Double Day, Double Bind: Women Garment Workers.

Abstract

Charlene Gannage in Double Day, Double Bind attempts to unravel the complex life and work experience of immigrant women workers at Edna Manufacturing, a garment factory on Spadina in Toronto. The success of this book is twofold: first, it breaks the silence and solicits and records the voices of immigrant women; secondly, it details the complex factors which contribute to the development of gender and union consciousness, and which converge to create barriers to women's union participation. These factors include the organization of the work process, the system of payment, paternalistic employer/employee relations characteristic of small familyowned businesses; the ethnic division of the work place, skill differentiation, the gender division of labour; the double day for women, the structures and ideology of business unionism and patriarchal gender ideology. Before we meet the women themselves, Gannage discusses her research process. She documents the problems of gaining access to the women, the difficulties she had interviewing, the tensions and hostilities often generated by the process, and her own struggle to maintain her self confidence. For example, at one point she reports that a union bureaucrat advised me that I was too aggressive, too direct in my questions, that I cornered people, that I did not allow them an out, that I was too persistent and academic. He suggested that I be more feminine in my approach. I found this discussion fascinating. But I would have liked the personal character of it to be referenced to the ongoing feminist debate about how to do research, how to bridge the gap between researchers and respondents, etc.' We first meet the women of Edna manufacturing talking about their double day of labour. Gannage moves from the women's experience of the double day to look at how both the company and the union divide the workers. This sets the stage for making sense of women's limited participation in the union. In listening to these women speak of their work and their lives, I was struck by the relentless drudgery: their victimization by the capitalist work process and by a gender ideology that makes them responsible for housework and family life. I want to provide everything because Monday, start again to go to work. I don't want to leave I want to fix I kill myself sometimes. Maybe when I die, I relax. When I die, Ijinish They are driven by economic necessity and the desire to educate their children. The pressure of the double day means, however, that they have little time to spend with their children. They look forward to retirement and becoming grandmothers: You've got no time to enjoy your own children. But with grandchildren everything. Yet despite the pressures, they communicate a tremendous sense of determination and purpose: to work, to survive, to make better opportunities for their children. And they are often committed to wage work for reasons beyond the economic. I like work. Somehow I feel useful. I enjoy working ... You have your own money you enjoy that and you enjoy helping your husband ... you feel you belong to the world. You work, you make progress. This is consistent with research which has demonstrated that, from the point of view of physical and psychological health, the double day of work is better for women than staying at home fulltime. For example, Coleman and Antonucci (1982) argue that for women, is ... one of the most important predictors of physical health and lack of psychological an~iety.~ Canadian research on immigrant housewives suggests that employment might be especially important for immigrant women. Roxanna Ng and Judith Ramirez document the tremendous stress experienced by the immigrant woman, isolated in her home because of the language barrier, lack of support networks, etc.3 Gannage moves from women's experience of the double day to look at how the company divides the workers through the labour process, mobilizing the gender and ethnic division of labour as well as material and ideological differentiation by skill. Of particular interest is Gannage's description of how different systems of wage payment (some workers are paid by the piece, some by the hour and some by the week) structure competition, consciousness and degrees of worker solidarity. Workers acknowledge that the pressures of piece work create health problems but many also feel that piece work