Sex And Money: Feminism and Political Economy in the Media

5. The Invisibility of the Everyday: New Technology and Women’s Work

In the small community of Heart’s Content, Newfoundland, a museum chronicles the glory days of telecommunications in Newfoundland. It marks the site where the transatlantic cable first reached land in North America, which led to prosperous jobs. Although women represented at least half of the telegraph operators in Newfoundland telegraph stations between 1893 and 1896 (Bradbrook 1980), historic accounts of Newfoundland ’s telecommunications industry made little mention of the sex of workers when it came to the economics of the industry. This pattern reflects larger patterns of the omission of sex as a variable of analysis in the political economy of women’s work in telecommunications.1 Although only a fraction of the workers in the telecommunications sector today, women warrant consideration because their labor has played an important role in the delivery of communications services. The mechanisms through which women’s labor has been leveraged to service the needs of the market, and the costs borne by women in the process, have long gone unaddressed. Here I argue that the sex of workers in Atlantic Canada’s2 telecommunications sector is intimately tied to how technology is used to increase telecommunications sector profits in Atlantic Canada, where as the industry has grown, huge profits have been realized at the expense of women’s jobs. New telecommunications technology has played a central role in this process, as it has facilitated the movement of jobs between communities, provinces , and countries and contributed to job loss and deterioration of working conditions in many remaining jobs held predominately by women. Although traditional analytic tools used in political economy might allow one to discover how political economic changes translate into changes in the everyday lives of women, their use does not ensure that the significant links between sex and money will become apparent. These only become evident when sex is a variable of analysis, and analytic tools aimed at uncovering women’s everyday experiences are employed . Below, after briefly outlining the theoretical perspective on which this work is based, I describe the Atlantic Canadian telecommu60 5. The Invisibility of the Everyday: New Technology and Women’s Work Ellen Balka nications industry. Next, I tell a sex-blind story of changes in the Atlantic telecommunications industry to demonstrate how sex can be overlooked in traditional political-economic approaches. I then outline some of the changes that have occurred in women’s work in the Atlantic Canadian telecommunications industry, as a way of drawing attention to the value of focusing on women’s everyday experiences in our efforts to understand the political economy of women’s work in telecommunications . Such a focus also renders technology visible as a factor in the political economy of women’s telecommunications work. Theoretical Framework Mosco (1996) identifies three points of entry into the study of political economy of communications: commodification, spatialization, and structuration. Commodification refers to the process of transforming use value to exchange value, and the ways the processes of commodification are extended into the social field of communications products, audiences, and labor. Spatialization refers to the transformation of space and time, or the process of institutional extension. Structuration refers to “the process of constituting structures with social agency” (Mosco 1996, 138). Structuration results in social and power processes organized around class and gender and race that may correspond to or oppose one another. Mosco (1996, 231) suggests that one goal for political economy is “to determine how best to theorize gender within a political economic analysis” and to find terms of engagement between political economic frameworks and those that more adequately address gender. Here I suggest that although commodification, spatialization, and structuration are extremely useful in explaining the macrodynamics of women’s work in the telecommunications sector in Atlantic Canada, they fall short as conceptual tools when it comes to explaining the micro- or day-to-day experiences of women workers in the telecommunications sector—a frequent shortcoming of political economy that has been noted by others (e.g., Connelly and Armstrong 1992; Pendakur 1993). Political economy has been criticized for its failure to uncover “the ideological dimensions of economics that present a male-controlled system of work as characteristic and natural” (Mosco 1996, 61). Women’s day-to-day experiences become invisible in many accounts of political economy (Smith 1987), which suggests that we need a political economy that analyzes how women’s lives are caught up in historic, political, and economic processes. One of my tasks...