Working Lives

Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945-2007

Linda McDowell

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781444339185, 9781444339192
• eBook ISBN: 9781118349243
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Demography
• Index: Social Sciences

Full of unique and compelling insights into the working lives of migrant women in the UK, this book draws on more than two decades of in-depth research to explore the changing nature of women's employment in post-war Britain.

• A first-rate example of theoretically located empirical analysis of labour market change in contemporary Britain
• Includes compelling case studies that combine historical documentation of social change with fascinating first-hand accounts of women's working lives over decades
• Integrates information gleaned from more than two decades of in-depth research
• Revealing comparative analysis of the similarities and differences in the lives of immigrant working women in post-war Britain
• Features real-life accounts of women's under-reported experiences of migration

Part One

Migration and Mobilities

Chapter One

Leaving Home: Migration and Working Lives

Introduction: Geographical Journeys

One of the key rites of passage for growing numbers of young women is leaving home. Once associated for the majority with marriage and the move from a parental to a conjugal home, many young women now live independently for varying periods of time. In the industrial West, this has been related to the rising numbers of women in universities and with the growth in women’s labour market participation, enabling women increasingly to become financially independent and establish their own home. While once women’s lives were associated with the private spaces of the home and the local scale of the domestic, women in Britain are now part of the public sphere of waged work, where they participate in almost equal numbers to men. About 11 million men and women are now in waged work at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century and the social construction of femininity is no longer as closely linked with domesticity as it once was.

These changes have in the main been a post-Second World War ­phenomenon. While something like a third of all women worked for wages for some part of their lives in the century before that war, the numbers began to rise after it, accelerating from the 1970s. Between the end of the Second World War and the new millennium, then, there has been a transformation of employment, class, culture and relationships between gender and employment that have radically changed many people’s lives. Men, as well as women, found that the older certainties about their place in the labour market were challenged by the rise of new forms of work, new patterns of labour market participation and growing diversity in the social characteristics of employees. Perhaps the most significant change in the last three decades or so in the UK, however, has been the extended participation of women, especially mothers, in the workforce.

For many women, however, leaving home to take part in the labour market has not been a growing privilege, associated with educational participation, but an economic necessity. In different ways, sometimes on a casual basis or for cash in hand, working-class women have always contri­buted to their households and single women, without the support of a wider household, have also of necessity had to look for employment. For all but the few who work at ‘home’, in their own domestic arena, earning a living, going out to work, necessarily involves a journey, as Alice Kessler-Harris (1982) signalled in the title of her now classic history of US women’s ­working lives: Out to Work. Long before the establishment of capitalist social relations and the type of regulation that now characterises the formal labour markets of many societies, providing the daily essentials for everyday life often involved both long journeys and absences from the home. Travelling considerable distances was common among nomadic hunters and gatherers before the establishment of agriculture. From herders engaged in transhumance, moving between pastures on a seasonal or annual basis, to the peripatetic tramps, hobos and casual workers of national depressions, leaving home has been a correlate of making a living. For some, the migrations associated with employment have been more permanent or larger scale, across significant distances. In the transition to industrial capitalism and urbanisation in the West, hundreds of thousands of people moved from the countryside to the city; others moved across national boundaries to start a new life far from their country of birth. It is this group of people for whom leaving home also entails leaving their homeland that is the subject here.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, millions of migrants from Ireland, Germany, Russia and other parts of Eastern Europe moved across the Atlantic to the USA and Canada, escaping from hunger, hardship, oppression and political unrest in search of a better standard of living, leaving behind increasingly impoverished compatriots as the more able, the more skilled and the more adventurous swelled the ranks of the leavers. These movements were predominantly voluntary, albeit often motivated by necessity, encouraged by a variety of economic, political and social circumstances, to ‘new’ lands where the settlers re-established societies in the image of the ‘old’ country, with different degrees of success, but often ­disenfranchising the original inhabitants. Earlier migrations, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, were different. The wholesale transportation of slaves between Africa, Europe and the Americas was a tragic ­example of involuntary movement to provide labourers for the plantations and homes of the slave owners in the Americas, transforming both the ­sending and the receiving economies, and leaving a legacy of inequality and injustice that is still not settled. And more recently, in the immediate post-war period, white Britons left the UK to establish new lives in Australia and New Zealand as well as in North America, and several millions of displaced people after the end of the Second World War were transformed from ­refugees into economic migrants as western countries recruited workers to rebuild their shattered economies.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the rate of movement has increased as millions of people move in search of work or as displaced peoples and refugees. Currently in East and South-East Asia millions of people are moving within and across national boundaries as economic development, the mobility of capital and the growing integration of the global economy draw increasing numbers of people into different forms of employment relations. These more recent movements might be regarded as a sort of reverse colonisation (Bennett 1964), as millions of workers move from the economically exploited margins of the global economy to the centres of production, in the main as ‘volunteers’ or as casual cheap labourers, but sometimes under duress, as manufacturing workers, maids and nannies, gardeners and cleaners, construction workers and sex workers, bartenders and into numerous other forms of work, servicing the demands of more affluent populations.

These different migrations involve and affect men and women in ­different ways at different times. It seems that the forced migrations that characterised the early modern period included women as well as men, and white women among them (Colley 2002, 2007), whereas the enslavement of Africans in the Americas in the seventeenth century was predominantly, although not solely, a movement of men, as was the later transport of indentured servants and convicts from, for example, India to East Africa, China to the USA and Canada, and Britain to Australia. An analysis of migration reveals the assumptions about the suitability of men or women for different markets, as well as the racialised ideologies that permitted the exploitation of people constructed as inferior Others. In previous eras, when the earlier movers were men, the vanguard of the migratory movement, they sent for other family members once some labour market security had been found and savings accumulated. In the last century or so, however, women have made up an increasing proportion of transnational migrants, moving not only as part of a wide household group but also as independent individuals, sometimes in advance of other family members, at other times as single, unattached women, and in growing numbers leaving their families behind them as they become the primary breadwinners from a distance.

In the modern world, where restless global capital searches for locations where labour is cheap and exploitable, rural to urban migrations as well as transnational movements are increasingly dominated by women. These migrants move into export processing industries – garments, electronics, food processing – in Thailand, Taiwan, coastal China, the Mexican border, into sweated industries in the cities of the advanced industrial West (Sassen 2001) and into the caring work of nannies, nurses and domestic servants, to replace the domestic labour of middle-class women or to provide care for ageing populations (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2003). These migrations have a huge effect on gender and familial relations in both ‘sending’ and ‘receiving’ societies, affecting the demographic structure of different ­populations, the opportunities (or not) to create independent households and cultural assumptions about appropriate forms of work and behaviour for men and women, in some cases permitting greater freedom for women, in others deepening women’s exploitation as they find themselves trapped in unequal forms of relationships, both in the workplace and in the society at large.

Transnational migration has now become a global phenomenon. It has been estimated that at the start of the twenty-first century, about 200 ­million people in the world were migrants, the largest absolute number in history (Smith et al. 2006: 9) and about 3 per cent of the world’s population. Facilitated by developments in transport and communication technologies, people are now able to cross vast distances relatively easily and inexpensively, although the nature, pace and scale of migration are also connected to changes in national economies, to patterns of transnational capital flows, to wars, famine and pestilence, to revolutions and regime change, which may force the previously immobile to think about migration. The direction of travel is in the main from the South to the North, from less economically developed countries to the richer countries of the world, as it has been across the last two centuries. China, India and the Philippines have been the three main sending countries in the last half-century or so: an estimated 35 million Chinese, 20 million Indians and 7 million Filipinos lived elsewhere in the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Europe and North America are the key destination regions, as they have been for centuries: 70 million migrants (9.5 per cent of the population) live in different parts of Europe and 50 million in the USA (14 per cent of the total population; IOM 2008, 2010).

Many of these 200 million migrants have become a key part of the labour force in both developed and developing countries, both vulnerable as newcomers and valuable as an essential part of the workforce in service and manufacturing industries. Although the scale of international migration is now larger than ever, paradoxically its regulation is easier than in earlier centuries. The controls on trans-border movements are now both greater and more easily enforceable. In the age of bioinformatics, when physical and even genetic information is encoded in travel documents, and new technologies of electronic surveillance, transnational movements are easier to track and to control, at least in the most technologically sophisticated nations. Significantly, these same technologies permit migrants themselves to retain contacts with their ‘homeland’ as well as to build connections between diasporic communities in different places elsewhere. The internet, cheap phone rates, calling cards, low-budget flights, all mean that what was once – for migrants from, say, Russia to New York, from Poland to Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – a permanent movement, involving the severance of ties to friends and family left behind, has now become less permanent.

Although historical continuities are clear, it seems that a new stage in migration has begun, what theorists have termed transnationalism (Castles and Miller 2009; Glick Schiller et al. 1992; Vertovec 2001) involving living between two (or more) places. Migration may in earlier eras have been more permanent, although it was never entirely so. Some migrants have always returned ‘home’ and maintained connections through marriage, for example, as well as occasional visits. However, it seems that geographical movement is now both more common and more complex as, over the life cycle, growing numbers of people may move between several countries rather than from one to another in a single movement.

Despite this recent shift in the nature of migration, until the twenty-first century, economic migrants typically moved on a permanent basis, to settle in a new country. Indeed, countries such as Canada, the USA, Australia and New Zealand are ‘settler societies’, their lands colonised and their economies developed by large numbers of in-migrants, who less positively have often mistreated and restricted the land and opportunities available to the indigenous populations (Pateman and Mills 2007). The United Kingdom’s more recent history has been a different one. Despite a long history of movement and in-migration associated in the main with colonialism, until the second half of the twentieth century, the population was largely ethnically homogeneous, mainly white-skinned and born in the country. At the end of the Second World War, less than 5 per cent of the population of the UK had been born abroad. In the decades since then, however, economic migration has begun to transform the population. Schemes to recruit foreign labour after the war and to permit demobbed soldiers and airmen from Poland to stay, as well as responses to the Hungarian repression in 1956 and to independence movements in the South Asian subcontinent and in Africa between the late 1940s and the 1970s, have altered the composition of the UK population. More recently, recruitment of skilled workers to meet the growing demands in new service industries, the need for less skilled workers to care for an ageing population, and the growing permeability of borders within Europe, as membership of the European Union (EU) was extended in 2004 and 2007,¹ have transformed many British towns and cities. The number of foreign-born people in the UK has more than doubled but was still only about 8 per cent of the total UK population in 2001. This compares with 11 per cent of the US population in 2000. The percentage may seem small, given the significance of debates about migration in the national consciousness. In part this is explained by the confusion between the ­foreign-born population and British-born children of migrants whose ­presence increases the diversity of the population. The growing movement of people from elsewhere into the UK over the last sixty years, many of whom have stayed in the country for the rest of their lives, and their descendants has produced a new diversity in national origins, cultures and customs, skin colour and languages which simultaneously has enriched and challenged the indigenous population.

In the UK, as elsewhere, in more recent decades, as new patterns of ­economic migration seem to be emerging, migrants have become more transitory and more diverse not only in terms of their origins, but also in their motives, intentions and statuses within destination countries (Vertovec 2007). In the immediate post-war era in Britain, the majority of economic migrants came to stay. They left their home villages, towns and cities – in the Caribbean, the Punjab, or East Africa – to move to the UK on a permanent basis. Despite journeys home for holidays, for key family events such as births, marriages or deaths, most of the migrants in the earlier post-war decades lived for their entire post-migration lives in the UK, with the exception of small numbers who returned to their country of origin on retirement. In the last three decades, however, the numbers of people leaving the UK have risen from less than 70,000 each year to almost 200,000 by 2006, although not all these leavers were previous in-migrants and some are British-born people moving for work or on retirement. Nevertheless, more people arrived in the UK over these years than left, as in-migration accele­rated especially from the early 1990s onwards.

It seems clear, however, that in-migrants are less likely to stay permanently than in previous decades. Only a quarter of the migrants who entered the UK in 1998 were still here ten years later (Finch et al. 2009). In part this is explained by the rising numbers of young, single migrants from within the European Union who came to the UK after EU expansion in 2004 permitted them to work in the expanded Union. Initially Britain was one of only three old member states that opened their borders to labour migrants, although other countries have now done so, and as a consequence larger than expected numbers of young migrants moved to the UK in the early years after accession. However, wider access to labour markets and the effects of economic recession in Western Europe after 2007 (Rogers 2009) have had an impact on recent numbers of both entrants and leavers, increasing the movement between countries within, and beyond, the EU.

Moving across geographical space to seek work elsewhere is, then, one of the key defining characteristics of the twenty-first century, so far. Globally it was estimated by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) that in 2005/6, one in ten workers was employed outside the country of their birth – an estimated million people. These figures are, of course, merely best estimates as both migration and employment records are notoriously ­unreliable, especially the former. Many movements across national ­boundaries simply are not recorded as borders are porous or as migrants take evasive action to avoid being captured in official statistics. Many countries, where in-migration records are reasonably reliable, may not collect the figures of leavers with much enthusiasm. Some of the in-migrants may ­overstay their welcome and others may not have entered legally, and so both groups may be engaged in waged work outside the formal mechanisms of the labour market.

At the start of the twenty-first century, there were almost equal numbers of men and women among the official figures for transnational migrants (IOM 2008), although according to United Nations statistics, there were more women than men among the recent migrants in Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, North America, Oceania and the former USSR (Koser 2007: 6–7). This transformation in the gender composition of transnational migrants is the subject here, associated with a parallel transformation in the structure of the labour market and the division of labour in the more affluent countries of the world that attract growing numbers of women migrants. Migration often challenges and recuts older divisions based on gender, as well as on class and ethnicity (Andall 2003; Palmary et al. 2010). For many migrants, moving in search of work involves downward social mobility as qualifications and skills may not be recognised. Migrants from middle-class backgrounds may find their insertion into the class structure in the UK problematic as they are able to find only low(er)-status work. They may experience anxiety as previous ideas of status and authority are challenged by the hierarchical structure of the labour market and by racialised ­discrimination. Gendered notions of authority may also be challenged as women assert their growing independence based on new expectations about women’s and men’s rights and obligations in host societies, leading to new cleavages and divisions within migrant populations as well as between ­different migrant groups and between migrants and ‘local’ populations.

Transforming Lives

These questions about the transformation of identities as women move across national borders and enter the labour market are the focus of this book. At its heart are the lives of women migrants, born outside the UK but who moved there in the decades after the Second World War from a variety of countries to create a better life for themselves and their families. Some women came alone, others as single women but as part of a family or household that moved together, and others came either to marry or as already married women. All of them worked for wages for large parts of their lives, in a range of different types of jobs in different parts of the UK, becoming a crucial part of the workforce in female-dominated sectors of the British economy. The main focus of the succeeding chapters is the waged work undertaken by these women migrants – the types of jobs they undertook as the British economy changed from one dominated by manufacturing industries employing mainly men to a service-dominated economy in which almost equal numbers of men and women are in waged employment. In Part One I explore ways of theorising the connections between employment, migration and identity, and in Part Two the focus is on the daily working lives of migrant women across six post-war decades.

Over these decades, not only the types of jobs changed but also the ways in which people were attached to the labour market became more varied. New forms of contracts, shift work, casual employment, short hours or long hours and overtime all became more common and, at the same time, the workforce itself became more diverse, as more women, more people born outside the UK, older workers, students and schoolchildren all worked for wages (McDowell 2009). Part of this growing diversity is reflected in the origins of the women migrants who became part of the British labour market in growing numbers after the end of the Second World War. In the second part of the book, I explore the nature of the UK labour market through the eyes of migrant women. I investigate the jobs that women undertake, and the reasons why class, colour, gender and ethnicity intersect in particular ways at different times in the UK, to produce a gender division of labour in which migrant women often, but by no means always, find themselves restricted to some of the lowest-status and poorest-paid jobs in the UK economy. The voices of women migrants across sixty post-war years echo through the pages, as they reflect on their lives in the UK in their own words. It is interesting to hear the similarities and continuities of their labour market experience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• RGS-IBG Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• List of Figures and Tables
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Preface: Leaving Home and Looking for Work
• Part One: Migration and Mobilities
• Part Two: Out to Work: Embodied Genealogies
• References
• Appendix: Post-war Legislation
• Index