Review

General Books

In Race on the Line, Venus Green chronicles a one hundred year history of technological change and workplace struggle in the U.S. telephone industry from the perspective that the social and political context influences technological development. In her analysis, however, she highlights race, arguing that "race, class, gender, and technology do not simply converge in the workplace. Racial ideology actively shapes the interplay of these variables." (p. 2) Thus, at bottom, Green is concerned with the impact of race segregation upon sex segregation among telephone operators and how technology figured into that story.	1
A good part of Race on the Line is devoted to tracing innovations in the principal technologies defining telephone operators' work between the 1880s and the 1980s. Over these years, argues Green, management objectives regarding technology and the workforce changed. In the nineteenth century, telephone companies utilized technology that increased the numbers of operators or enhanced their skills, whereas in the twentieth century through automation and computerization the Bell System "waged a deliberate campaign to reduce its operating force and to gain greater control over the work process." (p. 6) In demonstrating the alternative potential of early telephone technology and in emphasizing management's conscious decisions to use technology in the ways it did, Green's book falls within the historical literature that emphasizes the social construction of skill and argues that work degradation and deskilling are not inherent in new technologies but the result of human choice in how they are deployed.	2
The other half of Green's book is a labor history of the experiences of women telephone operators. From the beginning, telephone managers perceived native-born, young white girls as patient and civil workers. Given the need to sell the public on its new service, and given the unreliability of the nascent technology, managers depended on women operators who exercised individual judgement and skill in the course of delivering courteous service. Believing only a certain kind of persona could deliver a "voice with a smile," managers used race and gender exclusions to create a "white lady" operator identity that in the industry's early years appeased disgruntled male customers and, later on, proved effective in dividing and controlling the workforce. To be sure, both individually and collectively, women operators resisted management's efforts to degrade the work process. However, argues Green, when unions secured a foothold in the industry in the 1930s and 1940s, the tendency of men unionists to dominate leadership positions and women's acquiescence, helped along by their "white lady" identity, made the elaboration and enforcement of solutions to technological degradation unlikely. But more damningly, as operators' work became less pleasant, white women clung to the "white lady" image believing it lent them a measure of respectability. Their commitment to this identity contributed to their opposition to African American and other "minority" women's efforts to integrate the industry. The latter ultimately succeeded, but only in the 1960s when computerization was severely reducing the numbers of operators.	3
Green's concern with matters of justice is a defining feature of her book. Her treatment of operators' history and the history of technological development in the telephone industry is informed by her own contact with sex and race segregation as a worker in the telephone crafts. Thus, Green speaks with an "authentic" voice that students should find compelling--she is not simply an ivory tower academic with a passing interest in the subject. At the same time, however, throwaway lines like "the operators' struggle against tyrannical management is admirable" (p. 103) are fair enough, but have little explanatory value and run the risk of alienating the critical reader (university students are a tough crowd). A more nuanced interrogation of managerial motivations and behavior would explain why management was so harsh with regard to workplace resistance and inflexible when it came to unions. But in the end, even if her handling of the interplay among race, class, gender, and technology has something of a static quality, Green advances a sound, if uncontroversial, argument--management, driven by the quest for profits, deployed certain technologies and manipulated racial ideology and sexual stereotypes to maintain a tractable sex- and race-segregated labor force. Where Green really succeeds is in charting this process over time. Race on the Line would be best used in upper-level university and graduate courses on the histories of technology, women workers, and labor. To be sure, students will have to persevere through some rather detailed descriptions of telephone technology and, overall, Green's rather choppy narrative. Nevertheless, in seminar settings Race on the Line should stimulate energetic discussion and debate.	4
University of Auckland Paul Michel Taillon

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