| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 61

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Kris Paap, Working Construction: Why White Working-Class Men Put Themselves – And the Labor Movement – In Harm's Way (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2006)

IN THIS BOOK, Kris Paap makes a bold and useful contribution to understandings of the intertwining relations of gender, race, class and labour processes in capitalist economies. Based upon her two and a half year foray into construction trades as a unionized carpentry apprentice in the American Midwest, this volume traces the ways in which a hierarchy of gender, race, and class is produced and maintained through the processes and relations of construction work, not only among workers and employers, but within the consciousness and embodiment of individual workers.

This well-written book transmits the visceral intensity of construction labour to explain how hard, risky, physical labour performed by groups of men is a resource for a particular kind of white workingclass masculinity, one that establishes construction workers as "real men" while simultaneously maintaining them as subordinate to those in management and other white-collar work. Further, Paap argues that this production of masculinity, when combined with the precariousness of construction employment, has shaped a relation between workers and employers in which construction workers are undermining their own positions in the labour market by aligning with interests of their employers.

Paap describes the construction work environment as one where "getting her [the job] done" is not only the goal of employers, but is central to the attribution of merit and masculinity among workers. Due to the absence of employment protections from arbitrary dismissal in construction even in the unionized situations where Paap worked, workers strove to stay employed by maintaining a high rate of productivity. This motivation to be productive was reinforced by a dominant ideology that equated being truly masculine with the ability to work while in pain and to ignore or minimize injuries and risk. Therefore, construction workers place their means of production – their bodies and lives – on the line.

This central argument of the book is developed around the notion of "pigness," a term used by the men who worked with Paap to describe themselves. This term connotes a rough, tough masculinity of which these men are collectively proud, a license to act in racist and sexist ways that maintains their dominance over others in the industry, and a requirement that workers ignore risk and take injury lightly (like a man). Paap shows how this label is deployed to empower men on the job, and how it also subordinates and constrains construction workers outside of the industry. While it allows workers to draw positive meaning from what is frequently tedious and difficult work, it also reduces these men by equating physical labour with stupidity and base sexuality. While it rewards workers with a feeling of manliness, it makes them amenable to overwork and other workplace risk in a dangerous industry. "Pigness" also mediates against solidarity with other workers by legitimating practices of dominance among white working-class men as well as between these men and others.

Paap's analysis is advanced by her discussion of racism and sexism, to show how the relations of gender and race are co-constituted with labour processes. In Paap's experience, women and people of colour were regularly subjected to discrimination and harassment. She describes how pervasive sexism and racism on the job was naturalized by an ideology that attributed these behaviours to the animalistic nature of these ruggedly masculine workers. This naturalization made overt sexism and racism disappear as a problem ("they can't help it – it doesn't mean anything"), while preserving white men's dominance over women and people of colour who work construction, and putting those who are harassed in the position of accommodating to their own harassment. When challenged, the charge of intolerance was directed at those who complained.

Paap's experiences reveal the paradoxical results of affirmative action programs for women and people of colour. She argues that white men in construction do not acknowledge that their workplaces have been closed to capable workers due to discrimination. Therefore they tend to assume that women and people of colour achieve their job status solely through affirmative action, rather than through capability and job skills.

Paap notes that when she was working for a smaller, family-operated company, no harassment of any kind occurred. This employer not only censured racism and sexism in policy (like the two larger companies in the study), but did not tolerate them in practice. Paap concludes, therefore, that employers have the power to prevent racism and sexism on their worksites due to the very conditions that lead workers to unsafe and over-work situations: the lack of employment protections from arbitrary dismissal. However, here, Paap's analysis becomes thin. She notes that harassing language and behaviours increase with distance from supervisors, and suggests that more control and consistency in following existing policy would lead to less harassment. But what if the attitudes and behaviours of "pigness" are shaped by the depersonalization, alienation, and fragmented work processes associated with large-scale companies and projects? Paap describes labour processes that reduce worker contributions to repetitive, disconnected tasks at other points in the book, but does not discuss the relation between this fragmentation and individual consciousness or group interactions. Given that on large construction projects, "factory- style" labour processes tend to be implemented more intensively than in smaller projects, the influence of scale needs further consideration, in our view.

One of Paap's more provocative arguments is her re-conceptualization of gender as a physiologically experienced emotion. She argues that the physical nature of this labour, combined with the sexualized vocabulary and metaphors used in construction, produces a lowlevel physiological arousal in workers. This sensation not only makes workers "feel like a man" but provides a physiological and psychological wage. She deploys social psychological and cognitive approaches to suggest that the reproduction of gender in this case is occurring through emotions, which are conceptualized as the socially bound interpretations of physical sensations. Thus employment activities which produce distinct kinds of physical sensations and arousal are resources for gender reproduction, due to their social interpretations. Due to masculinity's requirement that masculinity must not only be experienced but proved, construction workers' sense of themselves as masculine beings is tied to the labour process.

Paap's theorization of gender in terms of bodies and emotions contributes to understandings of the ways in which gendered meanings adhere to what people do, thus shaping identities. While she describes how she herself acquired a sensation of being masculine from doing construction, likely providing her with a re-interpretation of her gender identity, she does not advance her analysis to a discussion of how social interpretations of bodies and emotions are re- or de-gendered.

Paap's portrait of labour processes and the relations of gender, race, and class in a specific historical context provides useful insight. Her theorization of gender reproduction has important implications for those working for change in the gendered divisions of labour. For white men, who are likely to encounter themselves in its pages even if they have never held a hammer, this book will bring their place in social relations into consciousness. Astute readers will situate Paap's bleak prognosis for unionized labour, and workers as a whole, within the broader context of changes in the construction industry more generally and in the character of employment relationships in late capitalism.


SUSAN BRAEDLEY York University with TOM JOHNSTONE, licensed carpenter

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