict is encapsulated in her final statement that 'the experience changed me and my political outlook, challenging my understanding of the relation between race, sex and class and of the different groups within wage labour. It also showed me that we would need to build a new relationship between intellectuals and the working class in order to deepen this understanding.'
Quite apart from the meaninglessness of this conclusion, I searched in vain throughout the book for some terrible or shocking revelation to warrant the publisher's fear of litigation. All I could find was that factory work is hard, boring and badly paid, and an implication that a few improvements in conditions and friendlier management would put things right. Hardly a call for struggle, nor a crushing indictment of capitalism, nor for that matter of UMEC and the rest of the UMO industry.
ANNA POLLERT is an active socialist and author of Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (MacMillan, 1981).