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The article reviews the book, "Formations of Class & Gender," by Beverley Skeggs.
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Examines the struggle for equal pay for women in a large office union composed of female clerical and male technical and manual workers. The Office and Technical Employees' Union pursued "equal pay for equal job evaluation" for over thirty years from 1949 to 1981, while the employer, B.C. Electric/Hydro, systematically restructured unequal pay. At the same time, union negotiating practices and priorities also reinforced the gendered hierarchy in the workplace, and equal pay for women remained a sectoral "women's issue" rather than a core general union issue.
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The history of labour in Canada is most often understood to mean – and presented as – the history of blue-collar workers, especially men. And it is a story of union solidarity to gain wages, rights, and the like from employers. In Contracting Masculinity, Gillian Creese examines in depth the white-collar office workers union at BC Hydro, and shows how collective bargaining involves the negotiation of gender, class, and race. Over the first 50 years of the office union's existence male and female members were approximately equal in number. Yet equality has ended there. Women are concentrated at the lower rungs of the job hierarchy, while men start higher up the ladder and enjoy more job mobility; men's office work has been redefined as a wide range of 'technical' jobs, while women's work has been concentrated in a narrow range of 'clerical' positions. As well, for decades Canadian Aboriginals and people of colour were not employed by BC Hydro, which has resulted in a racialized-gendered workplace. What is the role of workers and their trade unions in constructing male and female work, a process that is often seen as the outcome solely of management decisions? How is this process of gendering also racialized, so that women and men of different race and ethnicity are differentiallv privileged at work? How do males in a white-collar union create and maintain their own image of masculinity in the face of a feminized occupation and a more militant male blue-collar union housed within the same corporation? What impact does the gender composition of union leadership have on collective bargaining? How do traditions of union solidarity affect attempts to bargain for greater equity in the office? These are the central questions that Contracting Masculinity seeks to answer in this in-depth look at a Canadian union. --Publisher's description
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Presents seven papers from the workshop: "Feminist Reflections on the Writing of Canadian Working Class History in the 1980s" by Kathryn McPherson, "Peculiarities of British Columbians" by James R. Conley, "The British Columbia Working Class: New Perspectives on Ethnicity/Race and Gender" by Gillian Creese, "Teaching Working Class History in B.C." by Peter Seixas, "Labour Programmes: A Challenging Partnership" by Elaine Bernard, "Labour Historians and Unions: Assessing the Interaction" by Michael J. Piva, and "The New Brunswick Experience" by Raymond Leger.
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