Sisters in the Brotherhoods: Working Women Organizing for Equality in New York City
By Jane LaTour
Palgrave Macmillian, 2008

Live Wire: Women and Brotherhood in the Electrical Industry
By Francine A. Moccio
Temple University Press, 2009

Reviewed by Mary Margaret Fonow

Despite decades of litigation, equity policies, labor education programs, leadership programs for women, external advocacy, and internal activism, progress for women in the brotherhoods has been dismal. The civil rights movement and the women’s movement helped to open doors for women in nontraditional occupations, but the ceiling in construction, electrical, transport, and public safety proved to be cement, not glass. To understand why—and why this matters—read these two books.

In Sisters in the Brotherhoods, Jane LaTour documents the stories of courageous women who persevered, despite all odds, in some of the most hostile work environments imaginable. They took pride in their work and were staunchly pro-union, yet their unions—the one institution meant to protect their interests—let them down. Not to be deterred, the women formed advocacy organizations to campaign for equality on the job—in the union and in society more generally—and while the efforts of United Tradeswomen, Nontraditional Employment for Women, and others made a difference, the overall picture remains bleak. Over and over again women tell similar stories of harassment, exclusion, and petty forms of incivility—all persisting to this day—that create a daily micro-environment so unpleasant that many women are eventually forced out.

While there is more awareness of harassment today than when women first entered the nontraditional trades, it is still more common than we would like to admit, and it differs from the harassment women face in more traditional occupations. According to LaTour, the harassment of women in male-dominated occupations is more hostile and is motivated by retaliation for invading male economic and social space, while in traditional occupations the harassment is more subtle and driven by the exploitation of power differences between men and women. Some of the harassment in both settings is sexual, but more often than not it qualifies as workplace bullying. One of LaTour’s respondents described her experiences as the first woman on a construction site in New York City as “horrendous” and believed that much of the harassment was designed to get rid of her. These behaviors included assigning her to least skilled work, transferring her to remote sites, failing to assign her a partner, general forms of exclusion, denial of overtime opportunities, and poor evaluations. She felt her work was sabotaged and that she was constantly under a microscope, which led to over-compensation as she tried to prove herself. Many of the women reported other, more overt forms of harassment that were more sexual and included sexual graffiti, pornography, crude remarks, and even indecent exposure.

Racism and homophobia exacerbate sexism and harassment experienced by women in these hostile environments. Quoting Miriam Frank, LaTour writes: “Homophobia in the building trades—you could write an encyclopedia about it or you might as well say nothing” (p. 118). It often does not come up as an issue because people are afraid to talk about it or to “come out” on the job or in the union. Homophobia is a particularly pernicious issue in nontraditional occupations where “dyke-baiting” is often used to silence the activism of feminists within the union and on the job. The lesbian label is deployed as a pejorative epithet used to reinforce the presumption that “real” (heterosexual) women would not want “male” jobs, thus preserving deeply held beliefs about the nature of gender roles and work. Women of color experience multiple forms of discrimination and find it difficult to separate one form from another. According to one construction worker interviewed by LaTour, the further away you were from the norm of the white, male, blue-collar worker the more resistance you encountered. There was a progression of resistance against men of color, then women, then women of color, and then lesbian women of color.

No wonder women remain less than 3 percent of the workforce in construction— a number perilously close to the low-water mark of 2 percent, thirty years ago. Fortunately, many of the women who leave continue to be active in other forms of democratic struggle. It is organized labor that ultimately loses, however, when it will not harness the passion and activism of its natural allies—particularly when labor’s survival depends on reaching new workers. Women who remained in these occupations were women who encountered the right combination of sympathetic male co-workers, progressive union leadership, and sisterhood.

Francine A. Moccio’s Live Wire, a detailed ethnography of New York’s IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) Local #3, helps us to understand why it was so difficult for women to succeed (in large numbers) in the brotherhoods—in this case the elite electrical trades—and why, even when they knew the women were being treated unfairly, men failed (for the most part) to intervene. Too often the union was complicit in or willfully ignorant of the discrimination faced by women. Moccio demonstrates why by unraveling the complex and contradictory historical and contemporary factors that not only fueled sex discrimination but stymied efforts to end it. For example, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, given the nature of the work, it made sense for contractors to work closely with the unions to hire and train workers. But by the twenty-first century, such collusion made it nearly impossible for women to break into an elaborate system of job-referral practices that often rested on the intergenerational transfer of jobs and skills from one male relative to another. An equally elaborate system of fraternal social clubs based on gender and ethnicity was created to integrate different groups of men into the trade and to ensure loyalty to particular union regimes. This created a hyper-masculine work/union culture where gender trumped class as the basis of solidarity.

Moccio provides an in-depth analysis of one local in New York as a way to animate larger trends. She provides the larger economic and historical context within which to better understand the micro-cultural realities of day-to-day life on the job for women in a highly masculinized work environment. Her case study covers the history and organizational structure of the brotherhood, the formation and transformation of male fraternalism and its relationship to the culture of exclusion, sexual politics of the family, labor-management relations and how they have changed over time, the threat to job security posed by neoliberal policies, and the way gender, race, and sexuality create unity or division among workers. Taken together, these factors help to explain why women are still excluded from the electrical trades.

Moccio’s training as an anthropologist enables her to provide a fine-tuned description of workplace culture in the electrical trades and how gender norms operate to disadvantage women within that culture. Male identity is tied to job performance, and men take pride in their hard-won skills and sense of professionalism. Some of that pride is being threatened by technological innovations like fiber optics, which make the job easier, and some of the men displace their resentment of deskilling onto women. As one respondent told Moccio, “The men have this saying, ‘if it were easy, a woman could do it.’ Now, women are in there doing it, and the guys don’t like it one bit” (p. 86). Women’s achievements are viewed as an affront to their masculinity so, to be successful, women on the job must prove they are just as masculine: “Male workers demand that women assimilate into masculine culture on the job, while, at the same time, they make that process difficult” (p. 88). This double bind leads women to risk injury to show they are worthy, while being reluctant to report incidents of discrimination and harassment. Men who might otherwise support female co-workers are fearful that to do so would call into question their own masculinity.

It is no coincidence that “brotherhood” appears in the title of these two books written by sympathetic insiders and longtime labor educators. Both books focus our attention on male culture and fraternal bonding as barriers to the type of class solidarity so badly needed by labor in these difficult economic times. Male anxiety over job insecurity will not suffice as the excuse for “men behaving badly.” Resentment and hostility toward women seeking their rights as workers will not build a vibrant labor movement.

Both of the authors of these books grew up in pro-labor households and have spent their lives advocating for working women and for more democratic and inclusive unions. They deserve to be listened to. We have all the laws, policies, and training manuals we need to end sex discrimination, yet little progress is being made. We need the political will and common sense to enforce the laws we have, to better execute equity policies and to promote more women into the leadership of unions. Women have the skills, the work ethic, and the desire to rebuild our communities and our future depends on it. Unions and their male leaders have nothing to fear from empowered women with a sense of their rights on the job and a deep commitment to economic justice.

New Labor Forum 19(3): 49-50, Fall 2010
Copyright © Joseph S. Murphy Institute, CUNY
ISSN: 1095-7960/10 print, DOI: 10.4179/NLF.193.0000008