Abstract
It is a delight to encounter the broad scale of different women’s migrant experiences contained within this book. Putting together research projects which have stretched over time and space, from 1945 to 2007, McDowell offers us a breadth and depth rarely experienced. However, its reach is even longer than this period; Working Lives shows us how the legacies of the British Empire are lived through representations which shape migrant women into workers.
This book is also a powerful reminder of the loss of attention that has crept upon us about women and work. It reminds us to ask where are those fantastically rich ethnographies from the 1980s of women’s working lives exemplified in studies such as Sallie Westwood (1984) on the Grunwick strikers, Anna Pollert (1981) on the tobacco factory workers in Bristol, and the study of migrant car factory workers by Ruth Cavendish (aka Miriam Glucksmann) (Cavendish, 1982). A new generation of feminist analysis of work is now breaking through (Pettinger, Dowling, Hardy – working on service/sex work, for instance), but without the research funding required for long term ethnographies I fear we lose out on understanding the complexity of lives over time. 1 Fortunately here in Linda McDowell’s book we have some of the earlier density brought into the present.
One of the most inadvertent findings of this book is how debt has become so significant to settlement, belonging and survival. I was struck by how what appears to be increased affluence is just increased debt. What is also striking in this book is how gender is revealed as a performance, and not performative as major theories of gender reproduction would suggest. I have argued for some time that performativity only works for those positioned as normative and is disrupted by those who are positioned as the constitutive limit to normativity. Inscriptions of race and class establish gendered differences. In Working Lives Linda McDowell details how West Indian and Caribbean women were symbolically marked as masculine (through colonial history), whereas Latvian women were inscribed as feminine, but not by the pure white of bourgeois femininity, more as the ‘dirty white’ described by Chris Haylett (2001) to distinguish working class women.
This marking of difference impacts upon how the women are understood as ‘potential’ value as labour for capital, but also how they can access different sectors of the labour market. The ‘Baltic Cygnets’ (Latvian women) are able to access the ‘wages of whiteness’ described by Roediger (1991) and Frank (1998). These women, on entry to the UK, are pre-inscribed with value through a colonialism-infused class-ificatory system of race that works through gender. Their access to forms of work is circumscribed by a raced and gendered division of labour.
This racial marking can, however, have surprising effects, as Linda McDowell shows in her analysis of the Grunwick strike (at a photo processing plant in north-west London, which lasted for two years between 1976 and 1978). Although classified as ‘green [naive] labour’ through colonial attributions of docile femininity to Indian women, it was the South Asian women who proved to be the most militant. Their tenacious action was a challenge to management, trade unions and theories of gender and ideology. They refused the interpellation by which they had been positioned. They did not recognize and refused to stand under the sign to which they had been located by histories of gendered and raced classification.
What this also points to is how categories become capacities, unable to contain that which they were established to control. What I mean is how the ‘theories of monstrosity’ have contradiction built into their very design. From the 16th century (Linebaugh and Rediker, 2000), theories of monstrosity were developed by the nation state to criminalize labour in order to make it suitable for transportation to the Virginia colonies and then later developed through racial classification, designed to fine tune it and legitimate the inhumanity of slavery. Yet it is impossible to reduce people to their classificatory representations, although a phenomenal amount of capital and energy continues to be used to try to do so. What Linda McDowell shows is precisely how and when these categories work and fail for women migrant workers.
Not content with ‘just’ racial and gendered classifications, capitalists and their subcontractors attempted to fit the race/gendered classification to job capacities and thus to value. The slave traders in the 1800s classified geographies into capacities into value: Haitians were classified as ‘more troublesome’, for instance, which decreased their exchange value in relation to the more obedient (Roediger and Esch, 2012). Linda shows how the 1953 British Government report (CO1032/119) of the Working Party on Coloured People Seeking Employment in the United Kingdom did exactly the same in their search for not just efficiency and economy, but also for discipline and control.
Through careful analysis Linda McDowell details how these legacies are sustained through the institutionalization of representations into management techniques and working practices. The Grunwick women were inscribed with the legacies of English colonial rule in India, The West Indian nurses were metaphorically engraved with legacies from slavery. The Latvian women carried much less of the historical weight associated with the British Empire and were able to evade the classifications that relied upon recognition by colour. The representations of racism that circulate through our everyday media whereby bodies become recognizable and associated with capacity and value have very powerful effects, as this book shows.
It is the state that makes these representations stick to specific bodies, through institutionalization by migration law and employment reports (as above). Working Lives outlines the relationship between capital and the state as it colour codes workers with un/desirable capacities for both labour and social reproduction. It is the nation state that lubricates the push and pull of labour for capital. It is immigration legislation that is absolutely crucial to the control and supply of labour (hence the debates currently taking place in the UK over the European free flow of labour – where racist rhetoric deployed for political gain pushes up against the requirements of capital).
Working Lives made me think how, since the 1990s, a great deal of our academic attention has been focused on identity rather than on labour. However, identity deals with the end product, the categories that have already been formed through this long gendering and racializing process. We need to go back to understanding whom these classifications were intended to benefit. As Linda McDowell shows, they were designed to enable bodies to be converted into particular forms of labour and hence value for capital. If instead of thinking of ourselves as a singular identity we think of ourselves as classified labour we may re-orient our politics to one that is not dependent upon making claims on a state that brought these very categories of identity into existence. We are labour. Also, if we recognize ourselves as labour we may be more collective, rather than competitive in our political claims. Working Lives shows how easily groups are set in competition with each other for meagre rewards.
I recommend this book wholeheartedly. It offers a superb historical and geographical perspective of labour, gender and race. In particular it reminded me of how the state and capital have rarely swerved, pursuing their own interests repetitively and mercilessly, forever increasing their power and controlling labour in its various forms, while labour has been sent hurtling all over the world trying to survive. This book shows the very detail of these operations, but makes us take stock of how we become invested in and diverted by the very divide and compete that was established to control and rule us. Working Lives is a very powerful reminder of what is important.