Women’s Power in the Workplace

The tension between women’s push for mutually supporting integrative relationships with each other and the isolating, disintegrating pressures of “rationalized” production processes creates an unending ebb and flow in the expression of collective or individual power. Like all natural configurations, women’s power emerges from particular circumstances and is in continuous process of change and transformation. A description of the production process in a heavily male dominated meat packing plant provides the ethnographic context for analysis of women’s power in the workplace. The analysis of women’s power presented below is based on historical reconstruction, using oral histories, and direct observation over a two-month period of women in the bacon room. For women, the features of a dominant mode are shaped by two interconnected factors: the presence of an autonomous base from which they develop leadership and programs and the integration of women’s issues into a general program of worker control.