What is the lived experience of routine wage labour? Why does it matter? In the mid-1970s, Miriam Glucksmann/Ruth Cavendish, committed as a socialist and feminist and frustrated at the political isolation of academia from working class life, went to find out. She worked in a factory, and while not originally intending to write about it, ended up producing a rich ethnography: Women on the Line. Why was it important, and does it remain so? In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson explained his choice of title: “Making, because it is the study in an active process, which owes as much to agency as to conditioning.”Footnote ¹ It is this interaction between agency and structure that is important to understanding how consciousness, identity, and action work—including the possibilities of challenging the status quo. Glucksmann gained the insight into what it felt like to “work on the line”; how work felt, the memories, experiences, everyday realities of her work colleagues; the control of the labour process, class and gender relations and collectivity; how wage exploitation operated; and resistance, including unionization, a dispute, division, and defeat.

Glucksmann's book stands as a touchstone for revealing class and gender relations “in the making” in the 1970s. The parallels with my own study, Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, are remarkable.Footnote ² This too is an ethnography of women factory workers during the 1970s and a theoretical study of identity and action, gender and class. Like Glucksmann, I was politically committed as a socialist and feminist, but I did not attempt to get a job at a factory. The research began as an academic study in the early 1970s, but motivation to write a book came from teaching and finding a dearth of material portraying the concrete experience of women's wage labour. My aim was to reveal the hidden clamour, tensions, and conflicts behind the oft-quoted “silent majority.” The story is about workers in a small, “ordinary” unknown factory, one which closed in 1974—just three years after fieldwork took place and a sign of the times.

Glucksmann offers a “close-up” account of the feel of assembly line work and of individual identities as well as group dynamics, among whom she worked. My own study involved observing the workplace, talking to women across the factory, and engaging in group discussions. It, too, is concerned with process and becoming, but particular themes, such as the pace of work, expectations of the future, the role of unions, the relationship between home and employment, were deliberately explored to probe what factory life felt like and how views and experiences interacted. Theoretically, it aimed to explore capitalist class exploitation and gender oppression as process, and I saw how they become inextricably fused in consciousness and workplace dynamics. For example, in the chapter “Workers: So What If They're Women,” women reveal a “them and us” consciousness of management and workers being on different sides, but also a complex sense of resignation to, and rejection of, male stereotypes of “fiddly” “women's” jobs. While the processes of reproduction of women's subordination within the workplace, the union, and the household are unravelled, so too are the potentials for change.

Like Glucksmann, I portray the factory in its setting although my publisher did not censor use of the real company name and its product, as with “UMEC.” So Churchmans, a tobacco factory, was set in a wider political economy, the growth of a giant corporation and the labor movement context of Britain in the 1970s. I explored theories of gender and class in the narratives of workplace lives, portraying the “lived experience” of work.Footnote ³ Thirty years on, I am struck by similarities and contrasts between that period and today—both now and then, rising unemployment, but now an intimidated labour movement corralled by anti trade union laws, and then, a militant labour movement. But as well as successes at that time, there were failures, especially among women's workplace struggles and women dealing with male-dominated unions.

Like Glucksmann, my focus was life inside the workplace, focusing on the division of labour across the factory, the labour process, what was distinctive about being a woman worker, shop-shop-floor culture, factory and sexual politics. As in UMEC, a key aspect of shop-floor life was the entry of a world outside into the factory. Conversations with and between women demonstrated how private gender relations, images of romance and marriage, and household experience entered and shaped workplace life and were, in turn, shaped by it. A further parallel between the two books is an industrial dispute, with division and failure in both.

Comparing both my own, and Glucksmann's many months spent inside a factory, and with what counts as “field-work” today—often, restricted by management to a few hours' interviews—I am struck by the privilege of real shop-floor immersion. Glucksmann had to negotiate her position as an “outsider” while I had to explain who I was, and why I wanted to document working lives. What I lost in depth by not working at Churchmans, I gained by breadth, moving between different departments, talking to different age groups, discovering varying cultures. Everywhere, I was questioned as well as questioning, which partly mitigated the power imbalance between research interviewer and “subject.” While exploring different settings in different ways, the two approaches are complementary.

An example of the conflicts and contradictions in consciousness that emerged in Girls, Wives, Factory Lives was the ambivalence about pay: “It's very good pay—for women. You wouldn't get a better company”; but, “you know, I thought it was good wages here. Well it is, I suppose, except for the price of flats and food and bus fares.” Could the company pay more? “Well, we're at the low end of the ladder, we're just working class,” and “yeah, I reckon they could, but it's their profits, that's why they won't.” On equal pay, “I believe women doing the same as a man should have equal pay, but men will feel downgraded. I expect to feel supported by my husband,” but “I'd like to see some men doing the kinds of jobs we've got to do,” and “I'd like to see them here. I'd like to turn it upside down, see the Manager on a weighing machine for a week.” “Not a week! An hour would be enough!”Footnote ⁴ Received views on a woman's place and a worker's place collide with workplace sense of justice and injustice on both class and gender dimensions. In discussion on trade unionism, Ivy felt that “these dockersFootnote ⁵ are going to grind us to a halt. The unions have got too much power,” but simultaneously, in her own work, “Time and again this union has sold us right down the river…they won't fight for you. Don't come down to the spinning room—it's a slave camp.”Footnote ⁶ Both concrete, immediate experience and received wisdom or ideology attain force. The constant tussle between consent with, and rejection of accepted norms and perceptions makes consciousness unstable and labile. Women workers' dissatisfaction with their general treatment and pay broke out in the one-day strike. Many young women, who had never had any union involvement, enthusiastically attended a mass meeting for strike action. The union, as before, sold them out, but it was a learning process.

Re-reading both books, I would like to see contemporary versions in the twenty-first century. Unfortunately, today's restrictive research access makes it unlikely that similar immersion can gauge change and continuity in consciousness over the past thirty years. There are a number of contributing factors. Even twenty years ago, changing corporate culture began to restrict access to workers, while making it much easier to gain access to managers. In either case, any interference with, or interruption to productivity were resisted. More recently, academic strictures through research “ethics” conditions have added a newer layer of restriction. And yet, these conditions make it as important as ever to reach the hard to reach and unheard and to reveal class and gender relations in the making. I have attempted this, talking (again) to women assemblers, unpicking life behind management rhetoric of “total quality” and “team work.”Footnote ⁷ Later in the early 1990s, I examined workplace experience, including among women shop workers, in post-“communist” Central Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁸ Most recently, I have turned to the experiences of low-paid, unorganized workers in Britain—the majority (sixty-one percent) are women. Individual and group interviews were all used, but no more was there the immersion over weeks or months that allowed the nuanced exploration of the multidimensional experiences of work, from which we benefited in the 1970s.

Researching and giving a voice to the hard-to-reach remains crucial. But what methodologies are open to us? Multimethod research, combining quantitative surveys with qualitative research can provide breadth and some depth, although the latter is limited compared with the 1970s. In my 2004 study of non-unionised workers in Britain, I wanted to examine the surprisingly under-researched phenomenon of absence of collective organization. Seventy-two percent of British workers are non-unionised, yet little generalizable evidence exists regarding their problems at work and what they do about them.Footnote ⁹ Workplace access to workers proved impossible, while other research strategies, such as high-street leafleting followed by interviews, failed. I eventually contracted a survey organization to conduct a detailed telephone survey of five hundred nonunionised, lower-paid workers with problems at work and complemented this with qualitative, in-depth telephone interviews with fifty workers who sought help to resolve their grievances from the Citizens Advice Bureau.Footnote ¹⁰ What I learned in researching Girls, Wives, Factory Lives, about the complexities and contradictions in consciousness, remain important. For example, the subtle connotations of language, in the word “problem” at work had to be addressed: “softer” concepts, referring to “worries and difficulties” at work, were needed to include in the survey those who suffered workplace grievances but were too inured to them to conceptualize them as “problems.” Hidden voices were heard in qualitative research, albeit of a different type. In telephone interviews with workers seeking Citizens Advice help, I heard heart-rending narratives of isolation and helplessness as well as fury and frustration at injustice. Survey research also yielded hard, quantitative data, demonstrating both the active attempts of workers to shape their lives, and their weakness: While the majority (eighty-six percent) of respondents tried to resolve their problems, almost half had no outcome whatsoever. Still, these research outcomes presented social snapshots but lacked the historical dynamic of the unfolding of consciousness and action.

Imagination and commitment can continue research traditions learned in the 1970s about the world of work. Glucksmann and I, in different but complementary ways, portrayed women's working lives in 1970s Britain. We need more than ever today the commitment, as well as the freedom, to research and write to demonstrate how people make their lives and, within historic constraints, are active agents in their own history.