Getting by in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on the Job. (Book Reviews/Comptes Rendus)

Meg Luxton and June Corman, Getting By in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on Job. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001, 326 pp. What has been impact of economic restructuring on Hamilton steelworkers and their families over 1980s and 1990s? How have women coped with changes, both as paid employees and in sphere of social reproduction? How do these working-class men and women alike make sense out of changes that they have experienced, i.e., what are personal narratives and styles of discourse that are used to justify and defend their own socioeconomic positions? These are questions that inform core Luxton and Corman's analysis. The issues are addressed entirely from Marxist-feminist perspective, particularly through authors' discussion of social reproduction, or the activities required to ensure day-to-day and generational survival of population (p. 29). Much of book assumes critical perspective in examining inherent tensions embedded in relations of production and exchange of labour power via-a-vis unpaid domestic labour required to sustain family unit and to enhance capacity of family members to maintain their labour force attachments. The core arguments are not new, but authors present some interesting recent data to help confirm their main thesis: household as site of social reproduction subsidizes industrial capitalism primarily at expense of women. Luxton and Corman develop several additional arguments through their case study of Stelco's Hilton Works plant in Hamilton, Ontario. The work explores social reproduction thesis in detail, as authors sharply critique mutual incompatibility of social organization of domestic sphere and requirements of paid labour. Since most families have been organized around ideals of nuclear and heterosexual commitments, individual steelworkers and their partners were not often able to articulate alternative visions for how such informal or unpaid work might be organized differently. Instead, women have continued to serve as a reserve army of unpaid labour, expanding and contracting their domestic labour in reaction to changing state and business practices (p. 6). The impact of neo-liberal restructuring has been to intensify class, gender, and race inequalities among working class, as individuals and their families turned inward to protect their declining standards of living. The empirical support for their arguments stems mainly from interviews with 187 cohabiting couples conducted in 1984, followed by in-depth interviews with 30 of these individuals ten years later. In addition, interviews with several women steelworkers provide another layer of analysis. The authors draw upon these interviews to investigate capital-labour relationship, first by focussing on daily routines and experiences of workers. Luxton and Corman are most compelling in their treatment of workplace culture, as authors present evidence of racism and especially sexism as dominating everything from language to lunchroom walls. The follow-up chapter describes restructuring process of 1980s and 1990s that threatened job security, undermined workers' confidence in achieving long-term stability, and helped consolidate further management's control over workplace. The second half of book presents gender corrective to predominantly Marxist framework. One chapter concentrates on struggle to juggle paid labour and domestic labour demands, followed by an in-depth look at gendered division of labour and individual strategies for maintaining household. The authors conclude that most men continue to benefit from prevailing arrangements, both through their unequal earning power and extent to which women assume greater domestic responsibilities regardless of their own employment status. …

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