Gender And Work In Today's World

A Reader

Nancy Sacks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429979897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Promoting gender equality through balanced analysis of both sexes, Gender and work in Today's World: A Reader explores the experiences of both men and women in the work force, focussing especially on gender-non-traditional jobs (i.e. men as nursed and women in the police force) and non-traditional work structures (i.e. Part-time, temporary, and odd-hour work), work over the life course, and sexual harassment.

Part I
WOMEN AT WORK

In this opening section of Gender and Work in Today’s World: A Reader, we look at some very different work settings and occupational statuses for women. For women and men, the work they do occupies, quite literally, a significant part of their identity formation in the contexts of both paid work and the social response to these jobs. These selections tell of the cumulative experience of being and feeling marginalized on many levels. In the readings to follow, there is the clear sense that uniting, theoretically, notions of work, identity, and status befit the case that work affects women in specific and meaningful ways.

First, in this excerpt from Nickel and Dimed, we travel with Barbara Ehrenreich through low-wage work as a Wal-Mart clerk in Middle America. This study is the first, but not the only, research that links work and social class with identity as women struggle to have a real and meaningful life within the low means they earn.

The confining power of work identity reveals itself as obvious social construct in our next reading, from Yuko Ogasawara’s Office Ladies: Power, Gender and Work in Japanese Companies. Here, the opportunities and potential for power in employment as “office lady” or “business girl,” even in a large banking firm, for example, go unexploited by women. Ogasawara argues that the immediate separation carried out through selective recruitment in this Japanese work setting tracks women and men into a two-tiered, and fundamentally stratified, modern workplace.

Perhaps immigrant women, like those in “Domestica,” by Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, articulate to us even more disturbingly the stark instances whereby some women are clearly reduced to feelings of inadequacy by the work they do. The constant scrutiny of these domestic workers by their household employers of higher social class not only denigrates the tasks these women perform, despite the instrumental function of these tasks to the household, but also further shapes and weakens the workers’ individual identities.

Finally, in “Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia,” from Working Women: International Perspectives on Labour and Gender Ideology, Wendy Lee looks at one of the oldest sources of employment, in which women find that the work is contingent on both their own economic status and the desire of men to set a marketplace. Poor women have always found work like this. Because of the economic circumstances that define what we do for work, and despite the general notion that work defines men’s identities more, this section clearly describes how work defines a social experience for women as well. Some of the least exceptional jobs provide the most elucidating windows into women’s lives, identities, and their own lack of awareness on the need to connect the two.

1
Nickel and Dimed

Selling in Minnesota

Barbara Ehrenreich

For sheer grandeur, scale, and intimidation value, I doubt if any corporate orientation exceeds that of Wal-Mart. I have been told that the process will take eight hours, which will include two fifteen-minute breaks and a half hour for a meal, and will be paid for like a regular shift. When I arrive, dressed neatly in khakis and clean T-shirt, as befits a potential Wal-Mart “associate,” I find there are ten new hires besides myself, mostly young and Caucasian, and a team of three, headed by Roberta, to do the “orientating.” We sit around a long table in the same windowless room where I was interviewed, each with a thick folder of paperwork in front of us, and hear Roberta tell once again about raising six children, being a “people person,” discovering that the three principles of Wal-Mart philosophy were the same as her own, and so on. We begin with a video, about fifteen minutes long, on the history and philosophy of Wal-Mart, or, as an anthropological observer might call it, the Cult of Dam, First young Sam Walton, in uniform, comes back from the war. He starts a store, a sort of five-and-dime; he marries and fathers four attractive children; he receives a Medal of Freedom from President Bush, after which he promptly dies, making way for the eulogies. But the company goes on, yes indeed. Here the arc of the story soars upward unstoppably, pausing only to mark some fresh milestone of corporate expansion. 1992: Wal-Mart becomes the largest retailer in the world. 1997: Sales top $100 billion. 1998: The number of Wal-Mart associates hits 825,000, making Wal-Mart the largest private employer in the nation.

In orientation we learned that the store’s success depends entirely on us, the associates; in fact, our bright blue vests bear the statement “At Wal-Mart, our people make the difference.” Underneath those vests, though, there are real-life charity cases, maybe even shelter dwellers.¹

So, anyway, begins my surreal existence at the Comfort Inn.

I live in luxury with AC, a door that bolts, a large window protected by an intact screen—just like a tourist or a business traveler. But from there I go out every day to a life that most business travelers would find shabby and dispiriting—lunch at Wendy’s, dinner at Sbarro (the Italian-flavored fast-food place), and work at Wal-Mart, where I would be embarrassed to be discovered in my vest, should some member of the Comfort staff happen to wander in. Of course, I expect to leave any day, when the Hopkins Park Plaza opens up. For the time being, though, I revel in the splendor of my accommodations, amazed that they cost $5.05 less, on a daily basis, than what I was paying for that rat hole in Clearview. I stop worrying about my computer being stolen or cooked, I sleep through the night, the sick little plucking habit loses its grip. I feel like the man in the commercials for the Holiday Inn Express who’s so refreshed by his overnight stay that he can perform surgery the next day or instruct people in how to use a parachute. At Wal-Mart, I get better at what I do, much better than I could ever have imagined at the beginning.

The breakthrough comes on a Saturday, one of your heavier shopping days. There are two carts waiting for me when I arrive at two, and tossed items inches deep on major patches of the floor. The place hasn’t been shopped, it’s been looted. In this situation, all I can do is everything at once—stoop, reach, bend, lift, run from rack to rack with my cart. And then it happens—a magical flow state in which the clothes start putting themselves away. Oh, I play a part in this, but not in any conscious way. Instead of thinking, “White Stag navy twill skort,” and doggedly searching out similar skorts, all I have do is form an image of the item in my mind, transpose this image onto the field, and move to wherever the image finds its match in the outer world. I don’t know how this works. Maybe my mind just gets so busy processing the incoming visual data that it has to bypass the left brain’s verbal centers, with their cumbersome instructions: “Proceed to White Stag area in the northwest corner of ladies’, try bottom racks near khaki shorts ...” Or maybe the trick lies in understanding that each item wants to be reunited with its sibs and its clam members and that, within each clan, the item wants to occupy its proper place in the color/size hierarchy. Once I let the clothes take charge, once I understand that I am only the means of their reunification, they just fly out of the cart to their natural homes.

On the same day, perhaps because the new speediness frees me to think more clearly, I make my peace with the customers and discover the purpose of life, or at least of my life at Wal-Mart. Management may think that the purpose is to sell things, but this is an overly reductionist, narrowly capitalist view. As a matter of fact, I never see anything sold, since sales take place out of my sight, at the cash registers at the front of the store. All I see is customers unfolding carefully folded T-shirts, taking dresses and pants off their hangers, holding them up for a moment’s idle inspection, then dropping them somewhere for us associates to pick up. For me, the way out of the resentment begins with a clue provided by a poster near the break room, in the back of the store where only associates go: “Your mother doesn’t work here,” it says. “Please pick up after yourself.” I’ve passed it many times, thinking, “Ha, that’s all I do—pick up after people.” Then it hits me: most of the people I pick up after are mothers themselves, meaning that what I do at work is what they do at home—pick up the toys and the clothes and the spills. So the great thing about shopping, for most of these women, is that here they get to behave like brats, ignoring the bawling babies in their cars, tossing things around for someone else to pick up. And it wouldn’t be any fun—would it?—unless the clothes were all reasonably orderly to begin with, which is where I come in, constantly re-creating orderliness for the customers to maliciously destroy. It’s appalling, but it’s their nature: only pristine and virginal displays truly excite them.

I test this theory out on Isabelle: that our job is to constantly re-create the stage setting in which women can act out. That without us, rates of child abuse would suddenly soar. That we function, in a way. as therapists and should probably be paid accordingly, at $50—$100 an hour. “You just go on thinking that,” she says, shaking her head. But she smiles her canny little smile in a way that makes me think it’s not a bad notion.

With competence comes a new impatience: Why does anybody put up with the wages we’re paid?. True, most of my fellow workers are better cushioned than I am; they live with their spouses or grown children or they have other jobs in addition to this one. I sit with Lynne in the break room one and find out this is only a part-time job for her—six hours a day—with the other eight hours spent at a factory for $9 an hour. Doesn’t she get awfully tired? Nah, it’s what she’s always done. The cook at the Radio Grill has two other jobs. You might expect a bit of grumbling, some signs here and there of unrest—graffiti on the hortatory posters in the break room, muffled guffaws during our associate meetings—but I can detect none of that. Maybe this is what you get when you weed out all the rebels with drug tests and personality “surveys”—a uniformly servile and denatured workforce, content to dream of the distant day when they’ll be vested in the company’s profit-sharing plan. They even join in the “Wal-Mart cheer” when required to do so at meetings, so I’m told by the evening fitting room lady, though I am fortunate enough never to witness this final abasement.²

But, if it’s hard to think “out of the box,” it may be almost impossible to think out of the Big Box. Wal-Mart, when you’re in it, is total—a closed system, a world unto itself. I get a chill when I’m watching TV in the break room one afternoon and see. . . a commercial for Wal-Mart. When a Wal-Mart shoes up within a television with a Wal-Mart, you have to question the existence of an outer world. Sure, you can drive for five minutes and get somewhere else—Kmart, that is, or Home Depot, or Target, or Burger King, or Wendy’s, or KFC. Wherever you look, there is no alternative to the megascale corporate order, for which every form of local creativity and initiative has been abolished by distant home offices. Even the woods and meadows have been stripped of disorderly life forms and forced into a uniform made of concrete. What you see—highways, parking lots, stores—is all there is, or all that’s left to us here in the reign of globalized, totalized, paved-over, corporate everything. I like to read the labels to find out where the clothing we sell is made—Indonesia, Mexico, Turkey, the Philippines, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Brazil—but the labels serve only to remind me that none of these places is “exotic” anymore, that they’ve all been eaten by the great blind profit-making global machine.

The only thing to do is ask: Why do you—why do we—work here? Why do you stay? So when Isabelle praises my work a second time (!), I take the opportunity to say I really appreciate her encouragement, but I can’t afford to live on $7 an hour, and how does she do it? The answer is that she lives with her grown daughter, who also works, plus the fact that she’s worked here the last two years, during which her pay has shot up to $7.75 an hour. She counsels patience: it could happen to me. Melissa, who has the advantage of a working husband, says, “Well, it’s a job.” Yes, she made twice as much when she was a waitress but that place closed down and at her age she’s never going to be hired at a high-tip place. I recognize the inertia, the unwillingness to start up with the apps and the interviews and the drug tests again. She thinks she should give it a year. A year? I tell her I’m wondering whether I should give it another week.

A few days later something happens to make kindly, sweet-natured Melissa mad. She gets banished to bras, which is terra incognita for us—huge banks of shelves bearing barely distinguishable bi-coned objects—for a three-hour stretch. I know how she feels, because I was once sent over to work for a couple of hours in men’s wear, where I wandered uselessly through the strange thickets of racks, numbed by the sameness of colors and styles.³ It’s the difference between working and pretending to work. You push your cart a few feet, pause significantly with item in hand, frown at the ambient racks, then push on and repeat the process. “I just don’t like wasting their money,” Melissa says when she’s allowed back. “I mean they’re paying me and I just wasn’t accomplishing anything over there.” To me, this anger seems badly mis-aimed. What does she think, that the Walton family is living in some hidden room in the back of the store, in the utmost frugality, and likely to be ruined by $21 worth of wasted labor? I’m starting in on that theme when she suddenly dives behind the rack that separates the place where we’re standing, in the Jordache/No Boundaries section, from the Faded Glory region. Worried that I may have offended her somehow, I follow right behind. “Howard,” she whispers. “Didn’t you see him come by? We’re not allowed to talk to each other, you know.”

“The point is our time is so cheap they don’t care if we waste it,” I continue, aware even as I speak that this isn’t true, otherwise why would they be constantly monitoring us for “time theft”? But I sputter on: “That’s what’s so insulting.” Of course, in this outburst of militance I am completely not noticing the context—two women of mature years, two very hardworking women, as it happens, dodging behind a clothing rack to avoid a twenty-six-year-old management twerp. That’s not even worth commenting on.

Alyssa is another target for my crusade. When she returns to check yet again on that $7 polo, she finds a stain on it. What could she get off for that? I think 10 percent, and if you add in the 10 percent employee discount, we’d be down to $5.60. I’m trying to negotiate a 20-percent price reduction with the fitting room lady when—rotten luck!—Howard shows up and announces that there are no reductions and no employee discounts on clearanced items. Those are the rules. Alyssa looks crushed, and I tell her, when Howard’s out of sight, that there’s something wrong when you’re not paid enough to buy a Wal-Mart shirt, a clearanced Wal-Mart shirt with a stain on it. “I hear you,” she says, and admits Wal-Mart isn’t working for her either, if the goal is to make a living.

Then I get a little reckless. When an associate meeting is announced over the loudspeaker that afternoon, I decide to go, although most of my coworkers stay put. I don’t understand the purpose of these meetings, which occur every three days or so and consist largely of attendance taking, unless it’s Howard’s way of showing us that there’s only one of him compared to so many of us. I’m just happy to have a few minutes to sit down or, in this case, perch on some fertilizer bags since we’re meeting in lawn and garden today, and chat with whoever shows up, today a gal from the optical department. She’s better coifed and made up than most of us female associates—forced to take the job because of a recent divorce, she tells me, and sorry now that she’s found out how crummy the health insurance is. There follows a long story about preexisting conditions and deductibles and her COBRA running out. I listen vacantly because, like most of the other people in my orientation group, I hadn’t opted for the health insurance—the employee contribution seemed too high. “You know what we need here?” I finally respond. “We need a union.” There it is, the word is out. Maybe if I hadn’t been feeling so footsore I wouldn’t have said it, and I probably wouldn’t have said it either if we were allowed to say “hell” and “damn” now and then or, better yet, “shit.” But no one has outright banned the word union and right now it’s the most potent couple of syllables at hand. “We need something,” she responds.

After that, there’s nothing to stop me. I’m on a mission now: Raise the questions! Plant the seeds! Breaks finally have a purpose beyond getting off my feet. There are hundreds of workers here—I never do find out how many—and sooner or later I’ll meet them all. I reject the break room for this purpose because the TV inhibits conversation, and for all I know that’s what it’s supposed to do. Better to go outdoors to the fenced-in smoking area in front of the store. Smokers, in smoke-free America, are more likely to be rebels; at least that was true at The Maids, where the nonsmokers waited silently in the office for work to begin, while the smokers out on the sidewalk would be having a raucous old time. Besides, you can always start the ball rolling by asking for a light, which I have to do anyway when the wind is up. The next question is, “What department are you in?” followed by, “How long have you worked here?”—from which it’s an obvious segue to the bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I Women at Work
• Part II Men at Work
• Part III Women and Men in Nontraditional Jobs
• Part IV Nontraditional Work Structures
• Part V Gender Matters
• Part VII Work/Home Conflict: Time and Domestic Labor
• Part IX Work over the Life Course
• Bibliography
• Index