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Our Output = Their Income(
Womankind 1972)
(Editors Note: Life for the women workers in one small Northside factory-Chicago 1972.)
The factory
I worked in is in the Paulina-Barry community, just on the edge of an
industrial area. Ten of us women worked together in this small plant
-- 8_ hours a day, $1.60 an hour, standing all the time -- putting plastic
alphabet letters into plastic bags.
The women
I worked with came from different parts of the city and different backgrounds,
but with one thing in common -- being poor, and depending on this job
for a living. One young woman quit school at fourteen when her family
moved from Tennessee -- her life is now this work and the neighborhood
gang. Another, who was still in high school, works to help her family
with money troubles and comes all the way from 115th south. There was
a Puerto Rican woman who spoke little English, and three other young
mothers, two black and one white, who had been deserted by their husbands.
A big part of their paycheck went for baby-sitters and transportation,
since none lived close by. Our supervisor was a woman from Kentucky
(a lot of the workers came from the mountain country) who spent her
energy on making money, putting the other women down, and sweet-talking
the managers in order to keep her job.
Most of
the men in the plant were in their teens and made frantic attempts
to impress us with their prowess. This was quickly put down or ignored
by the women. All of us had enough of the same treatment by men before
to know how to handle it, and the strength of our numbers and experience
really came in handy.
Not surprisingly,
the main topic of conversation among the women was families and men,
in that order of importance. All of the married or once-married women
had children, and talked about the difficulties of finding someone
they trusted enough to look after their children. They didn't want
their children to always be carted around from one place to another,
from one baby-sitter to another. When their children were sick they
couldn't take them to a doctor for lack of money and for fear of losing
their job if they took a day off. This happened twice -- women took
their children to the doctor's, and were fired for taking time off
work unnecessarily, and losing the company money Although none of these
problems were their fault, most of the women felt guilty about not
being "good mothers"-
and not spending more time with their children. None of them had been
able to get on, or stay on, welfare, because they "knew men"
or "had no reason not to work". At least once a day, each
mother would worry out loud about her children.
One day
one of the older white women came in puffy-faced and missing a tooth
-- her "old man" had beaten her up. We got into a discussion
of bow many times different ones of us had been beaten up and how badly.
These women knew better than to see their men as knights on white horses,
which is often the illusion of middle class women. They had experienced
enough to know that macho behavior (a Spanish word for super-masculinity)
is not the sign of a superior being, but only a front. Men are seen
as companions, but the women liked the company of their girlfriends
better. With other women, they could talk, but men often treated them
as sex objects. They were resentful of this treatment, but it had also
been pounded into their heads that they were - or would be -- someone's
"old lady”. The attitude of most of the women towards men
was that they wanted one or were holding on to the one they had, because
a man could support you and your children and take off some of the burden
of working.
Besides
families, we also talked about money and jobs. It was hard to talk
to each other except at lunch time because talk among the workers was
often prohibited -- it "slowed us down". We all got an hourly wage,
and then a bonus for output. This "bonus" was often used against
us by the owners. They expressed concern that we make extra money for
ourselves, but on days we didn't make bonus, they would start talking
about firing some of the "slow" ones. Bonus for us meant twice
as much income for them. Their favorite tactic was to pit us against
each other by picking out one woman on the line, and saying that because
she was so slow, the rest of us wouldn't make any extra money -- so
we could thank her for ruining it for us. This worked for a while, and
would get us backbiting and picking on each other. Then we’d get
yelled at for something they started.Sometimes, as punishment for not
making bonus or talking the fan or radio would be taken out of our work
area.
It was
a hot summer, in an even hotter factory, and the combination of heat
and monotonous work gave most people headaches, and made a couple of
women faint. The fan and radio were our only relief. After a while
without them, we told the managers that we would use the fan and radio
when we wanted, or else would work a lot slower than we had been. We
weren't strong enough to threaten quitting (most of the women couldn't
afford the risk), but we got back our fan and radio with the strength
we did show.
Race was
something that none of the working women used against each other, but
which the management did. The white women came from backgrounds which "experts" would call racist--Southern white, and the black
women all identified to different degrees with black culture and present
black struggles. But the common-ness of our situations and experiences,
some as women, some as poor women, gave a unity to our work group. The
managers' racism was very strong and very open -- when they picked on
people, it was always on the black women for being slow, or on the Puerto
Rican woman for having "that funny Latin accent". They eventually
used her accent and slight knowledge of English to fire her -- "She
can't work well enough without speaking English". How much English
does it take to put plastic letters into plastic bags, especially when
talking is almost forbidden?
I recently
went back to the factory to pick up an old paycheck which somehow got "lost". All of the people I had worked with were gone, except
two. There were new women in our place, all Latin, and a new white woman
had been made supervisor. The male workers had gotten a raise.
Higher
salaries, transportation, day-care centers, and control of our working
situations... all of these things are necessary. What is needed to
get these is strength with the people we work with and strength with
the people we come from. I'm a woman, and a working with women. Our
strength comes from this, and has just begun. Viva the common woman!
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