ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews an ethnography of heavy industry workers in Ferrol, Galicia. It illustrates workers' growing concerns with, and efforts towards achieving improved working conditions, particularly concerning the use of time and seeking a balance between productive and reproductive activities. Childcare arrangements in particular highlight the constraints and opportunities stemming from fathers' working conditions at the steel plant, and the contradictions between production and reproduction as they are experienced at the level of households and family relations. The close intertwining of production and reproduction is evident as relations of solidarity and moral obligations regulate care giving and household work, but are also at play in relations of production, for instance, in recruitment mechanisms or in the imposition of a work discipline. It follows that power inequalities and exploitation, typical of capitalist production, can also underpin divisions of labor in the sphere of reproduction.
