Gillian Creese, Contracting Masculinity: Gender, Class, and Race in a White-Collar Union, 1944–1994. Ontario: Oxford University Press of Canada, 1999. vii + 278 pp. $21.95 paper

Extract

Based on the meticulous examination of company and union records and enlightening interviews with workers, Contracting Masculinity is a successful attempt to show how “doing gender” at the provincial utility British Columbia Electric (BE) created systematic sexual inequality from the 1940s to the present. Tellingly, the first union organization at BE was formed in 1944 and the first personnel management department followed in 1945. Creese's aim is to show how the leadership of one white-collar union collaborated with company executives and personnel managers to institutionalize job evaluation (or classification) systems and collective bargaining agreements that normalized “the rights of male breadwinners to higher pay and career mobility” (107). In the process, the (white) male worker became the norm and the object of most union strategies.