ABSTRACT

This chapter presents the story of Alice, a shop steward, with the presumption that the contextual matters and social processes in the company and the union are necessary for understanding Alice's pathway as a union representative but, also more generally, for understanding the gendered conditions of leadership behaviour in unions. Alice was a sewing machinist and shop steward in a clothing company in Finland, and her story mainly takes place in the period when the clothing industry was facing major adaptation pressures due to shrinking bilateral Finnish–Soviet trade during the 1990s.