Sex and Skill in the Organisation of the Clothing Industry

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Abstract
This article looks at the clothing industry, which has a larger concentration of women employees than any other industry. In asking the questions, why are women still concentrated in unskilled and low paid work, and why hasn’t anti-discrimination and equal pay legislation changed that, it would appear that some answers lie in the forms of organisation of the labour process itself. To perceive women’s marginalised relation to production as a consequence of their ‘dual role’ and a discriminatory labour market is not enough, and here the concentration of women in low-paid work is placed within the context of the deskilling of the labour process. Such changes in the organisation of the labour process have created the unskilled jobs which women undertake, but it does not explain why women’s wages are so persistently lower than men’s, nor the blanket categorisation of women’s work as always being of lower skill value than men’s work. Deskilling is not an abstract formula, and in clothing, as elsewhere, the range of strategies available to management to effect the cheapening of production occur in the context of economic constraints and labour resistance. What is shown here is that strategies employed by management to exert a downward pressure on wages (and along the way avoid equal pay), combine with union strategies to resist that, to have the effect of reinforcing sexual divisions within the labour process. So that although the actions of management and male workers derive from quite different imperatives, they can have a short-term coincidence of interests in keeping female labour segregated in certain jobs. It does raise questions about traditional forms of trade union strategy, especially trade union sectionalism, and just how women can get out of the low-wage ghetto.

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