Rethinking women's resistance and agency: the case of retrenched textile workers

Abstract

After briefly tracing the recent disappearance of Feltex Carpets, a major yarns mill site in Braybrook, a Western suburb of Melbourne, the paper analyses material collected from interviews with migrant women retrenched from the Feltex factory, as they adapted to their new working lives between 2006 and 2008. Utilising Bourdieu's notions of habitus, disposition and capital, the paper considers the links between individual resistance amongst this group of workers and the power relations beyond the field of work. Whilst much has been written concerning the decline of the Textile Clothing and Footwear (TCF) industries in Australia, little attention has been paid to the lives of individual women workers involved in and affected by these events. Little is known about what happens to migrant women as they move out of long-term, full-time jobs as machine operators and into casual employment. In analysing their subjective shifts in the years following retrenchment, the paper highlights how their changing self-perceptions interact with their subjective framing of choice and resistance in relation to work. The paper uses this analysis to draw some implications for unions seeking to promote the conditions for collective resistance and social transformation around low-paid women's work.