2 - Unions’ Representation of Women and Their Interests in the Workplace

Summary

In comparison with other academic fields, the underrepresentation of women and their interests in and by unions has attracted attention only relatively recently in France, with the exception of pioneering work on women's strikes in sociology (Maruani, 1979; Borzeix and Maruani, 1982; Kergoat, 1982) and history (Guilbert, 1966; Perrot, 1974; Zylberberg-Hocquard, 1978; Auzias and Houel, 1982). Research in employment relations has long been criticized for its ‘classist obsession’ (Kirton and Healy, 2008), its institutional bias (Wajcman, 2000), and its lack of consideration for the gendered dynamics that characterize union representation and the labour market. Yet, as early as the 1980s, Sylvia Walby (1986) argued that trade unions were one of the three patriarchal institutions that intervene in gender relations in paid employment, the others being the state and employers. In both France and Great Britain an overview of the literature shows the clearly marginal place of women in the ‘classical’ study of industrial relations; when they are not literally left out of the analysis, women feature only as a descriptive variable, or are studied in relation to specific issues like equal pay, workplace discrimination, and sometimes organizing.

In the UK in the 1980s, work by socialist-feminist researchers on working-class women's work led to a condemnation of the unions’ hostile attitude to women in traditional industries and raised the question of the underrepresentation of women and their interests more generally (Pollert, 1981; Glucksmann, 1982; Cockburn, 1983). The convergence between feminism, the feminization of the workforce, and the increasing union membership of women contributed to the emergence of a ‘subfield of research’ (Ledwith, 2012) in the 1990s. Research was conducted with public sector unions like UNISON, which have a large female membership (Lawrence, 1994; Cunnison and Stageman, 1995; Colgan and Ledwith, 1996). Special issues in academic journals focusing on employment relations (Dickens, 1989) developed a gendered perspective and research groups were set up in specialized organizations like the British Universities Industrial Relations Association. In France it was not until the 2000s that research in this area developed, with work by Josette Trat and Marie-Hélène Zylberberg (2000), Yannick Le Quentrec and Annie Rieu (2003), Chantal Rogerat (2005), and Rachel Silvera (2006, 2010) on the CGT, my own research and that of Sophie Pochic (Guillaume 2007, Guillaume and Pochic, 2009c, 2011, 2013), and Pascale Le Brouster (2006, 2009, 2011) on the CFDT.