ILPC 2027

A key characteristic of the British printing industry has been its clearly demarcated labour process and accompanying workforce segmentation.  This has been closely linked to pay grades and has been a central contributor to the institutionalisation of the gender pay gap (Craig et al, 1984).  The gender pay gap in general printing is significantly wider than the national average. Women in printing still earn around 20.3% less than men’s median hourly earnings and 27.6% less than their median weekly earnings (ONS, 2009).  At the time of this research, the gender pay gap nationally meant manual women received 26% less than full-time manual men’s weekly average earnings, while in printing it was 35.7% (ONS, 2002). 

Conducted as part of a now-completed PhD, this research utilised a combination of a national survey of union members, interviews with a proportion of respondents, interviews with key protagonists, considerable documentary research and observer participation to examine developments in relation to women’s pay and position since Cockburn’s (1983) study of newspapers.  Utilising an adapted version of Bradley’s (1999) model of power resources alongside Lukes’ (2005) three dimensions of power, this study considers how power relations act to make women’s contribution to the industry invisible, thereby rendering them apparently irrelevant in work organisation and pay processes, thus preventing successful challenges to the status quo.

Developments in the labour process are shown to be important in two ways. First, segments are being discarded and created simultaneously, creating new barriers to women’s employment even as old barriers disappear and threatening even women’s existing position in the industry.  Second, in the context of union decline, the study identifies problems with the shallowness of change that came from strategies pursued primarily for survival (Ledwith and Colgan, 1996; Dickens, 1997).  As such, it is suggested here that both a continued reliance on craft-style organisation and a failure to deliver genuinely wider internal democracy has provided employers with better opportunities to divide even the formerly ‘solid’ craft workers through re-segmentation in the context of industrial restructuring.  In the event men are becoming less able to defend their wages and conditions and women’s low pay is further embedded as their numbers fall.

References

Bradley, H. (1999) Gender and Power in the Workplace, Macmillan Press, Basingstoke.

Cockburn, C. (1983) Brothers: Male Dominance and Technological Change, Pluto Press, London.

Colgan, F. and Ledwith, S. (1996) ‘Sisters Organising – women and their trade unions’ in Ledwith, S. and Colgan, F. (eds) (1996) Women in Organisations, Macmillan, Basingstoke and London.

Craig, C., Garnsey, E. and Rubery, J. (1984) Payment structures and smaller firms: women’s employment in segmented labour markets, Research Paper No. 48, Department of Employment, London.

Dickens, L. (1997) ‘Gender, race and employment equality in Britain: inadequate strategies and the role of industrial relations actors’ in Industrial Relations Journal, 28:4, pp282-291.

Lukes, S. (2005) Power: A Radical View, Palgrave MacMillan, London.

Office of National Statistics (2002, 2009) Annual Survey of Hours and Holidays by Industry.