Female Workers and Unions

The reason why it represents the matter of crucial importance for the unions to seek into organizing the unorganized is that by doing it, unions increase the extent of their own bargaining power – hence, ensuring their continuous existence.

Even though that unorganized workers may appear utterly powerless and unprivileged, the fact that they are being represented in great numbers implies their potential to exert a powerful influence onto the very essence of socio-economic dynamics in a particular society.

According to Lee (2007): “As working-class interests are organized and channeled into political arenas, citizens are provided more realistic sets of political alter­natives, which drive heated contests between political forces seeking electoral power” (p. 592).

Nowadays, the validity of an earlier statement appears particularly self-evident, because due to an ongoing introduction of technology into just about every sphere of industrial manufacturing and commerce, commonly referred to as ‘post-industrialization’, the representatives of a working class continue to grow progressively underpowered, in social sense of this word.

Even as far back as in early eighties, Gorz (1982) was able to define the subtleties of such a tendency with perfect clarity: “Workers no longer ‘produce’ society through the mediation of the relations of production; instead the machinery of social production as a whole produces ‘work’ and imposes it in a random way upon random, interchangeable individuals” (p. 71).

The reading of Reiter’s (1986) article, will confirm the full validity of Gorz’s insight. According to the author, the fact Burger King’s employment strategy is being closely associated with high turnover rate among workers does not even slightly undermine the extent of company’s overall competitiveness.

On the contrary – it is namely because King Burger can well afford replacing employees with new ones, due to high standardization of work-related procedures (just about anyone can be trained to flip burgers within the matter of minutes) and due to the abundance of an unskilled workforce (newly arrived immigrants from Third World countries), which provides this company with the strong competitive edge: “Since the motion of the factory proceeds from the machinery and not from the worker, working personnel can continually be replaced.

Frequent change in workers will not disrupt the labor process – a shift in organization applauded” (p. 312). Just as it used to be the case during the era of ‘classical capitalism’, today’s large commercial companies that feature high automatization of manufacturing processes, deliberately strive to ‘atomize’ employees so that they would not be able to unite, while pursuing some common professional agenda.

And, an ongoing process of Western economies becoming increasingly technology-intensive and service-oriented (Globalization) helps corporate employers rather substantially in their attempts to disfranchise the very notion of workers’ solidarity.

As it was pointed out by Ebbinghaus and Jelle Visser (1999): “The transition from an industrial to a service economy erodes the basis for union organization (p. 141).

Given the fact that in very near future, the demand for low-skilled labor would virtually cease to exist, it will create objective preconditions for millions and millions of people to be left without even a formal source of income.

Yet, once organized into unions, even low-skilled workers will realize themselves capable to effectively oppose corporate greediness. After all, it does not represent much of a challenge to break a single tree-branch. However, many of such branches, binded into a bundle, would prove quite impossible to break.

One of the major challenges, experienced by women who seek unionizing, is the fact that very often; employers refuse to recognize them as professional employers, in full sense of this word. This especially appears to be the case in Third World countries, where there is an acute lack of legislations, meant to ensure women’s civil rights.

In her article, Datta (2003) provides us with the example of how India’s governmental authorities brush aside the very idea that working women should be referred to as ‘workers’ per se:

“When… 600 (female) garment workers approached the Labor Commissioner of Gujarat to register the garment worker’s union, the Commissioner did not recognize them as workers; they were simply women, who stayed ‘home and stitched garments’” (p. 354).

It goes without saying, of course, that governmental authorities resort to rationale-driven reasoning, while justifying their often strongly defined unwillingness to recognize that fact that women are being just as valuable of employees as men are.

For example, it is being commonly suggested that, during the course of their menstrual periods, women become utterly irrational and therefore, unsuited for executing particularly demanding professional duties. This, however, does not conceal the fact that this kind of reasoning, behind women’s employment-related dehumanization, derives out of men’s deep-seated sense of sexism.

In fact, this can be well referred to as another major obstacle, on the way of women’s union-movement.

In her article, where she elaborates onto gradual transformation of Justice for Janitors (J4J) union from essentially men-governed body into organization where women are being more or less equally represented among its policy-makers, Cranford (2007) points out to the fact that women-janitors never ceased experiencing subtle sexism, on the part of their male coworkers and simultaneously J4J members.

According to the author, even though women played rather major role, while participating in J4J-sponsored rallies against an unfair treatment of janitors in L.A., they have been rarely given an opportunity to take part in designing union’s policies:

“There was no overt exclusion of or direct discrimination toward women entering more formal positions (in J4J) but neither was there a concerted effort to bring (female) janitors into formal leadership positions and this absence of leadership development had gendered effects” (p. 367).

Therefore, it comes as not a particular surprise that, until recently, J4J paid little attention towards protecting the interests of women-janitors.

Two other unionization-related major challenges, experienced by women, can be defined as unions’ reluctance to recognize childrearing as productive work and the lack of education, on the part of many informal female workers.

As it was pointed out by Cranford in the article, from which we have already quoted: “Men’s wage earning in the public realm of production is valued and visibly contributes to the family’s reproduction while women’s reproductive work of caring for children and housework is unpaid” (p. 363).

This is the reason why it is specifically socially underprivileged male workers (especially those temporarily unemployed), who benefit the most from social assistance programs. According to Glass and Beth (1997):

“US welfare state has been fashioned around direct provision of services to families with heads unable to secure employment” (p. 291).

As a result, low-skilled female employees are being put is clearly disadvantageous position, as compared to what it is being the case with their male counterparts.

And, as it appears from Datta’s article, it is namely the fact that many such female employees in Third World countries lack even basic education, which contributes rather significantly towards their inability to realize a simple fact that, by indulging in childrearing activities, they prove themselves being quite as productive members of society as informal male workers.

After all, the popular perception of employed mothers often implies that the fact that they have to take care of children undermines their professional adequacy.

Nevertheless, as soon as such women attain basic literacy, they become increasingly aware of what constitutes their constitutionally guaranteed rights and freedoms at workplace, which naturally predisposes them towards adopting an active stance, while addressing their unionization-related anxieties.

There can be little doubt as to the fact that the experiences of organizing informal workers in India, or immigrant janitors in the United States, outlined in Cranford and Datta’s articles, do provide lessons as to how unions can adopt new strategies that will increase women’s trade union participation.

For example, as it was shown by Cranford, although women often lack formal power to actively partake in unionizing, they nevertheless posses plenty of an informal one. The reason for this is simple – unlike what it is being the case with most men, women tend to assess unionization-related challenges as being closely related to what they perceive as ‘family issues’.

And, given the fact that, when it comes to ensuring family’s well-being, it is women who end up wearing pants, in allegorical sense of this word, this provides them with an effective tool for leveraging dynamics within a particular union – thus, becoming active players in the process of low-skilled workers’ unionization.

Another important lesson, learned from reading earlier mentioned articles, is the fact that, in order for more and more women to be willing to join trade unions and to be considered eligible for unions’ membership, they should never cease educating themselves about what the concept of empowerment stands for.

The reason for this is simple – after having gained an awareness of this concept’s actual meaning, and after having affiliated themselves with empowerment-facilitating activities, women will be more like to adopt a proper stance, while dealing with work-related challenges.

For example, as it was shown by Datta, Indian female street-vendors used to be initially harassed by police for bribes. And yet, after they joined Self-Employed Women Association (SEWA), and consequentially began exerting political influence, as the body of highly organized workers, the problem with police demanding bribes became substantially less acute:

“SEWA organizers have surveyed women who were subjected to such extortion, held meetings in the presence of the police superintendent, and ensured that the women vendors were not harassed anymore” (p. 356). In other words, women workers are being more then capable of protecting their interests.

However, in order for them to be able to do this, they would have to get rid of an inferiority complex, imposed by male-chauvinistic society. After all, the process of women’s empowerment is consistent with dialectically predetermined laws of history.

As it was pointed out by Bergquist (1993): “The history of women workers’ struggle for control over the way they work is replete with clues to a different, more democratic and sustainable, vision of human progress” (p. 764).

Therefore, even though that, while struggling to unionize, female workers continue to be opposed by the number of counter-progressive forces, there are good reasons to believe that eventually, working women will be able to reach the full spectrum of their objectives, in this respect.

References

Bergquist, C. (1993). Labor history and its challenges: Confessions of a Latin Americanist. The American Historical Review, 98(3), 757-764.

Cranford, C. J. (2007). Constructing union motherhood: Gender and social reproduction in the Los Angeles ‘Justice for Janitors’ movement. Qualitative Sociology, 30(4), 361-381.

Datta, R. (2003). From development to empowerment: The self-employed women’s association in India. International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society, 16(3), 351-368.

Ebbinghaus, B. & Visser, J. (1999). When institutions matter: Union growth and decline in Western Europe, 1950-1995. European Sociological Review, 15(2), 135-158.

Glass, J. & Beth, S. (1997). The family responsive workplace. Annual Review of Sociology, 23, 289-313.

Gorz, Andre. (1982). Farewell to the Working Class. Boston: Pluto Press.

Lee, C. (2007). Labor unions and good governance: A cross-national, comparative analysis. American Sociological Review, 72(4), 585-609.

Reiter, E. (1986). Life in a fast-food factory. In C. Heron & R. Storey (Eds.), On the job: Confronting the labour process in Canada (pp. 309-326). Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.