Women on the Line

Miriam Glucksmann aka Ruth Cavendish

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134023837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Women on the Line is a pioneering ethnographic classic of the world of work in a British motor components factory. Miriam Glucksmann (aka Ruth Cavendish), a well-known contributor to the study of gender, work and employment, is for the first time revealed as the author, along with the identity of the company, product and factory.

Recording the experience of migrant women from Ireland, the Caribbean, and the Indian subcontinent with the immediacy of a diary, this is a unique account from an observing participant of the daily routines of repetitive work, a strike led by women from below, and the temporalities of work, home, children and leisure. Glucksmann's vivid narrative of life on the assembly line is combined with an analysis of the intersections of gender, ethnicity and class that prefigures subsequent theoretical advances.

This edition contains a new introduction situating the book in contemporary debates and developments and includes original photographs taken on the shop floor at the time.

Chapter One
A factory job

I had been thinking of taking a working-class job for years before I actually went to work in the factory. I had a host of reasons for doing so, both personal and political. Basically they represented a wish to put my feet on more solid ground. I was a product of the 1960s student movement, formed politically and intellectually by involvement in struggles over education, the Vietnam and other anti-imperialist movements, and by the Women’s Liberation Movement. I’d been active in many groups but never joined any of the left-wing groups or parties.

By the mid-1970s I felt that the sort of politics I’d been involved in was approaching an impasse. I’d stayed on in higher education, taken a higher degree and had been teaching sociology at university and polytechnics for eight years. But conditions had changed drastically since the early days. Student struggles now centred on the grants issue. There was little criticism of course content or questioning of how education perpetuates class divisions. My possible political activity was increasingly restricted to union politics over teachers’ conditions and the education cuts. Even teaching Marxism and courses on racism and women’s oppression seemed like a contradiction: students could just regurgitate radical lectures in their exam papers without any change of political outlook. As academic sociology became more parasitic on Marxist and feminist theory, books and topics which had been taboo in 1970 now became required reading, and in the process lost much of their critical impact.

At the same time many intellectuals in Britain had retreated from active political involvement into academic Marxism. They seemed to be delving further and further back into the ‘theory of theory’, worrying about how to construct concepts, and criticising one analytical framework in terms of another. This retreat into theoreticism seemed arid and abstract to me. Keeping a distance from ongoing struggles might further the philosophy of science, but it didn’t contribute much to our understanding of the decline of capitalism on a world scale, or of economic and political forces in Britain today.

Many left-wing intellectuals come from a middle-class background and hold professional jobs—they enjoy sufficient income and spare time to cushion them from the harsh realities of life experienced by the majority of workers. Trying to keep one’s feet on the ground and have a concrete grasp of ongoing working-class struggles had always seemed to me an antidote to a middle-class lifestyle, essential if we were to understand the people on whose behalf we were supposedly theorising. Yet recent theories had revelled in the longest of words, and the most abstract of analyses, with a disregard and even arrogance for working-class people and their everyday problems.

The socialist ‘wing’ of the women’s movement was losing some of its earlier dynamism. We’d never properly succeeded in one of our main aims—to contact and involve working-class women. Was it the demands we made or the way we organised that failed to attract them? Individual feminists had contact with working-class women over housing, childcare and health issues, and many feminists in their capacity as social workers had working-class clients. But there was little opportunity to meet working-class women on an equal footing; as many of us were young, professional and single, our experience of life was quite different from that of our working-class sisters.

My job and politics were limited and frustrating. In some ways, ‘movement’ politics seemed to be a leftover from the late 1960s and early 1970s when we could choose to organise around education, sexuality and other issues not ‘at the point of production’. Since then economic crisis has brought us sharply face to face with the nitty-gritty of economic issues, and working-class struggles at the point of production have returned to the forefront of the political arena. The other issues are not peripheral in the least but we need to find ways to link them with the concrete realities of class in Britain today.

So I was looking for a new way of being involved politically, where I might have daily contact with working-class women over the long term. Learning from them would help me appreciate their experience and understanding of life from the inside for a change. Friends of mine had taken routine office jobs or hospital work, but I decided to look for factory work. I had no experience so it would have to be unskilled or semi-skilled, like the work done by the vast majority of women manual workers; and I was expecting the very low pay—‘married women’s wages’—characteristic of such work.

I didn’t know much about the employment structure in West London where I lived, and walked round the local trading estates to look for a job. I was surprised to see that most of the women workers in the largest trading estate, which I shall call Victoria Trading Estate, were of Caribbean or Asian origin—few factories had even a small proportion of white women. It would be difficult enough for me to be accepted by working-class women, but I was worried that the barriers would be that much greater if I was one of the few whites. Black and Asian women would have more reasons to be suspicious of me, on account of my colour as well as my background, education and speech. It would be easier to fit in where there were some other white women.

I decided on Universal Mechanical and Electrical Components Limited (UMEC), a large factory some distance from Victoria Trading Estate, which employed mainly women, black, white and Asian. The factory manufactured a component for the motor industry—the ‘unidentifiable mechanical object’ or UMO.*

Getting the job itself was straightforward; I was interviewed in the personnel office and offered clerical work.

I said I’d prefer manual work, and they gave me the choice of operating one machine or working on the assembly line. The line would give closer contact with other women so I chose that. The supervisor took me round the workshop and told me about pay and conditions. My being an ex-teacher didn’t seem to worry them, but they were surprised that I turned down the cleaner, better-paid clerical job. After I’d had a medical and provided a reference, they told me to report for work the following Monday. I could see from the brief guided tour that all the assemblers were women, and that the work was very fiddly and fast.

I worked at UMEC for seven months in 1977–8. At the beginning, my intentions were open-ended; if I fitted in and thought I could become involved with the women in the factory and in the community, I was prepared to make it a long-term commitment. But there was no telling in advance how I’d stand up to the hard physical work and long hours, and I was worried that the women wouldn’t accept me. I’d also have to manage on the low wages. Although I’d been an active socialist feminist for a long time, my outlook must have been influenced by my own experience—of a relatively well-paid job with short hours and long holidays, and by being single and childless. I wondered whether the very different experience meant that the central issues in the women’s movement were not so relevant to working-class women, and if others were more important.

In addition to trying to answer these broad questions and the attempt to be politically involved in a different way, I hoped that working in a large factory would help me think about particular questions of class analysis. Nowadays the working class is much more differentiated than it was a century ago; the vast majority of workers are wage labourers who sell their labour to an employer in exchange for a wage; there are far fewer self-employed, domestic servants and rentiers than in the past. Developments in technology and more mechanised methods of production require workers with different degrees of skill and education, and a whole array of white-collar administrative, scientific and clerical personnel. The state itself has become a major employer over the last few decades. Laundering, food preparation and other work which used to be done in the home is now carried out on a capitalist basis outside the home, and accounts for the vast expansion of the female service sector. These changes have resulted in a labour force, differentiated into many types and levels by different degrees of skill and education, who enjoy widely varying work conditions and wage levels. What are the similarities and differences between the different groups? What forces divide them and what would encourage them to ally?

Some recent Marxist analyses take the fact that both top scientists, say, and night cleaners are wage labourers to be the common denominator, outweighing the differences between them. Others distinguish between sections of the working class on the basis of ideological or political authority given to some groups over others. I thought that much more knowledge and theoretical work were necessary if we were to assess the political implications of this expansion in wage labour. Although all wage labourers fall under the classical definition of the working class, they may have a different relation to production. Is surplus value extracted in a different manner from the different groups? Would this outweigh their common features, and how would it affect their political consciousness? These are not just sociological questions—it is imperative politically to know what specific groupings exist, and what unites and divides them.

My other particular question was about women’s work in Britain. How was the expansion of semi-skilled work for women linked historically with the development of more mechanised methods of production? Power-driven machine tools and assembly lines permitted goods to be mass produced by relatively unskilled workers, but our knowledge of how women have been drawn into factories since the 1930s is scanty. Feminists have documented the way women were used to substitute for male engineering workers as a ‘reserve army of labour’ during the two world wars. We’ve also analysed domestic labour, women’s unpaid work in the home reproducing labour power, and drawn attention to the enormous expansion since 1945 in the employment of married women, part-time women workers and the mushrooming of the service and clerical sectors, the main employers of female labour. However, we know much less about changes in the position of women manual workers—how they have been affected by changes in technology, and deskilling, and what their response has been. We had put forward various reasons for women’s pay being so much lower than men’s, and drawn attention to their economic dependence. But we hadn’t thought much about the links between home and work for low-paid women who work full-time, or how work, home, family and low pay affect each other.

These kinds of questions were at the back of my mind while I worked in the factory and I returned to them after I left. I didn’t expect to find the answers there, or expect any thoughts to fall neatly into preconceived categories, but working there gave me some insights and helped me think about such issues. My experience of the work was the same as that of all the other women in the factory and it affected my outside life in much the same way; it was a means of livelihood for me as for them, but I was also observing what went on while they had no pressing need to do so.

My account of the factory and the work is therefore that of an outsider. It is limited because of this, and limited also because I was there for such a short time. It would have taken much longer to come to grips properly with the work process and occupational hierarchy and how these affected the different groups of workers. I tried to find out as much as I could by asking the other women, and by keeping my eyes open but some questions could have been answered only by supervisors or management.

So there may be factual inaccuracies in my descriptions. For example, the women said that the line speed had increased over the years, which may well be true. On the other hand, it may be that the jobs each woman has to do have been enlarged. Similarly, I knew how much we were paid, but only on hearsay how much the autoparts were sold for. We hadn’t a clue about the cost of raw materials or components, so I was not in a position to work out the profit margins. I’ve tried to outline the different grades of men that worked in the factory—engineers, technicians, and so on. Again, this relied on asking people who didn’t really care how many different grades of men workers there were; in any case, it took me about six weeks to tell the difference between a progress chaser and a maintenance engineer. After I left, I did some background reading on the motor industry in Britain, and the car components industry, and read up UMEC’s company reports.

The idea of writing a book about the factory didn’t occur to me while I was working there. To start with, I didn’t even keep a diary. After a few weeks I felt as if I’d always worked there, and thought I’d better note things down before I forgot my first impressions entirely. Every week I jotted down what had happened, discussions we had had, stories the women had told, as well as rows with the supervisors. Most of my diary was about how my neck ached and how tired I was. I wrote next to nothing about the actual work or how it was organised. So after I gave up the job I spent a couple of weeks writing in more detail about the work process, how the place was organised and about the relationships between the women. That account forms the basis of this book. Friends read it and encouraged me to write it up more formally—but I was quite reluctant.

Writing a book has the danger of giving more weight than is warranted to one short experience and one particular factory. It would be quite inappropriate to generalise about the lives of working-class women from UMEC. Also I didn’t want to betray the friendship and trust of the women by describing them from the outside and risk objectifying them. In the end, I’ve written it up to show how much I learnt from the women, and how much their friendship meant to me, and hope to make a small contribution to feminist understanding of what life is like for low-paid semiskilled factory workers.

None of the women ever accused me of dropping in and out of the working class, though I’m aware that this was how it could appear; rather they thought I was ‘wasting’ my education. But there’s no getting away from the fact that someone like me could choose to work in a factory and then choose to give it up—choices not open to other factory workers, and which would always mark off people from an intellectual or middle-class background from those who worked there of necessity.

I was very much in two minds about leaving: I knew how much I would miss the company of the other women, and that in time the work would have become a bit easier for me. The women already wanted me to be shop steward, and if I had stayed it would have been with the intention of working through the union to try and improve conditions. But the union organisation was such that to get anywhere I’d have needed to make it a long-term commitment—five or even ten years. I didn’t think I could stand the assembly line that long—repeating the same operations for eight hours day in day out was bad enough after seven months. The job also involved a much greater change in my whole life than I had anticipated. Exhaustion and lack of time made it difficult to come to a major decision like that—there was never a moment to sit back and think it through properly. In the end, I decided to look for another factory where conditions might be a bit better, but, as I explain later on, I couldn’t find another job.

For me, working in the factory wasn’t dropping in and out—I’d certainly be prepared to do it again and next time I’ll know better what to expect. Taking that kind of job must be one of the best ways for feminists to have day-to-day contact with working-class women, and for left-wing intellectuals to establish an active and continuous relationship with working-class people.

* In ‘Freedom of Speech’ I’ve explained why I have had to give the factory a fictitious name and location, and also disguise the nature of the product.

Chapter Two
The company

Universal Mechanical and Electrical Components Limited is a large ‘multi-business’ company with many factories in the UK and employing around 20,000 people. Its turnover exceeded £250m. during the year 1977–8, and £23m. were made in pre-tax profits, an increase of £9m. since 1975. The company holds a major position in the production of UMOs for the UK and is one of the main suppliers to British Leyland and other manufacturers of cars and commercial vehicles. UMEC is one of a small number of companies making autoparts which hold an effective monopoly in the British motor industry.

According to the company reports, the firms comprising the company manufacture a wide variety of products in addition to components for the motor trade—painting and decorating materials, hydraulic equipment and ventilation systems, and industrial instruments. The firm is in the forefront of research and development of advanced electronic equipment for the space industry and for medical science, and it has large contracts, both civil and military, for electronic instruments. UMEC manufactures underwater exploration equipment and has pioneered new submarine technology for North Sea oil. Heavy investment in research has paid off in large contracts recently secured with the major companies engaged in these new areas of industry.

The fortunes of the vehicle component side of the company have mirrored fluctuations in the motor industry as a whole. There was a setback between 1974–6 as a result of the three-day week, the energy crisis and rapid inflation but UMEC’s profits in vehicle components had recovered from a low of £500,000 in 1975 to over £3m. by 1977.

The general decline of the British motor industry, as well as these ups and downs, has encouraged UMEC to seek larger export markets for their autoparts (particularly in the Common Market), and to diversify production. Manufacture of submarine and electronic equipment uses comparable technology to autoparts, but also suffers from fluctuations in demand. So they have embarked on the manufacture of other products, such as glass and electronic musical instruments, in an effort to secure stable demand independent of fluctuations in the motor and electronics industries, and to even out their profit cycle.

As a major private British company then, UMEC is quite healthy. It owns many factories and manufactures under a large number of trade marks. It has worldwide distribution, and owns subsidiaries in Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and elsewhere. Over the last decade, the firm has increased its profitability and succeeded in reducing its workforce, the number of employees falling from 25,100 in 1969 to 19,900 in 1978. The number of individual shareholders fell over the same period: by 1978, 85 per cent of its shares were owned by insurance companies, pension funds, unit trusts and other such bodies.

In the USA and Europe motor manufacturers on the whole produce and assemble their own components, and do not depend on specialist component firms. British motor manufacturers, on the contrary, rely heavily on the independent components firms. The industry has a low level of ‘vertical integration’: Vauxhall is the most dependent, ‘buying-in’ 85 per cent of its components, and British Leyland buys-in 65 per cent. This situation gives all the vehicle component firms a central position in the motor industry.

Ford, however, manufactures practically the whole car and then assembles it. Even so, it has turned to ‘dual sourcing’, attempting to ensure that components are supplied by more than one outlet, so bottlenecks or strikes in one factory won’t dry up the source and prevent them assembling vehicles. Other motor manufacturers in Europe are following Ford’s example.

In recent years, British components firms have attempted to penetrate the foreign market, and to establish themselves as a dual source for Ford and other companies. This is seen as the only way to offset reduced demand from declining sales of new vehicles in the UK; so exports are a rapidly growing part of the components industry. UMEC has been particularly successful in penetrating the European market—it has contracts with many Continental motor companies and with Ford in Britain. The company has also consolidated its position with British Leyland since the latter was taken into public ownership; Leyland continues to account for a very large, but declining, proportion of UMEC’s orders for autoparts.

The site in West London housed UMEC’s general headquarters as well as the main factory for the production of UMOs. The place must have been built soon after the turn of the century, and I imagine that UMOs were made there from the early days of the British motor industry. I would guess about 1,800 people were employed in the complex as a whole, about 800 of them on the shopfloor. Apart from the clerical workers, computer staff and the managers, there were engineers, draughtsmen and various grades of craftsmen and technicians, in addition to the manual workers.

As you went through the factory gates, there was a ‘road’ with buildings flanking either side. On the left, was the large modern office block and computer centre. Then came the factory called ‘Assembly 2’, where instruments were made for Ford, and the sprocket shop where sprockets for UMOs were assembled. Beyond these was the engineering block which manual workers never entered, and behind it, parallel to a side road, the depot for ‘Goods Inwards’ where lorries arrived to unload their components for the stores.

On the right-hand side of the ‘road’, opposite the office block, were the canteens, one for ‘staff’ and another for manual workers. Then there was a huge block housing the personnel office, first aid, and several of the workshops. The ‘machine shop’ was in there, and so was the ‘spray shop’ where metal cases for UMOs were spray painted and the valve shop. The largest shop, the ‘main assembly’, where I was to work along with all the other women workers, was in there too.

Final assembly of UMOs went on in this main assembly; the other shops in the factory either made or subassembled components for final assembly. Most of the modules and diactors seemed to be made on the site, as did the basic mechanism for the UMO. Metal cases for lorry UMOs and for the Mini were made in the machine shop, and so were some of the metal clips and lugs. A large number of components came from UMEC’s o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Introduction to 2009 edition: From experience to reflection: changes and continuities in women’s work
• Preface to 1982 edition: Freedom of speech
• 1 A factory job
• 2 The company
• 3 Jobs on the line
• 4 Getting to know the women
• 5 The division of labour
• 6 The dictatorship of production
• 7 Bonus and wages
• 8 The union and the dispute
• 9 What to make of it?