Women in the Union

"A Woman's Place Is..."

Within the trade union movement itself, the war brought to the fore a contradiction that, while not new, could no longer be ignored. The CIO and industrial unionism had crusaded for the equality of all workers, and working women, especially in the clothing industry, joined unions in large numbers. But wages in the sectors that employed women were low while in the new sectors such as auto, companies rarely hired women. Even when women got jobs in auto, their wages were about two-thirds of men's (or lower), and management restricted women to separate seniority lists.

At GM, in the thirties, the Oshawa and St. Catharines plants each employed over 200 women. In addition, women reps sat on the bargaining committee, but they generally represented women who worked in segregated departments such as the sewing room. The original GM agreement of 1937 included a clause reading: "In any department in which both men and women are employed they should be divided into separate non-interchangeable occupational groups".

Soon after that agreement, when the economy slowed down and lay-offs returned, the union argued that positions should be found in other departments for those women with highest seniority. Although some inequities were later corrected, GM's Oshawa plant manager replied, at a meeting on 24 September 1937, that GM would unilaterally decide how many women to hire, adding that "the management did not favour mixing male and female 'help' in a department".

As young men left for the battlefield and the economy geared itself to the overseas war needs, Canada moved from unemployment to a situation where, by 1942, companies were competing for workers. For many companies and the government, women were the answer. Rather than attracting scarce workers with higher wages or better conditions, the companies could bring a new pool of labour into the factories and segregate these women workers in certain departments. Confident that the position offered to women - temporary, new to the labour market, separated from experienced union activists - would limit the development of their trade union consciousness and make them easier to control, the companies paid them lower wages.

In Oshawa, the number of women workers doubled (to 400); in St. Catharines, over one-quarter of the workforce was now women (1,200 of 4,500); at de Havilland, women (1,775) represented over half the workforce. In the auto industry before the war, only one worker in fourteen was female; this number more than doubled by 1943. In aerospace, the number of women was previously negligible; it rose to better than one in five workers (though they were still concentrated in certain lines of work). In agricultural implements, the proportion of women quadrupled from about five per cent to almost twenty per cent.

With popular culture supporting the inclusion of women in the workforce and with women participating in production, many thought that prevailing stereotypes of the role of women might change. After all, magazines now glorified the woman who left her home to produce for the war, popular songs such as "Rosie-the-Riveter" paid tribute to her, governments and companies not only endorsed but actually provided child-care services, and women showed that they were capable of heavy manufacturing and skilled work.

In spite of the apparent social support for women entering the workforce, their status remained inferior. The gendered division that the auto majors enforced was effective. If women had, for example, worked on the assembly line, doing the same work as men, the pressures from both the women and their fellow male unionists might have led to wage parity. But the company managed to avoid this outcome.

In motor vehicle assembly, employment increased by about 8,400 workers between 1939 and the wartime peak of 1942-43; but only 130 of these new workers, less than two per cent, were women. Even though the number of workers in the assembly sector increased by two-thirds between 1929 and 1949, the number of women - low as it was to start with - actually fell. Women were hired in certain sections of the parts sector, in traditional women's departments within the auto majors, or temporary divisions expected to disappear after the war. General Motors, for example, created a special Victory Shift for women which was to end when victory was achieved.

Some definite changes in attitude occurred. The Detroit office of the UAW established a Women's Bureau. With no automatic dues check-off, the union collected dues on an individual voluntary basis; this increased pressures to set out demands that would gain the support of women. Amalgamated locals such as Local 195 in Windsor and Local 397 in Brantford, which represented women in auto parts and miscellaneous manufacturing, successfully negotiated equal pay for equal work. Within the Big Three, Local 199 in St. Catharines was one of a number of locals who regularly raised the issue at the council, warning in June, 1942, that "unless the union=able to give leadership to the struggle for equal pay for equal work we will remain weak among the women".

The first strike of Ford Canada workers centred around the concern that Ford would replace men with lower-paid women. The union's demand was not to oppose the hiring of women, but to insist that they earn the same wages. Ford Canada's eventual response was that hiring women was worthwhile only if they were cheaper, and it refused to hire women at its assembly plants until 1977. Although the union leadership did raise the issue of equal pay with the broader public, the union did not launch a campaign to challenge Ford when it stopped hiring women in Canada. In the U.S., on the other hand, Ford was a major employer of women. This discrepancy may have stemmed from the differing structures of the company in the U.S. and in Canada. Whereas the Canadian operations were heavily weighted to assembly, the U.S. operations included an extensive parts manufacturing sector that could absorb lower-paid women workers.

After the war, many of these women, especially those who were married, were quite effectively returned to the kitchen. This trend was a matter of both company and government policy, reflected not only in lay-off policy but also in the closing of the extensive child-care centres that had been set up during the war. Yet women's return to the home also had a wide base of support amongst male and even female workers. There were isolated examples of resistance on the part of women, but as Pam Sugiman commented in Labour's Dilemma, her study of women in the Canadian UAW, the more common occurrence in the immediate postwar period was that "Married women disappeared as quietly and unassumingly as they had appeared in the auto plants."

Women's exposure to the world of work during the war did, however, have some lasting impact. In the decades after the war, the proportion of women in the workforce resumed a steady climb. Many of the married women who had entered the workforce in the war years and then returned to the home went back to work after their children grew up, influenced in part by their wartime experience. Furthermore, later studies indicated that women with wartime work experience passed on to their daughters attitudes that were more sympathetic to women's role in the workforce.

The story of women in the workforce during and after the war years contrasts in significant ways with the experience of black workers in the United States. The labour shortage and the relatively high wages in Detroit had attracted southern whites and blacks to Detroit. Racism against blacks was intense in spite of efforts by the UAW leadership to limit it: 100,000 person-days of wildcats occurred when whites (often but not always from the South) refused to work alongside blacks. The racism culminated in the horror of the Detroit race riots in the summer of 1943, when thirty-four people were killed. Yet, after the war, blacks, unlike women, remained a significant part of the auto workforce.

The difference, it seems, was that the role of blacks as paid workers wasn't generally challenged; the fight was over some white workers insisting that blacks be segregated. With women, on the other hand, it was their role as permanent paid workers that was not yet accepted. The truth was that the equality of women in the workplace could not be achieved unless the union addressed the broader role of women in the family and in society. As long as it was generally assumed that the role of women was primarily in the home, their role in the war would be viewed as temporary regardless of the rhetoric. Men might join in the fight for equal pay because they recognized this fight as being in their own self-interest; women accepting lower pay would be a competitive threat to their own jobs. But not so with seniority. Fewer workers with full seniority rights means more security for those with full rights (at least in the short run when solidarity an issue).

Indicative of these assumptions about the place of women in society was the role of the women's auxiliaries, organizations of wives of autoworkers established to assist the men in their struggles. The auxiliary in Oshawa, which became the largest such group in either Canada or the United States, was established before the 1937 strike began. These auxiliaries quickly spread throughout the union. They supplied coffee and sandwiches during strikes and sometimes joined the picket lines. They evolved into a social club for the participating women, who organized recreational and charity work.

But these women also saw themselves in broader political terms. In many locations - Oshawa one example - they supplemented the work of the union by mobilizing within the community and sometimes nationally for better housing, rent controls, and national medicare. They supported key labour struggles outside the UAW, participated in the peace movement in the sixties, and addressed international issues.

Yet the auxiliaries and the working women in the UAW seemed to inhabit completely different worlds. Few links were established. As the participation of women in the workforce later grew, and as a feminist consciousness developed in the seventies and eighties, the membership of the auxiliaries correspondingly declined, especially amongst younger women.

When the war ended and lay-offs replaced labour shortages, the prevailing assumption that women's real role was in the home directly led to separate seniority lists. Even the fight for equal pay, as long as it was about equality in the abstract, rather than the pay of workers who were truly equal, would not attract the kind of commitment and mobilization needed to change the existing pay structures. Working women had not yet developed their own self-confidence and were not yet in a position to build on the experiences of the war to transform society's (and their own) view of women's role. They had little or no supportive resources inside or outside the union. The Women's Bureau, for example, was in Detroit and itself had limited resources. Changes occurred, but they came slowly and not before the notion of a broader women's movement was on the agenda.

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