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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Meg Luxton and June Corman, Getting By in Hard Times: Gendered Labour at Home and on the Job (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001)

HOW HAVE THE DRAMATIC political and economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s — globalization, economic restructuring, cutbacks, and layoffs — transformed the lives of White working-class Canadian families? To answer this question, in 1984, 1994, and 1996, Meg Luxton and June Corman conducted in-depth interviews with hundreds of families in Hamilton, Ontario who had at least one member employed at Hilton Works, a steel manufacturing plant owned by Stelco (the Steel Company of Canada). Stelco and its workers provide an ideal case study since the company's recent restructuring reflects typical North American patterns: after a period of postwar growth, Stelco's markets declined significantly in the 1980s, due to the increased availability of low-cost European and Third World steel and a decrease in the domestic demand for steel. Stelco's management responded to these new circumstances with capital investment and labour restructuring, and at the heart of their reorganization of production was massive job reduction. Between 1980 and 1996, Stelco "successfully" restructured its production at the expense of its workers, reducing its labour force by 50 percent. Moreover, by 1996, the jobs available at Stelco were far less likely to offer the high wages, benefits, regular schedules, and protections that unions had won for workers in the postwar period.	1
For the White working-class families who had structured their lives based on the reliable family wage previously earned by men at Stelco, these changes have brought significant disruptions and financial insecurities into their lives. Although the job reductions have mostly affected men, in many respects, Luxton and Corman argue, working-class women have borne the brunt of economic restructuring. Many working-class wives entered the workforce when their husbands lost their jobs or when their husbands' jobs became increasingly insecure. They faced a sex-segregated job market with profound pay inequalities and continued to shoulder disproportionate responsibility for household labour. As working-class men and women worked longer hours at less secure jobs, their jobs increasingly restricted their private lives. Workers failed to develop community ties (and class consciousness), and their struggles to defend their standard of living made them "more hostile to equity struggles by women, people of colour, immigrants, and other minorities." (6)	2
The first chapters of Luxton and Corman's study examine working-class women and men's paid labour. After establishing the importance of women's unpaid domestic labour to the maintenance of a male workforce, they shift the focus to the shop floor, and explore daily life at Hilton Works. The authors emphasize the demanding nature of shift work, workers' alienation from their jobs, and the masculine work culture. During the economic restructuring and massive layoffs of the 1980s and 1990s, workers and unions experienced a profound loss of power. Those who kept their jobs did so only by forfeiting job security and a guaranteed decent pay cheque. Although Luxton and Corman also examine the experiences of women who gained jobs at Hilton Works after the successful 1979–1980 "Women Back Into Stelco" campaign, their discussions of female steel workers (which are scattered throughout the book) are not well-integrated into the analysis. The often-fascinating findings might have been more successfully explored in a separate chapter or article. The labour force experiences of Stelco wives are more thoroughly documented and they also differed significantly from their husbands. Employed women tended to earn less than men, lacked reliable child care, and bore the brunt of the double-day. Women also faced constraints on their participation in paid labour that men did not: marital, child care, and economic considerations all significantly shaped women's employment decisions.	3
Luxton and Corman hit their stride in their two core chapters on domestic labour and caregiving, which contain the book's most original material. These richly detailed chapters effectively put to rest any suggestion that household labour, nurturance, and caregiving are not true forms of "work." The authors provide a detailed and engaging portrait of how working-class women and men negotiate the daily demands of domestic labour and money management, in an age when working-class women are increasingly likely to engage in paid labour and men attempt to participate more actively in the running of households. Even in households where women were employed, women were usually still economically dependent on marriage. Moreover, although men often increased their participation in household labour, women remained responsible for its overall management — they co-ordinated the interaction of different labour processes and ensured that myriad tasks got done. In short, even with increased gender equity, in most families, "women do it [domestic labour] and men 'help out'." (160) As such, economic restructuring has been particularly burdensome for working-class women, who have acted as a "reserve army of unpaid workers" and have disproportionately increased their workload in an attempt to modify their households' declining standard of living. (184) The fact that so much of what women do at home involves caregiving and the cultivation of familial and personal relationships obscures both the economic value of women's labour and the way that this work of social reproduction sustains the labour power necessary for capitalist economies. (216)	4
Provocative, but less developed, is Luxton and Corman's argument that White working-class men and women have not developed a class consciousness or strategies to enact social change because economic restructuring has forced them to work harder and to channel their energies into their nuclear families instead of community relationships. The authors effectively demonstrate how paid labour is increasingly impinging upon and restricting workers' private lives and leisure time, a phenomenon that is occurring across class lines, and they argue that these employment constraints prevent men and women from participating in their communities. For example, shift work and irregular schedules often prevent men from joining baseball leagues or coaching their children's sports teams. With little predictable time to spare, workers' leisure time tends to revolve around nuclear family relationships. Luxton and Corman identify different leisure patterns for women: women's employment tends to undermine the "anti-social character of family life" (238) as employed women often spend more time with friends than homemakers, whereas homemakers develop stronger ties with neighbours. Yet it is not clear if these gendered leisure patterns are unique to recent decades or how they relate to the development of class consciousness and protest movements. Similarly, Luxton and Corman assert that White working-class men and women view their lives mainly on an individual level, and in increasingly racist and sexist terms, blaming their problems on minority and women workers who perform low-paid, insecure jobs. This argument is also not fully explored or placed in a historical context. Is contemporary White working-class racism and sexism substantially different from that of the earlier periods which have been well-documented by historians of working-class "whiteness?"	5
Ultimately, Luxton and Corman did not convince me of their claim that working-class families lack class consciousness, for the book contains abundant evidence of men and women's understanding of the ravages of capitalism and class inequalities. That many workers interviewed felt powerless in face of economic restructuring and failed to organize effective protests does not mean that they did not understand the exploitative nature of recent transformations. Many academics who have studied and critiqued these processes undoubtedly feel similarly powerless to change them. Rather, workers' sense of powerlessness and their lack of effective protest strategies may have more to do with the fact that their previously highly effective strategies — labour unions — no longer work. As Luxton and Corman show, Hilton Works' unions have lost tremendous power (and membership) in recent decades as they have been forced to co-operate with management's labour reductions or risk extinction.	6
Getting By in Hard Times makes a solid case for gender, domestic labour, and working-class people's experiences to be taken seriously by scholars wishing to understand the effects of global capitalism and possibilities for social change. Luxton and Corman's insistence that class, race, and gender inequality and conflict are at the heart of capitalist economics opens fruitful avenues of inquiry that should help to guide future scholarship on these questions.	7
Lisa Levenstein University of Wisconsin - Madison

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