Mining Coal and Undermining Gender

Jessica Smith Rolston

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780813571867
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios de género

 Though mining is an infamously masculine industry, women make up 20 percent of all production crews in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin—the largest coal-producing region in the United States.  How do these women fit into a working culture supposedly hostile to females?  This is what anthropologist Jessica Smith Rolston, herself a onetime mine worker and the daughter of a miner, set out to discover.  Her answers, based on years of participant-observation in four mines and extensive interviews with miners, managers, engineers, and the families of mine employees, offer a rich and surprising view of the working “families” that miners construct.  In this picture, gender roles are not nearly as straightforward—or as straitened—as stereotypes suggest.Gender is far from the primary concern of coworkers in crews.  Far more important, Rolston finds, is protecting the safety of the entire crew and finding a way to treat each other well despite the stresses of their jobs.  These miners share the burden of rotating shift work—continually switching between twelve-hour day and night shifts—which deprives them of the daily rhythms of a typical home, from morning breakfasts to bedtime stories. Rolston identifies the mine workers’ response to these shared challenges as a new sort of constructed kinship that both challenges and reproduces gender roles in their everyday working and family lives.Crews’ expectations for coworkers to treat one another like family and to adopt an “agricultural” work ethic tend to minimize gender differences.  And yet, these differences remain tenacious in the equation of masculinity with technical expertise, and of femininity with household responsibilities. For Rolston, such lingering areas of inequality highlight the importance of structural constraints that flout a common impulse among men and women to neutralize the significance of gender, at home and in the workplace.At a time when the Appalachian region continues to dominate discussion of mining culture, this book provides a very different and unexpected view—of how miners live and work together, and of how their lives and work reconfigure ideas of gender and kinship.

Part I

Orientation

1

Putting Kinship to Work

“Gender is not the most important part of my day,” Mary said to me during one of the shifts I spent with her at an enormous surface coal mine in northeastern Wyoming’s Powder River Basin, a region that is the largest coal producer in the United States.1 Mary had just completed her second decade of work at a mine that is one of the largest in the basin and the entire country. Surface miners like Mary spend their shifts operating heavy machinery to remove the top layer of overburden (the layer of rock and dirt above a coal seam), extract and transport the coal, and then replace the overburden during reclamation. On the particular day of our conversation, she was operating a giant electric shovel whose bucket could hold a few of the massive pickup trucks that were parked outside of every house and overcrowded apartment building in the area. From her perch on a worn seat in the cab, she maneuvered the shovel using joysticks at the end of the armrests and foot pedals on the floor. I was sitting behind her in a hard plastic chair usually reserved for trainees or supervisors, scribbling notes as we swayed back and forth with each pass from the dirt face to the trucks.2 Our conversation began at the beginning of the shift, before the sun rose, with her asking about my experience in mining. We talked about my father, a mine mechanic approaching his twentieth anniversary with a different company, and the summers my former high school classmates and I spent at the mines driving trucks and washing down machinery while on break from college. For our part, this annual rite of passage provided sizeable savings accounts, photos of us with imposing equipment, and a visceral appreciation for the work our parents had done to send us to school in the first place. Our summer employment presented mine employees with a rare opportunity to introduce their children to both the mines and their coworkers, who eagerly initiated the new recruits into long-running histories of practical jokes and the art of making the shift clock tick by swiftly.

Shifting our conversation to why I was voluntarily lacing up my steel-toe boots to report for shifts without the incentive of a paycheck, I explained that the summers working on production crews had inspired the research project I was conducting as a graduate student in anthropology. I had just mentioned my interest in studying gender when Mary downplayed its importance for her everyday life. She continued, “There are lots of other interesting things that people should care about.” One of the first lessons mine trainees learn is the importance of finessing and abstracting directions in order to suggest a course of action to a coworker without directly telling them what to do, so I deduced that the “people” she referenced in her statement were actually the future readers of my research, and me. I asked Mary what those more important things might include. She deftly positioned the shovel bucket over the bed of the haul truck she was loading and then tripped the cable to release the bottom of the bucket. Watching the dirt and rocks cascade into the bed, she said, “Like human needs. How to be a human out here, not how to be a woman out here.”

Mary then winked at me, picked up the handheld radio, and told the haul truck driver who was approaching us in the shovel that I was impressed by his “fine driving abilities.” They had been exchanging jokes on the radio over the course of the day. He guffawed and said thanks, but he already knew that I was an expert in “the behavioral sciences, which we can shorten to B.S.” The pun on the English expletive simultaneously poked fun at my college education and his own driving abilities, since it insinuated that he was not a good driver since I was not qualified to evaluate him. I grabbed the radio and told him that I was under the impression that the mine was the only place where people became experts in that field. He laughed as he pulled away and said I might be learning something after all. Mary chuckled to herself as she scooped the next bucket and waited for the next driver to make her approach.

The Powder River Basin stands out as an exception to an industry typically viewed as exceptionally masculine, if not openly hostile to women. Women like Mary represent a significant portion of the workforce that make the region the largest producer of coal in the United States. According to the federal Energy Information Administration, in 2011 just over a dozen surface mines on the Wyoming side of the basin and two in Montana churned out over 462 million tons of coal, surpassing the 454 million tons produced that year by all mines in all states east of the Mississippi. Coal from the Powder River Basin is burned in more than two hundred power plants in thirty-five states, including the states of the Appalachian region. Although mining is largely considered the epitome of masculine industries, production crews in the basin average 20 percent women. Both men and women miners in the Powder River Basin are over 90 percent White (European-American), reflecting the racial composition of Gillette and the surrounding communities.3 These crews operate and repair some of the largest heavy equipment in the world, such as three-story haul trucks whose wheels stretch twelve feet tall. Rank in the pit correlates with the hierarchy of machines used to expose and extract the coal, and women operate the most prestigious loading machines, alongside men. They also direct entire crews as frontline supervisors. Women play an even larger role in engineering and administrative activities in the office, where they are well represented in the upper echelons of management. During my research, a well-liked and well-respected woman led one of the largest companies as its president before taking a promotion as the chief executive for the parent firm’s entire southwestern region. The women I came to know during my research all expressed a deep satisfaction with their work and their workplace relationships, though they were not unlike other employees in pointing to aspects of their jobs they would change if they could.

Understanding the overall successful integration of women into the Wyoming mines requires moving away from prominent stereotypes about the industry to examine the everyday lives of the miners and their families, including the cultural frames they use to make sense of the challenges and joys they encounter along the way. When Mary said that gender was not the most important part of her day, she did not mean that gender never mattered. In fact, later that afternoon she spoke poignantly about some of the cultural and practical factors that discouraged some women from taking jobs as shovel operators. For instance, the shovels do not have their own toilet facilities and are stationary, which means that their operators cannot easily access the port-a-potties located around the pit close to areas frequented by truck drivers. If they do not wish to use the mine radio to announce their need to be picked up and transported to a bathroom—and slow down the pace of production in the process of doing so—they must creatively do their business off the side of the grated metal catwalk or inside the shovel’s engine room. Those maneuvers are more difficult for women than men. Furthermore, shovel operators are the leaders of the pit and give instructions to the trucks they load, and the few macho guys (discussed in greater detail in chapter 5) balked when taking directions from women (see also Rolston 2010a).

In our conversation, however, Mary pushed me to consider gender difference not as an ever-present feature of the workplace but as a social process that comes to matter in particular moments and places. In fact, she and most of her coworkers had dedicated their working lives to diminishing the salience of gender in the mines so that they could work on equal footing with men. Although they were keenly aware that they were not entirely successful in meeting the goal of total gender neutrality, they were rightfully proud of what they had accomplished. They urged me to not forget those efforts when I wrote about them and their work, as they were also keenly aware that popular representations of the industry were steeped in perceptions of abusive attitudes toward women. Mary, for instance, spoke at length about the frustration she felt when trying to explain her work to people who assumed, because they had no personal experience with the industry, that she was “an oppressed person, toiling underground all day, and getting harassed by guys.” Adding to her troubles was the 2005 film North Country, which had recently brought national attention to the sexual harassment women miners in Minnesota’s Iron Range faced in the 1980s. Many of the women miners I came to know had experienced harassment and hostility in previous jobs as bar tenders, waitresses, or construction workers, but very few had been harassed at the mines. Knowing the subject of the film, very few women in the basin saw it because they were concerned that the film would unduly reinforce stereotypes about macho male miners. For those who did see the film, like Mary, it confirmed their fears. While not denying that incidents such as those documented in the film occurred in other regions and eras of the industry, she was troubled that it would reinforce mining’s already bad reputation since people did not distinguish among regions, types of mining, or even specific companies.

Mary had also confronted popular opinions about mining when she found herself the subject of a Canadian television documentary about women equipment operators. The producers lavished praise on her technical prowess in operating the “Cadillac of dozers” and gleefully showed her riding her large and loud Harley-Davidson motorcycle on the highways that wound through the grassy hills on the outskirts of Gillette, the largest town in the basin with approximately thirty thousand residents. Yet she ultimately found the attention silly since she “was just doing the same things that everybody else out here does.” So did her coworker Jenny, who was happy that the final cut included her statement that she enjoyed joking around with the guys on her crew and had never experienced sexual harassment. But she also remembered, “The producer wanted to film some short commercials [advertising the documentary], so he asked me to climb up on the blade and put all of my long hair up under my hard hat. Then I was supposed to climb down, take it off, and shake out my hair. I felt so stupid! That’s not the way things are here.” The producer was trying to capitalize on the viewers’ expectation that the operator descending from the blade would be a man and surprise them with a markedly sexy and feminine woman. This framing was inappropriate at best and offensive at worst, as the basin’s men and women believe that their biggest achievement is turning gender into what they call a “nonissue” in their everyday relationships, challenges, and achievements.

A story told by Patty, a thirty-year veteran of the industry, illustrates the discomfort many women feel when gender difference is explicitly introduced into the fabric of social life at the mines, even when done with good intentions. I had rented an office in downtown Gillette to conduct private interviews, and she appeared in the doorway wearing blue jeans, work boots, and a heavy winter jacket emblazoned with her first name along with the name and logo of the company for whom she had worked for the previous three decades. She had come from the company office, where she worked in management after starting as a general laborer nearly three decades earlier. As we settled in to our coffee and conversation, she recalled a story from her first years in the mines. A beloved mine manager asked her and two other women truck drivers to see him at the office. When they arrived, he could barely contain his excitement. He announced that the local newspaper was doing an article on women in the coal mines, and he thought it would be fun to have all of the women at the mine pose for a picture. “I must have said something stupid out loud, like ‘that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,’” she said, “because he said that he thought we’d be excited and wanted to know why we weren’t.” Patty remembered telling him, “You know, for every step forward we try and take, it’s things like this, where you want our picture splayed in the paper because we’re women in mining. We’re just trying to say we’re no better than anybody else, and that takes us two steps backward.” The manager took her words to heart. The photographer ended up being late for the shoot, and the manager informed him that they had decided not to participate after talking to the women on-site. Patty summed up the incident by saying, “It was just one of those things. I don’t have to fight for a chance, but on the other hand, don’t make a big deal out of the fact that I’m out there doing it also.” It is telling that she said this incident was the only time in her thirty-year career that she ever “got vocal about women in the workforce” because for the most part it was a “nonissue.” Rather than being an all-pervasive feature of her relationships and work at the mine, Patty argued that gender difference had to be brought into play by particular statements or actions.

In fact, Mary, Jenny, Patty, and their coworkers guided many of our conversations to the moments in which gender difference faded into the background, which they sensed were missing from popular understandings of the industry. For the rest of the afternoon I spent with Mary on the shovel, for instance, she unwound the long histories of practical jokes that she and her crew had played on each other over the previous decades. Through these jokes, miners cultivated similar dispositions as they came to know, trust, and care for one another as a family. Like almost all miners in the basin, Mary views her coworkers as family, and these close workplace ties help address the “human issues” she found more troubling than the gender ones: ensuring the safety of the entire crew, finding meaning in monotonous tasks, and crafting relationships that safeguard everyone’s respect and dignity. People who view their coworkers as family treat each other like the unique persons they are, rather than as numbers or replaceable cogs in a machine. As miners such as Mary helped me interpret workplace events and debates from their point of view, they drew my attention to the similarities as well as differences that emerged as men and women cultivated, transformed, and evaluated those work-family relationships.

This ethnography therefore makes two major arguments. The first is that kinship, specifically what I call workplace relatedness, animates social relationships in the Powder River Basin coal mines. By extending the new anthropological kinship studies into an industrial workplace, I show that miners construct relatedness with one another not simply by working together in the same place but by sharing the uniquely demanding temporal regime of rotating shiftwork. Over a twenty-eight-day cycle, crews work a series of alternating twelve-hour dayshifts and nightshifts, which conflict with the rhythms of home life but create intense camaraderie among coworkers. All miners recognize the crew families, though they place varying degrees of importance on those ties, as explained below. When used by miners, talk of crew families signals egalitarian relationships based in shared respect for hard work. It points to the interdependence that underlines specific job tasks and ties each person’s well-being to the actions of their coworkers.4 Miners use the generic term “family” to refer to these relationships, likely because the otherwise egalitarian terms brother or sister would evoke the labor unions they voted against and draw attention to gender difference. Exceptions are made for mentoring relationships, in which younger or less experienced workers refer to their guides as being “like a father” or “like a mother.”5 When used by management, the same kinship talk can take on more hierarchical tones depending on the purpose to which it is directed. The crew families do not replace the relatives that miners, like other Americans, recognize through blood and marriage. But the time-based notion of kinship developed in the workplace does translate back into their families at home. According to miners, their spouses, and their children alike, shiftwork imperils kin-ties because the miner does not share the daily rhythms of the home, frequently missing morning breakfasts and evening bedtime stories, as well as many of the more momentous rituals of holiday celebrations and school award ceremonies. Analyzing the emphasis on time for these families deepens understandings of Euro-American folk theories of kinship beyond the belief in shared biogenetic substances.

The second argument builds on the first. The ethnographic materials demonstrate that in the process of crafting workplace relatedness, miners both construct and undo gender difference. By tracing the ways in which gender differences are reduced as well as reproduced, the book happily builds on a growing trajectory of feminist scholarship that argues for increased attention to “undoing gender” in order to understand and dismantle inequalities between men and women (Deutsch 2007; Lorber 2005; Risman 1998, 2009). These scholars argue that a singular focus on the construction and reproduction of gender difference—while valuable for identifying and rectifying some forms of discrimination—nonetheless obscures our understanding of how such differences can be challenged and sometimes made irrelevant. Instead of assuming the sociocultural salience of gender difference on the basis of differently sexed bodies—the tautological error identified by multiple generations of feminist theorists—I investigate where, when, how, and for whom gender difference comes to matter or fades away.

The turn to studying the ways in which gender is undone builds on a foundational, if overlooked (Carsten 2004: 69) insight of feminist anthropology: the cultural construction of gender difference rests on the “suppression of natural similarities” (Rubin 1975: 180). Studies of North American and European kinship practices attest to the power of gender binaries, with the exception of works by ethnographers who work with lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families (e.g., Carrington 2002; Lewin 2009; Weston 1991). This pattern can be attributed to a tenacious equation of gender and sexuality in social theory that leads to the assumption that alternative practices in one arena presume the same in the other (de Lauretis 1987; McElhinny 2003). In fact, kinship studies may be prone to reproducing dominant notions of binary masculinity and femininity due to entrenched Euro-American cultural links between kinship and heterosexuality (Butler 2002; Rubin 1975; Weston 1991).

Keeping an eye to both the doing and undoing of gender is necessary to understand the Wyoming workplace families. With few exceptions, women and men who are the most satisfied with their jobs and workplace relationships are those who are the most tightly integrated into the crew families and consciously work to minimize perceptions of gender difference. These women and men make up the majority of crews. Chapter 6 traces this orientation to their common adherence to an agricultural work ethic, built out of many miners’ experiences growing up on or nearby ranches and farms, which minimizes (but does not completely erase) gender difference.

Miners who do not privilege that specific form of work ethic find themselves on the fringe of the crew families, without being excluded completely. Chapter 5 shows that these departures from their coworkers’ expectations for workplace behavior are read in gendered terms: “macho” men who work “too hard” and lack empathy for others; “ladies” whose loyalty to stereotypical notions of femininity makes it difficult for them to comply with the requirements of their jobs; and “sissies“ and “bitches” who exemplify the worst features attributed to exaggerated stereotypes of the opposite sex—prissiness and competitiveness in men and women, respectively. On the other hand, the men and women who form the foundation of the crew families take on the labels of “softies” and “tomboys.” While gendered, these terms notably signal distance from stereotypical notions of masculinity and ...