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BOOKS REVIEWED BY LAURELL RITCHIE Women's Press 1986 Feminists, including those in the labour movement, rarely have a chance to see the strengths and wisdom of immigrant women working in the factories of our towns and cities. This is in part because most of us inhabit separate worlds of class, culture and language; but also because we don't seem inclined to reach out for that connection. Charlene Gannagé is to be praised for making a connection, in "Double Day; Double Bind: Women Garment Workers". Written originally as a doctoral thesis, the book reflects a personal odyssey into the world of overburdened women like Rosa, Carol, Maria and Grace. One of them muses "maybe when I die, I relax. When I die, I finish everything." For this case study, Gannagé spent two years interviewing the women and men who work for Edna Manufacturing in Toronto's garment district on Spadina Avenue. There are some limitations in the study. The
traditional "whole garment" production process at Edna is not representative of
the assembly-line production now used in most garment factories. It is also
unlike most garment factories today in that the senior workers,
Although Gannagé had substantial co-operation from trade union and company officials at the plant, she is refreshingly frank in her assessments of the management's labour relations record, and of the incumbent union's role. The union, she says, operates more "like a personnel department of management" than like a "representative body of the workers". She is particularly critical of the union's unwillingness to educate its members on issues of concern to working women. |
especially the men, share the common ground
of Jewish background with their bosses. Gannagé' s examination of the
role played by shared ethnic identity in labour relations at Edna is
fascinating, but it seems like a page out of history. Nonetheless the bulk of
her work on ethnic divisions of labour are essentially true for all such
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