Smokestacks in the Hills: Rural-Industrial Workers in West Virginia by Lou Martin

Author:Lou Martin [Martin, Lou]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Rural, Labor & Industrial Relations, Social Science, Political Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780252097560
Google: 9Hy0CgAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 25404021
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2015-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

WORK AND IDENTITY IN THE FACTORY AND AT HOME

By the end of the 1940s, steel and pottery workers in Hancock County had had very different experiences from urban-industrial workers. Workers in big cities who belonged to locals of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) became incorporated into the national labor movement through participation in national strikes as well as through the CIO’s culture of unity. They looked to the Democratic Party to strengthen labor rights and to create federal programs that would be their safety net in hard times. After abandoning their old survival strategies such as relying on local ethnic charities and fraternal organizations, many CIO families now credited unionization and the Democratic Party for their improved standard of living. The changes they experienced were so dramatic that many working-class homes in cities across the country had photographs of John L. Lewis and Franklin Roosevelt hanging on the living room wall. Industrial workers in Hancock County were lucky enough to keep working through most of the 1930s, did not participate in national strikes that resulted in better wages and benefits, and often focused on their old strategy of “making do” to improve their standard of living. The work experiences of families in Hancock County strengthened a rural-industrial culture that privileged place and localized community over national unions and distant bureaucracies.

Although the experiences of these rural-industrial workers diverged from the experiences of urban-industrial workers in several ways, one important commonality was that work, whether at home or in the factories, tended to be organized by gender. Because gender was so fundamental to the organization of work, it provides an important lens onto the daily experiences of Hancock County’s rural-industrial workers. The gendered division of labor in the factories evolved in the 1940s and 1950s. Potteries hired increasing numbers of women to fill more and more roles in the production process. The fact that pottery wages fell behind steel wages in these decades contributed to the declining percentage of men in the potteries as they sought a family wage. At the same time, Weirton—where the mill was “no place for a woman”—became a town of steelworkers and housewives with few job opportunities for women, especially married women. At home, women and men fell back into more familiar gender roles as they produced their own food, made their own clothing, and built their own houses. Rural-industrial workers believed in “making do” to stretch their family income, performing self-help activities that harked back to older work patterns on the farms that many of them had left behind. Thus there were two gender divisions of labor operating in parallel: one at home and another in the factory, one derived from rural self-sufficiency and the other from industrial production.

Neither the gendered patterns of work nor the rural-industrial workers’ adaptations to them were unique in America at this time. In cities across the nation, factory managers replaced male workers with female workers, and the urban working class experienced a gender division of labor at home.

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