Historically there has been a variety of ways for academics to engage with working people or to combine activism with scholarship. Women on the Line Footnote ¹ represents a historically specific form of engagement that was open to western feminists at the height of second wave feminism in the 1970s.

The book was based on my experience of working for nine months on the assembly line of a large motor components factory in London in 1977–1978. The stimulus to do this emerged directly out of my involvement in feminist and socialist politics in order to explore one of the major issues exercising the Women's Movement at the time: Why organized feminism appeared not to be relevant to or not to involve working-class women. I did it for political reasons rather than as sociological research and did not think of it as ethnography or participant observation.

British libel laws are very restrictive, placing the onus of proof on the author (it is the opposite in the United States), and in order to eventually publish my account as a book, I had to disguise everything about the firm and the product, and I had to adopt a pseudonym. Not only did this delay publication, but for many years no one met the author Ruth Cavendish, and she gave no talks! With republication under my own name, I am finally able to talk about my experiences of nearly thirty years ago, and it also provides a great opportunity to reflect on the changes in women's work in the intervening years.

The factory (Smiths in reality, “UMEC” in the book) was a dominant supplier of instruments to the automotive industry, and the “Unmentionable Mechanical Objects” (UMOs) we assembled were speedometers. The factory was in a high migrant area of North West London, and I lived a cycle ride away (on Cavendish Road). To my initial surprise, virtually all the shop-floor women workers were migrants from Ireland, the Caribbean, or the Indian subcontinent. There was a wide age variation, from sixteen to sixty-five. The handful of “natives” were mostly in low-level supervisory roles. Even more obvious was the very rigid division between women and men, and the strict demarcation between women's jobs and men's jobs. Women comprised a homogeneous grouping: All were assemblers, doing the same job whether they were sixteen or sixty; all were “semi-skilled,” with no career ladder or promotion prospects, minimal training, and the same low pay. All this contrasted markedly with the circumstances of the men. They filled a wide range of grades in an elaborate hierarchy; in fact, all positions bar assembling. They were not internally united as a group except in relation to women. Most had some training and were on a career ladder. It became clear that there was no common experience of working on the shop floor that was shared by all, and that the division between women assemblers and supervisors was virtually unbridgeable.

There was compulsory union membership, with a closed shop and subscriptions deducted from the wages. But most of the women felt that their interests were not well represented by the official union officers.

My deliberately understated analysis centered on the division of labor, relations of power, and the interweaving of multiple contradictions. Key themes included the organization of production, the hierarchical occupational structure, and how this was experienced, responded to, and resisted. Central to the analysis were the criss-crossing and intersecting divisions between women and men and between different groups of male and female workers. Ethnicity and nationality were fundamental to this and also to the shifting alliances between groups of women at good and low times. Relationships between women of the different national origins were close, as Caribbean, Asian, and Irish women sat next to each other on the line and chatted all day. Ethnicity was already an important concern of late 1970s feminists (despite the assertion in many present-day histories of feminist thought that “race” was ignored until the 1990s).

Pursuing the feminist understanding that “the personal is political,” I attempted a holistic account of the factory and its place in the women's lives. What strikes me now is how many of the issues I drew attention to later became central tropes of social theory. Embodiment is one of these (highlighted by Carol Wolkowitz elsewhere in this section): The narrative makes constant reference to neckache, tiredness, inability to move, and so on. Indeed I had devoted a whole section of the book to “Physical Survival,” which details the variety of aches, pains, stiffness, and strains caused directly by the conditions of work and its physical toll on the women's lives. The experience of time in the factory was also one of the most affecting, and many words are devoted to disentangling differing kinds of temporality—from the disjuncture between objective clock time and how it felt subjectively, to the many overt conflicts with supervisors over “ownership” of the few minutes or seconds at “finishing” time or daily questioning over the speed of the conveyor belt. Emotions, sociability, and “everyday” morality all figure prominently in the story, suggesting the specificity and importance of culture at work. As talking was the main way of passing the time, the women became very familiar with each other's families and home lives. Much discussion was devoted to “what it's like where you come from” and differing cultural practices between ethnic groups, as well as daily dissection of soap operas and the news.

Ruth Cavendish's book was not the only one of its kind. Given the high levels of industrial and political strife of the period, this is not surprising. Huw Beynon's influential study Working for Ford appeared in 1973, followed by Burawoy's Manufacturing Consent,Footnote ² both continuing a tradition of documenting work that concentrated almost exclusively on men. Despite the long history of women's employment and their trade union affiliation, the inspiration for studies of women workers came from the women's movement. Anna Pollert's Girls, Wives, Factory Lives Footnote ³ detailed the experience of unskilled, manual women workers at Churchman's cigarette factory and Sallie Westwood's All Day Every Day Footnote ⁴ revealed the work lives of Asian women at StitchCo, a Leicester hosiery factory. Anna and Sallie had researched on the shopfloor, and like me, emphasized the interplay between women's home and working lives. Indeed the three books are often referred to collectively as classic ethnographic studies of women's work of the 1970s. Similar accounts of men's and women's manual work were also appearing in Europe. This was an epoch, just before the election victories of Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980, of sharp political division and conflict, with strong demarcation lines between left and right, progressive and reactionary, and their opposing visions of virtually every aspect of life. The climate in Britain was of major industrial disputes, public debates about immigration control and trade union militancy as well as less formal movement politics around gender, sexuality, housing, and health. Strikes were commonplace and affected many industries, both before and after the 1979 “winter of discontent,” and the women's movement was approaching its peak.

At Smiths in the late 1970s a particular kind of work, a particular organization of production, and a particular kind of worker all came together to give the factory and its workforce their distinctive character. With hindsight the combination of features can be seen as conjunctural and specific to the time and place. The constituent elements then combined are no longer commonly found together in the global north. Each has had its own subsequent historical trajectory over the next thirty years as I suggest below and discuss more fully in the new introduction to Women on the Line.

The kind of work done at Smiths is no longer common in the UK or other developed economies. For one thing, the labor-intensive production process has been overtaken by technological change, and speedometer production is more fully automated. More significantly, the equivalent production methods, reliant on “nimble” fingers, manual dexterity, close work, and detail, have shifted across the world in successive waves to areas where female labour is cheaper. The assembly of electronic equipment like circuit boards and the Sony Walkman, computer components and, more recently, iPods and mobile phones have relocated to the other side of the globe. The primary destinations during the 1980s were emergent Asian countries (Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Malaysia) whose “economic miracle” was predicated on export-oriented production. Women comprised the backbone of the workforce, often rural migrants who moved to cities for newly available factory work. In a later wave, there was a shift from the now booming Tiger Economies to lower cost Special Economic Zones of mainland China, where the work is similar to Smiths but in far worse and more insecure conditions as so vividly documented by Pun Ngai'sFootnote ⁵ insights into the dormitory system, which deprives workers also of their “home” life.

If the kind of assembly jobs women did at Smiths have since migrated from the UK, what happened to the women? After the closure of the factory in 1983, most of the older Caribbean and Indian women will have sought similar work until they retired. My hunch is that their daughters, however, who were mostly British-born, had far better job opportunities than their mothers, as part of the generation of young women whose educational credentials secured a foothold in clerical or professional occupations. This trend was well underway by the 1990s. Given the emphasis many of the women placed on education for their daughters, it is possible that some became doctors or lawyers, while others undoubtedly entered service sector occupations that were denied to their mothers. The aim of many of the younger Irish women from rural backgrounds was to marry and leave the labor force for some years. (There were, of course, many other Irish women working in England, notably in nursing and teaching, but those at Smiths had no educational credentials.) The young Irish women I was closest to fulfilled their ambition. During the subsequent decade, the general pattern in Britain was still for women to leave full-time employment on the birth of their first child and return on a part-time basis when the youngest started school. It is also likely that many returned to Ireland in the 1990s with the emergence of the Celtic tiger.

But this does not mean that there are no longer jobs equivalent in pay and conditions to those at Smiths, nor that migrant workers have disappeared from the UK. The decline of jobs in manufacturing was offset by the expansion in services of all kinds—retail, financial, health, and care related amongst others. Low prestige and low paid jobs with abysmal employment conditions remain widespread but more commonly now in these sectors rather than manufacturing. Most of these jobs are not new, with the exception of call-center work, which expanded dramatically in the 1990s. What has changed is the significance of employment agencies as a key entry point for low paid work, acting as intermediaries between employees and the organization in which they work, and obscuring lines of hierarchy and responsibility. In the 1970s, prospective factory workers applied straight to Smiths, and direct recruitment was the norm for most sectors of employment (although agencies were already important in the recruitment of nurses from overseas). Call centers are widely understood as the closest contemporary equivalent of factory work like Smiths. Certainly the extreme speed, surveillance, low pay, and bonus schemes prevalent in the worst resonate with the factory experience. But call center control and monitoring are exercised electronically, in contrast to the mechanical and managerial control experienced at Smiths. Few call centers are unionized, and the competitive pressure on individual operators to outperform others would make it a less collective and solidaristic work environment than Smiths.

Staff in UK call centers are predominantly female, young and indigenous, and the sector does not provide much of an entry point for new migrants. The origins of recent waves of migrant workers to the UK are far more global than in the 1960s and 1970s, less centered on former British colonies. The health service and homes for the elderly have relied heavily on Filipinas, Nigerians, Colombians, and many other nationalities for nurses, cleaners, cooks, and care givers. But immigration restrictions on those without formal qualifications result in an increasing proportion of such work being undertaken by migrants from the new accession countries of the European Union in Eastern Europe. The least formally qualified global migrants were concentrated (until recently) in industries exempt from immigration restrictions through shortage of labor, such as agriculture and food processing. Indeed, in recent research on ready-made food factories, I came across a rural middle-England factory whose shop-floor workforce were made up of 33 nationalities, and one in London that boasted 57!Footnote ⁶ The workers here were truly global in origin, even if Eastern Europe was over-represented. This represents a very major change. An even more fundamental change since the 1970s was the virtual absence of gender division on the assembly lines. Like Smiths, virtually all the assemblers were migrants, but men and women stood on either side of a conveyor belt performing identical work. The managers were quick to point out that any other arrangement would contravene sex discrimination legislation!

There is a direct continuity between Women on the Line and the research I am doing today. My primary interest remains connections and divisions of labor, both in the workplace and across socio-economic domains, that shape the contemporary global world of work. A conviction that work, whether paid or unpaid, in the UK or China, should remain an enduring and future-oriented concern for social analysis has its roots in the experience of my time on the line.

In the spirit of the times, my aim for the book was both to “give a voice” to women who would not normally be heard, and to “give back” some of what I had learned from them. It was not “research,” and the publication problems I encountered were at the end of the process. Nowadays our libel laws are accompanied by a whole panoply of pre-emptive “ethical” regulations that impose serious barriers to participant ethnography. The wish to integrate “theory and practice,” so strong in the 1970s, has also dissipated in the global north. This was a moment when social movements, including the women's movement, the trade unions, and the Left were strong, offering an alternative political vision that inspired many young people. Being active in campaigns went hand in hand with scholarship. Nowadays this spirit appears far more evident in the global south than in Europe and North America, following the ascent of the right and gradual demise of effective opposition over recent decades. Mirroring shifts in the global world of work, a vibrant connection between feminist research and politics is perhaps more likely to be found in China, Taiwan, India, Central and South America, and other countries of the global south.