Life on the Line: A Sociological Investigation of Women Working in a Clothing Factory in Malta

Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2003 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 13, No. 1: 147-155 LIFE ON THE LINE. A SOCIOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION OF WOMEN WORKING IN A CLOTHING FACTORY IN MALTA (REVIEW ARTICLE) JosAnn Cutajar University ofMalta Angele Deguara provides us with a meticulously researched case study of power dynamics played out within and without a Maltese clothing factory. This research helps us recognize how gender and social class, together with the location of the Maltese Islands within the international capitalist mar­ ket, impact on agency. The focus is on the division of labour on the global and the national level and how it plays out at the micro level. Although the study purports to investigate the life experiences of a group of female factory workers through a Marxist and feminist perspective, the focus is continually on the interplay of power relationships between owners, management, middle management, machine operators and union. Deguara conducted fieldwork in Hosen (Malta) Ltd. (pseudonym) in the summer of 1994 with the objective of studying the ‘underdog’ standpoint, namely the lived experiences of the female machine operators who worked in this clothing factory. Observation and participant observation were conducted in different parts of the factory. Unstructured and semi-structured inter­ views were conducted with management, middle management, union representatives and machine operators to explore the relationships that existed among the machinists, the male and female workers within this factory, management and owners, as well as management and unions. Deguara draws on the disparate views to find out how physical, social, legal and ideological conditioning shape women’s life on the shop floor and eventu­ ally determine their attitude to work. The main asset of the book is that it uses a multi-method approach to give a multi-perspective view of the Copyright © 2003 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta. 148 JosAnn Cutajar phenomenon under study. The findings and conclusions that derive from these multi-focal points are then assiduously compared with similar research that took place in other countries and in Malta. The researcher also drew upon literature to explicate points that derived from her own analysis of the data. In the first chapter of the book, Deguara demarcates the Maltese Islands’ peripheral location within the international capitalist market, and explicates their dependence on foreign investment. As the author points out, foreign investors have the power to enforce a particular role on the labour force within the Maltese Islands. In this case, the investors of Hosen (Malta) Ltd., who were Germans, retained the role of design, planning, purchasing, marketing, selling, research and technology for the mother company in Germany, while relegating the role of production to their Maltese workers. By retaining this role, they had the capacity to retain the right to register the profit amassed for them by Maltese workers in Germany, hence depriving the Maltese Islands of revenue engendered by its own people. When I was reading this book, it became clear how the agency of developing and/or underdeveloped countries is affected by their location within the international global market. In the same chapter, the author delineates Maltese women’s peripheral location within the Maltese labour market, although she does not draw a parallel between Malta’s peripheral location as a nation and the peripheral location of its female citizens. Through the perusal of a number of theoretical positions, Deguara tries to explicate women’s subordinate location within the Maltese and international labour market. The author is of the idea that patriarchy and capitalism are the main causes of women’s subordinate location within the labour market. Less importance is given to state legislation and the ideology promoted by the Roman Catholic Church, two institutions that play conflicting or consistent roles in facilitating/preventing women from taking up/abstaining from paid work (see Cutajar 1995: 20-22). There is a plethora of theories incorporated within this chapter and sometimes the same concept is looked into a number of times because different terminologies for the same phenomenon are utilized by different authors. This sometimes detracts from the flow of the book. The researcher’s location within the academic world had also some bearing on the kind of methodology she adopted for this research. Writing from...