Live Wire: Women and Brotherhood in the Electrical Industry (review)

Anyone walking past construction sites will sense the reality that today, relatively few women hold skilled trades jobs. Francine Moccio seeks to understand why the electricians' occupation remains 98 per cent male, despite decades of legislative measures and feminist campaigns for change. Live Wire presents a case study of New York's powerful Local 3 of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, especially Division A, the elite construction unit. Moccio's analysis incorporates aspects of interview-based ethnographic participant observation, quantitative labour studies, political economy, sociology, and history of the skilled trades, civil rights, and the feminist movement.

"Building skyscrapers and building the construction brotherhoods went hand in hand, and masculinity was embedded in both," Moccio explains. (23) Union leadership, access to apprenticeships, and a sense of solidarity were literally passed father to son, for generations. Moccio pays particular attention to the complex evolution of the local's male social clubs, defining members' fraternal power networks as a central factor in resisting women's incorporation into the trade.

"Arguments for female inequality are vital to the preservation of the brotherhood," (89) Moccio writes. To discourage would-be female entrants and command respect, male electricians overemphasize macho dangers of the job, even as fibre optics and other new technologies reduce strength and skill requirements. Seasonal and cyclical insecurity of construction employment fuel hostility toward women, Moccio notes. Men fear that female co-workers might challenge established leadership and demand better working conditions, compromising union competitiveness by raising issues such as pregnancy and childcare. Employers have a vested interest in promoting labour brotherhood, with its hostility to women and change, as key to workplace stability and productivity. "By wiring together formal and informal cultural forms of male bonding and gender solidarity for purposes of organizational efficiency and commercial expansion, the electrical brotherhood and its joint industry board provide the nexus that privileges white male workers, unionists, and employers to the exclusion of women." (18)

Informed by her first-hand experience as a daughter and teacher of blue-collar workers, Moccio contends that workers' patriarchal beliefs shape dynamics not just at work, but in family life. "Men resent women entering the high-paying blue-collar positions because they lose a monopoly on two precious commodities - their high-wage jobs and their gender privilege at home." (78) Moccio shows how man-breadwinner/woman-housewife assumptions were literally built into Electchester, the union's co-op housing. Moccio's link between workplace and family hierarchy is intriguing, but not explored in real depth. Wanting to be "king of the castle" is not always the same as getting; private-life dynamics exhibit complicated twists. Moccio's argument would have benefited by interviewing electricians' spouses and explicitly engaging more literature on working-class family relationships.

A particularly valuable chapter contrasts the union's resistance to female workers with its historical progressiveness in accepting minority males. Moccio explains this irony by focusing on 1963 as a vital year, when union leader Harry Van Arsdale Jr. agreed to make new apprentice classes at least one-third minority, in exchange for laws increasing use of apprentices in skyscraper construction. This deal made the Kennedy administration look good on civil rights, pleased business by containing costs, and strengthened the union. "Van Arsdale legitimized the entrance of racial minorities.... He confronted resistant journeymen by relying on the rhetoric of... brotherhood: a commitment to bringing racial minorities into the trade, but only through the time-honored path of apprenticeship.... The entry of minority men into the union never had the same smell of outside interference that accompanied later efforts by agencies to pressure Local 3 to accept women." (113)

Between 1970 and 2000, New York construction employment doubled for African Americans and more than tripled for Hispanics. Moccio interprets these gains to "prove that it is much more than prejudice that impedes women's way, and suggest that the Sisyphean task of changing culture is not the only possible route to achieving redress." (102) Yet Moccio herself indicates that construction...