Production Regimes — Women’s Pride as Producers

Abstract

We have discussed several ways in which workers feel connected to their work and develop what we defined as producer’s pride: being proud to contribute to a useful product, enjoying teaching others, advancing from working on the line to a position of teacher, enjoying unpredictable variation, being able to exert influence on the production process, enjoying horizontal cooperation, learning new things. The other side in which we saw producer’s pride at work, was in workers’ boredom and dissatisfaction where their work was not challenging. Women and men experienced their work similarly. There was one aspect though, exclusively narrated by women, which was their experience of doing ‘a man’s job’ in a context where their workmates were predominantly men. In all the four factories we visited women in production were the exception. In the case of India, only one woman was working in production and even the administration was staffed only by men. In Mexico and in Sweden management had an explicit policy to increase the number of women on the floor. In the following we discuss the ways in which women talked about doing ‘a man’s job’. In contrast to Chapter 6, where we discuss doing a man’s job in the context of gender relations in the plant, the following chapter focuses on women’s relation to their work content.