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Thirty Years on from Women on the Line and Girls, Wives, Factory Lives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2012

Anna Pollert
Anna Pollert
Affiliation:
University of the West of England
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Extract

What is the lived experience of routine wage labour? Why does it matter? In the mid-1970s, Miriam Glucksmann/Ruth Cavendish, committed as a socialist and feminist and frustrated at the political isolation of academia from working class life, went to find out. She worked in a factory, and while not originally intending to write about it, ended up producing a rich ethnography: Women on the Line. Why was it important, and does it remain so? In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson explained his choice of title: “Making, because it is the study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.” It is this interaction between agency and structure that is important to understanding how consciousness, identity, and action work—including the possibilities of challenging the status quo. Glucksmann gained the insight into what it felt like to “work on the line”; how work felt, the memories, experiences, everyday realities of her work colleagues; the control of the labour process, class and gender relations and collectivity; how wage exploitation operated; and resistance, including unionization, a dispute, division, and defeat.

Type
Thirty Years on from Women on the Line: Researching Gender and Work
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 81 , Spring 2012 , pp. 174 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2012

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References

NOTES

1. Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1970), 9.Google Scholar

2. Pollert, Anna, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives (Basingstoke, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. See a similar approach in Beynon, Huw, Working for Ford (Harmondworth, 1973, 1984)Google Scholar; Nichols, Theo and Beynon, Huw, Living with Capitalism (London, 1977).Google Scholar

4. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, 85–86.

5. This refers to the 1972 stoppages in support of the “Pentonville Five,” five dockers jailed for contempt of the Industrial Relations Court.

6. Pollert, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, 163, 169.

7. Pollert, , “Team Work on the Assembly Line: Contradictions and the Dynamics of Union Resilience” in The New Workplace and Trade Unionism, ed. Ackers, Peter, Smith, Chris, and Smith, Paul (London, 1996), 178–209.Google Scholar

8. Pollert, , Transformation at Work in the New Market Economies of Central Eastern Europe (London, 1999).Google Scholar

9. Research Project: Economic and Social Research Council (R/000/23/9679). “The Unorganised Worker: Routes to Support and Views on Representation.”

10. Pollert, Anna and Charlwood, Andy, “The Vulnerable Worker in Britain and Problems at Work,” Work, Employment and Society, Vol 23 (2) (2009):343–362Google Scholar; Pollert, Anna, “The Lived Experience of Isolation for Vulnerable Workers Facing Workplace Grievances in 21st Century Britain,” Economic and Industrial Democracy 31 (2010):62–92.Google Scholar