Book Review

Canada and the United States

This narrowly conceived, very polemical work is bent on denigrating women's labor activism and disparaging its hard-won accomplishments. Although examining telephone operators' work experience and union organizing, Venus Green relies heavily on the AT&T archives and neglects to consult the papers of relevant women's labor and reform organizations, the journal of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) international with jurisdiction over the telephone service, or even daily newspaper coverage of union formation, labor negotiations, and strikes (except for a few clippings that happen to be in the company archives).

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Green's principal argument is that telephone operators should have made opposition to corporate technological innovations their central priority but failed to seriously respond to them. She is contemptuous of both the early twentieth-century Telephone Operators Union (TOU) and the Communications Workers of America (CWA). Green attributes the operators' alleged lack of concern to the their inability to recognize what was in their interest and to their acceptance of advice from women reformers and male unionists, who encouraged them to seek union recognition, higher wages, and shorter hours. Failing to look beyond the shop floor, Green does not appreciate the significance of what union operators forced Bell companies to concede as early as the 1910s: the eight-hour day, in place of one extending over fifteen hours, to allow life outside work; ending physical abuse and arbitrary firing of operators; and dramatic pay increases, like the twenty-eight percent raise won in the 1919 New England strike, at a time when most strikes failed. The operators sought higher pay not only to enhance worker dignity but to live independently of their families. The TOU forever enriched the lives of many operators by drawing them into workers' education.

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