Labor History on the Line

Venus Green. Race on the Line: Gender, Labor, and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. xv + 370 pp. Photographs, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

For the past twenty years, labor and working class history in the United States has been engaged in an internal debate about what is required to re-make the field and recapture its once-prominent place in the new social history. Studies of race and gender have been at the forefront of these calls for revision, but there have been other arguments as well. Historians have trumpeted greater attention to the history of technology, the political economy of labor and corporate capital, and state-centered analysis as ways to reintegrate labor history. Each successive cohort of labor scholars now faces ever-greater demands to make their studies holistic in design and more attentive to current political issues and cultural theories. Translating these visions into empirical studies presents students and scholars with a daunting task. It has rendered achieving coherence within individual studies increasingly difficult. A relatively straight-forward empirical study of the impact of technology on work and union organization, some argue, requires an overlay of cultural theory that might mask, undercut, or even undermine the significant contributions of the work.

With these thoughts in mind, I read Venus Green's recent study, Race on the Line: Gender, Labor and Technology in the Bell System, 1880-1980. Solidly grounded in sources from the AT&T archives, the book discusses how changing technology in switch systems and dial telephones undermined the ability of women workers in the industry (specifically telephone operators) to shape their workload and working conditions, demand adequate compensation, or defend themselves against repeated threats to job security. While unions such as the Telephone Operators Union (TOU) and Communications Workers of America (CWA) made some inroads on pay systems and working conditions, telephone companies, rapidly consolidating in the course of the twentieth century, called most of the shots. By the late twentieth century, monopolistic "Ma" Bell transformed what had once been a skilled service craft into computerized customer service that required fewer and cheaper workers. These workers, Green shows us, increasingly were minority (largely African American) women. The regulation of affirmative action, economic decline and company opportunism, and the exit of many white women from telephone operating opened the door for a predominantly minority female labor force. Scientific management and innovations in communication technology shaped and then re-shaped telephone work and the labor force.

On these lines, Green's study makes an important contribution to labor history. It illuminates important shifts in the ways telephone companies controlled labor and adds to our understanding of the history of business, labor, technology, and the economy. The book also contributes a gender-specific and racially informed analysis of these basic processes, and it compares favorably in this regard with Jefferson Cowie's more globally minded but less gender-savvy Capital Moves: RCA's Seventy-Year Quest for Cheap Labor (1999). Like Cowie, Green addresses the frequently heard calls for integration of the history of business and technology into labor history. Her account of technological change in the telephone industry is almost painfully detailed, as she lavishes attention on minute changes in drops, switchboards, signals, and dials. At the same time, however, Green confines her analysis to how technological change affected women's work and occupations in the communications industry, neglecting the comparison to men's jobs that might have added depth to her argument.

Instead, Green turns her attention to one of the current debates in labor history, which is how racial identity, and specifically whiteness, shaped work, workplace struggles, and labor relations generally. In doing so, she dwells on the notion that what working women sought was "white ladyhood," an argument in the same vein as Nan Enstad's recent book on garment worker politics, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture and...