Patterns of labour, patterns of challenge:

1. Patterns of labour, patterns of challenge: gender, voice and new information communication technologies in industrial relations

2. Patterns of labour • Margaret GriecoProfessor of Transport and Society, Napier UniversityandSalaried Visiting Full Professor, Institute for African Development, Cornell University.

3. patterns of challenge • 1. Patterns of labour - perspectives of scholarship and commitment • Richard Whipp – the legacy • The social process approach to skill • Correcting the "missing record" • the active part played by women in the synchronisation of household or domestic rhythms and industrial workplace rhythms

4. Patterns of labour • the gender communication structures of the workplace • gender and the world of work in the electronic age • gender, voice and the new information communication technologies in industrial relations.

5. patterns of challenge • 2. Recording the past, archiving the present: developing labour's knowledge base • Whipp's Patterns of labour provides a challenge to existing accounts of women as passive • The failure to notice or record active management of their world by women at the level of society and, correspondingly, scholarship was commonplace in the world of a heavily male political structure, media and academy.

6. Patterns of labour • Women's informal organising and patterns of resistance received little attention in the world of political structures which were formally male. The recording of the past was weak and the formal archiving of the present beyond the communication resources of women. • Women's labour history did not disappear deprived of formal communication resources but rather was relayed by local collective voice within the community of women as long as the employment base in which such labour was embedded remained

7. patterns of challenge • The advent of new information communication technologies enables the recollection of now fragmented labour histories of women who worked in industries which have disappeared. • Women now have the technical ability and material opportunity to record and archive their experience of labour and to place documentary evidence on a par with that of the more formally resourced male world.

8. Patterns of labour • It is the time to launch the major digital collection and recollection of women's labour history: • it is also the time to ensure that women are alerted to the potential of the new information communication technologies in the better organisation and interaction of the spheres of home and work for female labour. • Recording past gender voice can be a pathway to the better organisation of present gender voice.

9. patterns of challenge • the right of workplace access to electronic contact with other household members seems likely to figure in worker entitlements as a necessary and routine part of social life. • There are new information communication technology parallels to the communication structure of the women workers studied by Richard Whipp which have yet to receive any sustained attention. • Hopefully, this position paper begins an interest in developing such research amongst new scholars

10. Patterns of labour • 3. Globalising gender voices: women and health • Richard Whipp in his research of the patterns of women's labour within the potteries became aware that the family planning aspects of lead paint were known to the women within the industry. Exposure to lead paint produced miscarriages and was part of women's strategies to hold down family size. • This social use of industrial resources fits into the wider pattern of women's knowledge of health.

11. patterns of challenge • Women's health practices were often hidden from authority as with the knowledge of the impact of exposure to lead. • Women's relationship to health knowledge had lost ground over centuries: the folk medicine knowledge of wise women had been displaced and replaced by the development of a male medical profession which held dominance even in the central areas of female identity such as child birth.

12. Patterns of labour • With the recent rise of distributed information communication technologies, the health debate is increasingly being impacted by the communication circuits and worlds of women. • Challenges to the male perspectives of the health establishment are increasingly launched by social movements of negatively impacted women(http://www.design-and-determination.com/gender-health.html).

13. patterns of challenge • The internet and world wide web have enabled women to post their experiences of pharmaceuticals and other health treatments – • health and medical information is no longer confined to the local worlds of women's undercover health circuits or the closely guarded professional knowledge bases of men.

14. Patterns of labour • The voice of the female health consumer through these new extra local health information and communication circuits joins often with the interests of the health employee. • The raising of women's voices in the sphere of health provides important opportunities for organised labour to develop strategies to challenge capital, most particularly in respect of Big Pharma and the organisation and reorganisation of health provision, such as the changes in the NHS.

15. patterns of challenge • Developing the alliance between female voices on health experience and needs and health workers based upon the new information communication technology affordances has been underconsidered as an appropriate strategy by organised labour (see the UNISON site http://www.unison.org.uk/upon which such an alliance strategy in fighting the privatisation of the NHS is seemingly absent).

16. Patterns of labour • 4. Organising organised labour: women's time and women's contribution. • Richard Whipp's recognition that women actively manage their time between household and employment activities • New information communication technologies properly organised can enable women to migrate more readily across the boundaries of previously separate and distinct geographical spheres and activities. Historically, the time poverty of women worked against their participation in formal political activities: new information communication technologies enable women to participate in formal political activities in smaller and more convenient units of time

17. patterns of challenge • The ability to participate in politics from the domestic space through new information communication technology is an important but underconsidered new competence and affordance. • Involvement in campaigns and social movement action through "ten minute activism" is a new feature of socio-political life: relatively spontaneous but mass social action is now more easily organised. • Identifying precisely what the contours and possible contours of these new competences are and the ways in which these can be aligned to or utilised by organised labour is worthy of an audit. Within such an audit, the potential of women's possible contributions is particularly important.

18. Patterns of labour • How can unions better capture and utilise the participatory time that women can make available through better use of the new communications technologies? • Organised labour can organise its facilities so as to be more hospitable to women's participation. • Creating areas of union web sites that are useful to women non-members and create a path by which non-members can align with union activities or be recruited is a strategy which seems to have received little testing as of yet.

19. patterns of challenge • The evidence from women's involvement in social movements around health is that important reservoirs of membership for organised labour are presently lost because the communication strategies of organised labour have not yet adjusted to the new technical age.

20. Patterns of labour • 5. Conclusion: Patterning our understanding of women's labour: reviving the social process approach. • Richard Whipp's work demonstrated to us the local strength women could achieve in an industry which required their manual dexterity (the paintresses of the potteries) and the communication structures in which this local strength was embedded and out of which it was also produced but his work could not talk to the ability of women to organise on the extra-local level. New information communication technologies with their highly distributed availabilities now permit this pattern of labour: the detailed social process approach of understanding the organisation of labour can be equally applied within the world of modern communications and organisation. Understanding gender communications within the world of industrial relations can contribute to the better organisation of labour, the readier archiving of women's labour history and the formation of a knowledge base through which labour can better research its own strategies

21. patterns of challenge • References: • Whipp, Richard, (1990) PATTERNS OF LABOUR: Work and Social Change in the Pottery Industry (ISBN: 0415030765) Routledge. • City of Stoke on Trent Museum Servicehttp://www.stoke.gov.uk/ccm/navigation/leisure/museums/ • Greene Anne-marie, Gill Kirton (2003)Possibilities for remote participation in trade unions: mobilising women activists Industrial Relations Journal Vol. 34 Issue 4 Page 319 October 2003 • Grieco, M. and Little, S.E. (2005) Gender and health: an agenda for Big Pharma.http://www.design-and-determination.com/gender-health.html • Internal Labour Organisation, Gender Equality Tool -http://www.ilo.org/dyn/gender/genderresources.list?p_lang=en&p_category=NEW&p_str=&p_count=0&p_selection=&p_order=TYPE&p_min=211&p_incr=30 • United Nations, (2000) Gender, justice and information and communication technologies -http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/marcelle.htm Accessed August 2006

22. http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/patternsoflabour.htmlhttp://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/patternsoflabour.html • http://www.design-and-determination.com/labour-challenge.pps