Manajemen | Fakultas Ekonomi Universitas Maritim Raja Ali Haji 2005 13
BOOK REVIEWS
PARADISE LABORERS: HOTEL WORK IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
By Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London,
2004, xiii + 296 pp., $US22 (paperback)
‘You land in paradise’—this opening statement not only locates this important
work in context, but also represents a timely book. The international hotel industry is a significant employer of labour, and estimates by the World Tourism
Organisation suggests that global tourism will be responsible for creating approximately 251.6 million jobs or one in every 11 jobs by 2010 (International Tourism
Overview, 1995, Madrid). This book is located within the study of organisations,
occupations and class. The authors are both sociologists and the book deals with
workers employed in selected Hawaiian tourist resorts. Tourism is a major source
of employment, particularly for indigenous Hawaiians. This is an important area
of study as hospitality and tourism is often seen by Governments, particularly in
Australia, as a major source of employment, especially for the young as there are
few skill barriers (excluding kitchen trades) to entry.
The book is the result of a participant/ethnographic study and the research
experience unfolds before the reader making the book an appealing read. The
argument is located within the context of broader sociological debates (mostly
derived from American sociological inquiry). The authors were involved in participant observation in five luxury resorts, with over 500 resort workers and they
interviewed 90 workers in-depth. The data provides a rich tapestry to draw inferences from and reveals much about workers’ experiences and understanding
about their working lives behind the glamorous fac¸ade of palm trees and golden
beaches.
Paradise Laborers is structured according to 11 chapters that set out the main
arguments in a logical way. The authors’ major points are that hotel work forms
part of a global labour market that is structured according to class, gender, ethnicity and life style choices, and that hotel work has a differential impact on different
categories of workers. They distinguish two broad categories of hotel workers
defined according to their relationship with the local labour market. The first
are ‘trapped’ labourers comprising locals and new immigrants where local labour
market conditions are such that these workers have limited mobility locking them
into the peaks and troughs of the local labour market. Such labourers seek work
wherever it can be found. The second are ‘transient’ labourers comprising job
seekers who are highly mobile leisure/lifestyle seekers and managers who choose
resort work for the temporal experience of ‘working in paradise’, moving on
when local labour markets conditions decline. What the authors then do is to
distinguish each job category according to patterns of race, ethnicity and class
which, in turn, are connected to skill, job options, lifestyles and cultural capital
THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, VOL. 47, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2005, 364--370
BOOK REVIEWS
365
(the special attributes of race/ethnicity). These temporal numerically flexible categories would be familiar to most labour market researchers in Australia. The
exception is the high proportion of local indigenous Hawaiians and immigrant
labourers who perform mostly the lower-paid/lower-skilled hotel jobs.
What the authors find is a connection between gender, class, race and ethnicity.
They build their analysis to address how an entrenched work culture constructs
and sustains an internal labour market stratification system whereby skills are not
only socially constructed, but managerial strategy and policies that manufacture
internal departmental job funnelling and self-selection are mechanisms that serve
to usher workers into particular categories of skills and work. They show how
management in the resorts structure the internal labour markets and job hierarchies and sustain these through policies and practices, such as categorising specific
job descriptions in ways that perpetuate stratification making it accepted as part of
normal work culture. The effect is to withhold job and career opportunities from
minorities and women. For example, local workers are generally disadvantaged by
race/ethnicity, class and education and are relegated to less skilled back-of-house
work. However, the point made by the authors is that these trends are also more
subtle. Locals benefitted through their language skills and acculturation enabling
many to move into middle management ranks/departmental management positions. White (or ‘haoles’) and mostly male employees usually captured many of
the skilled and career positions. New immigrants were often preferred over locals for lower-paid jobs as locals generally disdained and avoided the dirtier and
demeaning work.
The authors tackle the vexed question of whether local labour is displaced by an
influx of new immigrant labour, arguing that locals find work in cultural activities,
such as lei-making and hula and lu’au dancers, front office and tour guiding. This
allows Hawaiian culture to become commodified, portraying Hawaiians as ‘ideal
type natives’ in a commercially attractive way. The authors also show how resorts
use the pool of local labour to manage seasonal variations and perpetuate job
stratification as well as examples of union busting tactics used by some resorts.
The authors see these developments as evolutionary and a consequence of our
post-modern temporality brought about by a 24 hours, 7 days week consumer
society that reshapes working time, and working experiences. At a public policy
level, the authors’ point cannot be clearer: as managerial strategy continues to
stratify labour markets perpetuating disadvantage, the gulf between the ‘haves’
and ‘have nots’ will widen. This situation makes it less attractive for educated and
trained workers who have the capacity to make other choices thereby reducing
the pools of skills, experience and quality.
The findings are bleak. The authors suggest that some of their findings can
be extrapolated to workers in the global economy concluding that Hawaii’s resorts reproduce the same stratification systems found in the global labour market
through mechanisms of gender, class, race and ethnicity to create differential access to job opportunities and careers. While the findings have some similarities
with the labour market of Australia’s Gold Coast, labour regulation, and supply
and demand operates differently. In the Australian context, a centralised system
of award determination has established (at the time of writing at least!) arbitrated
366
THE JOURNAL
OF
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
September 2005
minimum wage levels and working conditions and one should exercise caution
in making direct comparisons. What is needed are more studies such as this that
peel away the glittering fac¸ade of the modern resort industry to reveal the darker
processes and structures that shape and reshape contemporary hotel work.
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
NILS TIMO
DIRT CHEAP: LIFE AT THE WRONG END OF THE JOB MARKET
By Elisabeth Wynhausen. Macmillan, Sydney, 2005, ix + 246 pp., $30.00 (paperback)
In 1946, George Orwell wrote a short piece entitled ‘Why I Write’. In attempting
to explain how he was driven by a ‘demon whom one can neither resist nor
understand’, he said, ‘I write. . .because there is some lie I want to expose, some
fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing’
(Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds (1968) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920–1940. London: Secker and
Warburg). In 1933, he published his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London
(Gollancz, London), an account of working and living with the poor in two of
the world’s great cities. Elisabeth Wynhausen, who has a well established career
in journalism, being a senior writer with The Australian newspaper, decided to go
‘down and out’ to experience life as a minimum wage worker, and, like Orwell,
wrote Dirt Cheap, ‘to draw attention’ to the lot of such workers.
Wynhausen, who, at the time was 55 years of age when she decided to embark on
this project, had 10 weeks accumulated leave up her sleeve. Most workers/persons
of this age would provide themselves with ‘a much deserved’ holiday, or would
hold such leave in reserve and cash it in on retirement. Not Elisabeth Wynhausen.
Following a reading of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by
in America, Owl Books, New York, 2001, an Orwellian demon took over her life.
Ehrenreich worked in a series of jobs, at minimum wages of $US6 to $7 an hour,
and documented how difficult it is for such workers to live in ‘frugal comfort’, to
obtain accommodation, food, basic health care and necessities in modern America.
Wynhausen ‘made a spur-of-the-moment decision’ to take 9 months off her
job (she extended it to a year) ‘to see if I could get by as a minimum wage worker
and live to tell the tale’ (p. 1). She had paid-off the mortgage on her one-bedroom
flat and had some savings, both of which she found she had to draw on during
her year as a minimum wage worker. She says that she found the idea of ‘a sort of
self-funded sabbatical on the breadlines. . .exhilarating, as if I were embarking on
an adventure that would give my life new purpose and meaning’ (p. 2).
Since the early 1990s, the Australian economy has experienced sustained
growth. In the same period, major industrial relations changes have occurred
which have involved an attack on regulatory institutions, such as industrial tribunals and trade unions. These two factors have combined to produce a growth
in individual bargaining, an increase in part-time and casual work, and a decline
in employment entitlements of those at the bottom end of the labour market.
BOOK REVIEWS
367
Wynhausen wanted to discover for herself what ‘progress’ means for such workers. In the prologue she says:
The view of society you get from newspapers is as indistinct as the view of the street
from the highest floor of a city building, that being rarefied top-down perspective
journalism habitually adopts. . .I’m more intent on vivifying the flash of colour and
the blur of movement down below. I prefer to be in the thick of it, a perspective better
suited to telling the other side of the story, like the glorified tale of the economy,
furiously hyped as ‘the miracle economy’ even as it widened the gulf between winners
and losers in a nation that once led the world in social mobility (p. 3).
During her ‘sabbatical’, Wynhausen worked in six occupations. She was a cafeteria worker in an ‘exclusive’ Sydney club, an egg stacker in a factory in a rural
area, a cleaner in Melbourne, a breakfast attendant and general hand in two hotels in Melbourne, a shop assistant in a large department store in the northern
suburbs of Sydney, and a kitchen worker and general hand in two nursing homes
for the aged in Sydney’s northern suburbs. In the chapters dealing with her jobs
away from Sydney, Wynhausen devotes much time to the problems of finding
suitable and affordable accommodation; a theme which was more prevalent in
Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.
Of her four full-time jobs, the hourly wage rate she received ranged from $11.72
to $13.77. Her three part-time jobs ranged from $13.00 to $19.06 an hour. The
$19.06 was as a shop assistant, but she only managed to work slightly less than
33 hours in almost 3 weeks, at an average rate of $200 a week (p. 176). Such
an income would barely cover rental costs in Sydney. Her club job paid penalty
rates for weekend work, and her egg stacking job paid overtime for working
hours longer than the standard working day. Other jobs did not provide such
entitlements. More significantly, she (and other workers) was (were) not paid for
the time they stayed behind, after their stipulated shifts, as required by employers.
If nothing else, Dirt Cheap demonstrates that wage—and especially low wage—
workers require protection to ensure that they are paid for the time they actually
work, rather than the fictitious time employers specify in the shifts they offer
workers. Wynhausen also found that with some jobs, the rate she was paid was
below the award wages (pp. 124, 227). Moreover, in one of her part-time cleaning
jobs, ‘tax’ was deducted from her pay, when she received a cheque made out to
her in her first name (p. 124).
At the time of writing, the current government is in the process of introducing legislative changes which will weaken the role of regulatory institutions that
provide some support for those lacking power, and trade unions which act on
their behalf. Upon reading Dirt Cheap it is difficult to understand why they have
embarked on such a venture. Regulatory institutions and trade unions are virtually absent from the world of Wynhausen’s minimum wage earners. She has two
references to unions, of whom she is dismissive, or more correctly, appalled by
their inactivity or impotence (pp. 73, 168). Minimum wage workers receive little
or no training, the training they receive is inadequate, they are usually ‘thrown
into the deep end’ when they start and/or are told to ask other workers for help.
They are exposed to a range of occupational health and safety problems ranging
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OF
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September 2005
from repetitive strain injury, through to manual handling and lifting injuries and
exposure to chemicals and cramped working conditions. They are expected to be
active and on their feet for every second while employed and yet denied the right
to sit down and rest their bodies during quiet times. They have lunch breaks of
30 minutes. Given the continuous demands on their bodies, there is a strong case
that workers engaged in continuous labour and/or required to stand during shifts
have, on occupational health and safety grounds, a one hour lunch break to have
some rest.
The increased flexibility associated with industrial relations changes since the
beginning of the 1990s, works in favour of employers. Minimum wage workers
are so fearful of losing their jobs or, if part-time, of having shifts denied to them,
that they have been coerced into submission. They are divided and defensive.
Wynhausen writes, ‘It was as though employees reluctant to confront their own
sense of powerlessness had displaced their fears and suspicions of management to
each other’ (p. 36). She also draws attention to how minimum wage earners are
‘rendered invisible’; of how they are not consulted or burdened with explanations
about what is required of them (p. 234).
There are at least two ways in which Dirt Cheap can be read. The first, as
Wynhausen would surely like, is in horror to the treatment of minimum wage
earners and an end to what ‘Australians prided themselves on giving people a
fair go’ (p. 231). The second, is how passive minimum wage earners are and how
meekly they respond to that which is dished out to them. This could be translated
to mean that they can be pushed down even further. And this is what the current
government has in store for them.
Other scholars and writers have drawn attention to the plight of minimum
wage workers in Australia. The scribblings of academics only seem to be noticed
by the powerful when they say things the powerful know to be true. Wynhausen,
a journalist who operates in a different, wider, more popular medium, and with
a talent for producing accessible prose, may be able to have a larger impact than
those who have walked down the same path as her. The ‘demon whom [she
could] neither resist nor understand’ which resulted in her going ‘down and out’
has exposed what she regards as the ‘lie’ of claims concerning recent changes in
Australia, and drawn attention to, and provided a hearing for, minimum wage
earners.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BRAHAM DABSCHECK
HARD WORK: REMAKING THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT
By Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2004, xv + 244 pp., $US20 (paperback)
In 1993, the Australian Council of Trade Unions funded a study mission for senior
union officials to examine new organising techniques in North America. In part
this mission was motivated by the perception of an increasingly ‘Americanised’
environment for Australian unionism. At the time, Australian critics argued that
BOOK REVIEWS
369
unions here had very little to learn from the American labour movement and that
US unions would do better to visit and learn from us instead. There seemed some
merit to this argument. At that time, membership density in the US private sector
was around 10%, employers had been on a successful march against unions for
over a decade, conservative governments were paring back union rights and there
seemed little hope that organised labour could extract itself from this situation.
‘Our’ labour movement seemed positively blessed by comparison. While density
had been declining for over a decade, it sat at the (in retrospect and by comparison)
comfortable figure of almost 38%. The ‘new right’ disputes of the late 1980s had
certainly made a dent in the union armour, but these employer strategies were the
exception to mainstream employment relations during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Conservative state governments had introduced legislative changes which shifted
the goalposts for unions somewhat, but this occurred in the national framework
of the Accord which, undeniably presenting some problems for unions, gave them
a certain legitimacy as industrial and political actors.
As I read this book I reflected upon how much things have changed during the
past 12 years for Australian unionists. Aggregate membership and membership
density have declined precipitously, employers have been increasingly willing
to militantly resist the joint regulation of work, and the Howard government’s
increasingly aggressive anti-union legislative agenda alongside their activist policy
stance have made life for unions very difficult indeed. The Coalition control of
the Senate from mid-year and further re-casting of our industrial relations system
will only make life in the union world a whole lot harder.
Hard Work is an engaging account of the woes of US unions which makes
powerful and convincing arguments about the desperate need for the revival of
‘labour’ as a real industrial and political force. Because the book is written principally for a European audience, its five chapters present the history, structure,
politics, and indeed failings of US unions in a manner which makes it very accessible to non-American readers. The first chapter, ‘Why Labor Matters: The
Underside of the “American Model”’, is compelling reading not so much because
of its examination of the experience of work and workplaces for US employees
(although this is interesting in itself), but because of its broader analysis of the
insidious individualism which pervades all aspects of US society and which allows
for the ‘abdication of collective responsibility’ for basic social services. The authors do not present unions as the hapless victims of this situation. They argue
instead that US unions’ narrowly economistic and highly sectionalist view of their
own purpose, in place of a militant solidaristic outlook, has reinforced and indeed
entrenched the social order.
This theme is echoed in chapter 2, ‘An Exceptionally Hostile Terrain’, which
interweaves a discussion of the development of business unionism with an analysis of employers’ vicious anti-unionism throughout the twentieth century, and
an overview of the evolution of contemporary industrial relations in the USA.
Here, Fantasia and Voss argue that while US unions had the potential to become
a ‘mass-based radical’ movement, that a ‘domesticated’, ‘compliant’ and ‘pure and
simple unionism’ developed in its place. They explain that this is not only in
relation to the impact of a range of external forces (for example, Taft-Hartley,
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September 2005
globalisation, employer opposition), but also in terms of the narrow and bureaucratic outlook of unions which, they argue, legitimised and reinforced the union
environment. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of employer militancy from
the Reagan years onward, including a discussion of the critical role that management consultants have played in further de-collectivising US workplaces.
Chapter 3, ‘Bureaucrats, Strongmen, Militants and Intellectuals’, charts the
development of the ‘character’ of US union leadership. For readers outside the
USA, the chapter is both illuminating and deeply depressing. The typical ‘business
union’ leader is presented as a self-interested, bullying, corrupt, older man. The
argument is supplemented by extracts from speeches and interviews with union
leaders, which at times is very amusing (for example, see ‘notoriety doesn’t excite
me that much’ on p. 91). The chapter ends with a discussion of the leadership
style and strategies of the ‘New Voice’ officials who successfully challenged the
leadership of the AFL-CIO 10 years ago. Fantasia and Voss begin to advance their
argument about the ‘fitful reinvention’ of US unions during the past decade.
Chapter 4, ‘Practices and Possibilities of Social Movement Unionism’, extends
this argument identifying a number of episodes and themes in the development
of what is identified as a ‘new unionism’. This essentially involves the utilisation
of innovative tactics to build political power and circumvent restrictions upon
unions; in so doing, there is a broadening of union concerns and a building of
closer union organisation. Together this gives Fantasia and Voss a hope that
there is a prospect for unions to build a genuinely class-based ‘movement’. After
presenting case studies of union action which in the authors’ view demonstrates
this ‘new unionism’, the book concludes with an analysis of the ‘Two Futures’ for
US unions. It is concluded that while there are formidable internal and external
obstacles to building union power, the ‘social unionism’ identified offers the best
hope for any kind of labour movement renewal.
Hard Work would make a useful addition to the reading lists of many university courses dealing with comparative industrial relations, collective bargaining
and the nature and purpose of trade unionism. At a broader level, this book is
essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and practices of the labour
movement in a time of crisis. If Australian unionists have learned anything from
the experience of their US counterparts it will come in handy now, as they brace
for what will undoubtedly be a dark time.
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
RAE COOPER
PARADISE LABORERS: HOTEL WORK IN THE GLOBAL ECONOMY
By Patricia A. Adler and Peter Adler. Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London,
2004, xiii + 296 pp., $US22 (paperback)
‘You land in paradise’—this opening statement not only locates this important
work in context, but also represents a timely book. The international hotel industry is a significant employer of labour, and estimates by the World Tourism
Organisation suggests that global tourism will be responsible for creating approximately 251.6 million jobs or one in every 11 jobs by 2010 (International Tourism
Overview, 1995, Madrid). This book is located within the study of organisations,
occupations and class. The authors are both sociologists and the book deals with
workers employed in selected Hawaiian tourist resorts. Tourism is a major source
of employment, particularly for indigenous Hawaiians. This is an important area
of study as hospitality and tourism is often seen by Governments, particularly in
Australia, as a major source of employment, especially for the young as there are
few skill barriers (excluding kitchen trades) to entry.
The book is the result of a participant/ethnographic study and the research
experience unfolds before the reader making the book an appealing read. The
argument is located within the context of broader sociological debates (mostly
derived from American sociological inquiry). The authors were involved in participant observation in five luxury resorts, with over 500 resort workers and they
interviewed 90 workers in-depth. The data provides a rich tapestry to draw inferences from and reveals much about workers’ experiences and understanding
about their working lives behind the glamorous fac¸ade of palm trees and golden
beaches.
Paradise Laborers is structured according to 11 chapters that set out the main
arguments in a logical way. The authors’ major points are that hotel work forms
part of a global labour market that is structured according to class, gender, ethnicity and life style choices, and that hotel work has a differential impact on different
categories of workers. They distinguish two broad categories of hotel workers
defined according to their relationship with the local labour market. The first
are ‘trapped’ labourers comprising locals and new immigrants where local labour
market conditions are such that these workers have limited mobility locking them
into the peaks and troughs of the local labour market. Such labourers seek work
wherever it can be found. The second are ‘transient’ labourers comprising job
seekers who are highly mobile leisure/lifestyle seekers and managers who choose
resort work for the temporal experience of ‘working in paradise’, moving on
when local labour markets conditions decline. What the authors then do is to
distinguish each job category according to patterns of race, ethnicity and class
which, in turn, are connected to skill, job options, lifestyles and cultural capital
THE JOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, VOL. 47, NO. 3, SEPTEMBER 2005, 364--370
BOOK REVIEWS
365
(the special attributes of race/ethnicity). These temporal numerically flexible categories would be familiar to most labour market researchers in Australia. The
exception is the high proportion of local indigenous Hawaiians and immigrant
labourers who perform mostly the lower-paid/lower-skilled hotel jobs.
What the authors find is a connection between gender, class, race and ethnicity.
They build their analysis to address how an entrenched work culture constructs
and sustains an internal labour market stratification system whereby skills are not
only socially constructed, but managerial strategy and policies that manufacture
internal departmental job funnelling and self-selection are mechanisms that serve
to usher workers into particular categories of skills and work. They show how
management in the resorts structure the internal labour markets and job hierarchies and sustain these through policies and practices, such as categorising specific
job descriptions in ways that perpetuate stratification making it accepted as part of
normal work culture. The effect is to withhold job and career opportunities from
minorities and women. For example, local workers are generally disadvantaged by
race/ethnicity, class and education and are relegated to less skilled back-of-house
work. However, the point made by the authors is that these trends are also more
subtle. Locals benefitted through their language skills and acculturation enabling
many to move into middle management ranks/departmental management positions. White (or ‘haoles’) and mostly male employees usually captured many of
the skilled and career positions. New immigrants were often preferred over locals for lower-paid jobs as locals generally disdained and avoided the dirtier and
demeaning work.
The authors tackle the vexed question of whether local labour is displaced by an
influx of new immigrant labour, arguing that locals find work in cultural activities,
such as lei-making and hula and lu’au dancers, front office and tour guiding. This
allows Hawaiian culture to become commodified, portraying Hawaiians as ‘ideal
type natives’ in a commercially attractive way. The authors also show how resorts
use the pool of local labour to manage seasonal variations and perpetuate job
stratification as well as examples of union busting tactics used by some resorts.
The authors see these developments as evolutionary and a consequence of our
post-modern temporality brought about by a 24 hours, 7 days week consumer
society that reshapes working time, and working experiences. At a public policy
level, the authors’ point cannot be clearer: as managerial strategy continues to
stratify labour markets perpetuating disadvantage, the gulf between the ‘haves’
and ‘have nots’ will widen. This situation makes it less attractive for educated and
trained workers who have the capacity to make other choices thereby reducing
the pools of skills, experience and quality.
The findings are bleak. The authors suggest that some of their findings can
be extrapolated to workers in the global economy concluding that Hawaii’s resorts reproduce the same stratification systems found in the global labour market
through mechanisms of gender, class, race and ethnicity to create differential access to job opportunities and careers. While the findings have some similarities
with the labour market of Australia’s Gold Coast, labour regulation, and supply
and demand operates differently. In the Australian context, a centralised system
of award determination has established (at the time of writing at least!) arbitrated
366
THE JOURNAL
OF
INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS
September 2005
minimum wage levels and working conditions and one should exercise caution
in making direct comparisons. What is needed are more studies such as this that
peel away the glittering fac¸ade of the modern resort industry to reveal the darker
processes and structures that shape and reshape contemporary hotel work.
GRIFFITH UNIVERSITY
NILS TIMO
DIRT CHEAP: LIFE AT THE WRONG END OF THE JOB MARKET
By Elisabeth Wynhausen. Macmillan, Sydney, 2005, ix + 246 pp., $30.00 (paperback)
In 1946, George Orwell wrote a short piece entitled ‘Why I Write’. In attempting
to explain how he was driven by a ‘demon whom one can neither resist nor
understand’, he said, ‘I write. . .because there is some lie I want to expose, some
fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing’
(Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds (1968) The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters
of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920–1940. London: Secker and
Warburg). In 1933, he published his first novel, Down and Out in Paris and London
(Gollancz, London), an account of working and living with the poor in two of
the world’s great cities. Elisabeth Wynhausen, who has a well established career
in journalism, being a senior writer with The Australian newspaper, decided to go
‘down and out’ to experience life as a minimum wage worker, and, like Orwell,
wrote Dirt Cheap, ‘to draw attention’ to the lot of such workers.
Wynhausen, who, at the time was 55 years of age when she decided to embark on
this project, had 10 weeks accumulated leave up her sleeve. Most workers/persons
of this age would provide themselves with ‘a much deserved’ holiday, or would
hold such leave in reserve and cash it in on retirement. Not Elisabeth Wynhausen.
Following a reading of Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by
in America, Owl Books, New York, 2001, an Orwellian demon took over her life.
Ehrenreich worked in a series of jobs, at minimum wages of $US6 to $7 an hour,
and documented how difficult it is for such workers to live in ‘frugal comfort’, to
obtain accommodation, food, basic health care and necessities in modern America.
Wynhausen ‘made a spur-of-the-moment decision’ to take 9 months off her
job (she extended it to a year) ‘to see if I could get by as a minimum wage worker
and live to tell the tale’ (p. 1). She had paid-off the mortgage on her one-bedroom
flat and had some savings, both of which she found she had to draw on during
her year as a minimum wage worker. She says that she found the idea of ‘a sort of
self-funded sabbatical on the breadlines. . .exhilarating, as if I were embarking on
an adventure that would give my life new purpose and meaning’ (p. 2).
Since the early 1990s, the Australian economy has experienced sustained
growth. In the same period, major industrial relations changes have occurred
which have involved an attack on regulatory institutions, such as industrial tribunals and trade unions. These two factors have combined to produce a growth
in individual bargaining, an increase in part-time and casual work, and a decline
in employment entitlements of those at the bottom end of the labour market.
BOOK REVIEWS
367
Wynhausen wanted to discover for herself what ‘progress’ means for such workers. In the prologue she says:
The view of society you get from newspapers is as indistinct as the view of the street
from the highest floor of a city building, that being rarefied top-down perspective
journalism habitually adopts. . .I’m more intent on vivifying the flash of colour and
the blur of movement down below. I prefer to be in the thick of it, a perspective better
suited to telling the other side of the story, like the glorified tale of the economy,
furiously hyped as ‘the miracle economy’ even as it widened the gulf between winners
and losers in a nation that once led the world in social mobility (p. 3).
During her ‘sabbatical’, Wynhausen worked in six occupations. She was a cafeteria worker in an ‘exclusive’ Sydney club, an egg stacker in a factory in a rural
area, a cleaner in Melbourne, a breakfast attendant and general hand in two hotels in Melbourne, a shop assistant in a large department store in the northern
suburbs of Sydney, and a kitchen worker and general hand in two nursing homes
for the aged in Sydney’s northern suburbs. In the chapters dealing with her jobs
away from Sydney, Wynhausen devotes much time to the problems of finding
suitable and affordable accommodation; a theme which was more prevalent in
Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed.
Of her four full-time jobs, the hourly wage rate she received ranged from $11.72
to $13.77. Her three part-time jobs ranged from $13.00 to $19.06 an hour. The
$19.06 was as a shop assistant, but she only managed to work slightly less than
33 hours in almost 3 weeks, at an average rate of $200 a week (p. 176). Such
an income would barely cover rental costs in Sydney. Her club job paid penalty
rates for weekend work, and her egg stacking job paid overtime for working
hours longer than the standard working day. Other jobs did not provide such
entitlements. More significantly, she (and other workers) was (were) not paid for
the time they stayed behind, after their stipulated shifts, as required by employers.
If nothing else, Dirt Cheap demonstrates that wage—and especially low wage—
workers require protection to ensure that they are paid for the time they actually
work, rather than the fictitious time employers specify in the shifts they offer
workers. Wynhausen also found that with some jobs, the rate she was paid was
below the award wages (pp. 124, 227). Moreover, in one of her part-time cleaning
jobs, ‘tax’ was deducted from her pay, when she received a cheque made out to
her in her first name (p. 124).
At the time of writing, the current government is in the process of introducing legislative changes which will weaken the role of regulatory institutions that
provide some support for those lacking power, and trade unions which act on
their behalf. Upon reading Dirt Cheap it is difficult to understand why they have
embarked on such a venture. Regulatory institutions and trade unions are virtually absent from the world of Wynhausen’s minimum wage earners. She has two
references to unions, of whom she is dismissive, or more correctly, appalled by
their inactivity or impotence (pp. 73, 168). Minimum wage workers receive little
or no training, the training they receive is inadequate, they are usually ‘thrown
into the deep end’ when they start and/or are told to ask other workers for help.
They are exposed to a range of occupational health and safety problems ranging
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from repetitive strain injury, through to manual handling and lifting injuries and
exposure to chemicals and cramped working conditions. They are expected to be
active and on their feet for every second while employed and yet denied the right
to sit down and rest their bodies during quiet times. They have lunch breaks of
30 minutes. Given the continuous demands on their bodies, there is a strong case
that workers engaged in continuous labour and/or required to stand during shifts
have, on occupational health and safety grounds, a one hour lunch break to have
some rest.
The increased flexibility associated with industrial relations changes since the
beginning of the 1990s, works in favour of employers. Minimum wage workers
are so fearful of losing their jobs or, if part-time, of having shifts denied to them,
that they have been coerced into submission. They are divided and defensive.
Wynhausen writes, ‘It was as though employees reluctant to confront their own
sense of powerlessness had displaced their fears and suspicions of management to
each other’ (p. 36). She also draws attention to how minimum wage earners are
‘rendered invisible’; of how they are not consulted or burdened with explanations
about what is required of them (p. 234).
There are at least two ways in which Dirt Cheap can be read. The first, as
Wynhausen would surely like, is in horror to the treatment of minimum wage
earners and an end to what ‘Australians prided themselves on giving people a
fair go’ (p. 231). The second, is how passive minimum wage earners are and how
meekly they respond to that which is dished out to them. This could be translated
to mean that they can be pushed down even further. And this is what the current
government has in store for them.
Other scholars and writers have drawn attention to the plight of minimum
wage workers in Australia. The scribblings of academics only seem to be noticed
by the powerful when they say things the powerful know to be true. Wynhausen,
a journalist who operates in a different, wider, more popular medium, and with
a talent for producing accessible prose, may be able to have a larger impact than
those who have walked down the same path as her. The ‘demon whom [she
could] neither resist nor understand’ which resulted in her going ‘down and out’
has exposed what she regards as the ‘lie’ of claims concerning recent changes in
Australia, and drawn attention to, and provided a hearing for, minimum wage
earners.
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES
BRAHAM DABSCHECK
HARD WORK: REMAKING THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT
By Rick Fantasia and Kim Voss. University of California Press, Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2004, xv + 244 pp., $US20 (paperback)
In 1993, the Australian Council of Trade Unions funded a study mission for senior
union officials to examine new organising techniques in North America. In part
this mission was motivated by the perception of an increasingly ‘Americanised’
environment for Australian unionism. At the time, Australian critics argued that
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unions here had very little to learn from the American labour movement and that
US unions would do better to visit and learn from us instead. There seemed some
merit to this argument. At that time, membership density in the US private sector
was around 10%, employers had been on a successful march against unions for
over a decade, conservative governments were paring back union rights and there
seemed little hope that organised labour could extract itself from this situation.
‘Our’ labour movement seemed positively blessed by comparison. While density
had been declining for over a decade, it sat at the (in retrospect and by comparison)
comfortable figure of almost 38%. The ‘new right’ disputes of the late 1980s had
certainly made a dent in the union armour, but these employer strategies were the
exception to mainstream employment relations during the 1980s and early 1990s.
Conservative state governments had introduced legislative changes which shifted
the goalposts for unions somewhat, but this occurred in the national framework
of the Accord which, undeniably presenting some problems for unions, gave them
a certain legitimacy as industrial and political actors.
As I read this book I reflected upon how much things have changed during the
past 12 years for Australian unionists. Aggregate membership and membership
density have declined precipitously, employers have been increasingly willing
to militantly resist the joint regulation of work, and the Howard government’s
increasingly aggressive anti-union legislative agenda alongside their activist policy
stance have made life for unions very difficult indeed. The Coalition control of
the Senate from mid-year and further re-casting of our industrial relations system
will only make life in the union world a whole lot harder.
Hard Work is an engaging account of the woes of US unions which makes
powerful and convincing arguments about the desperate need for the revival of
‘labour’ as a real industrial and political force. Because the book is written principally for a European audience, its five chapters present the history, structure,
politics, and indeed failings of US unions in a manner which makes it very accessible to non-American readers. The first chapter, ‘Why Labor Matters: The
Underside of the “American Model”’, is compelling reading not so much because
of its examination of the experience of work and workplaces for US employees
(although this is interesting in itself), but because of its broader analysis of the
insidious individualism which pervades all aspects of US society and which allows
for the ‘abdication of collective responsibility’ for basic social services. The authors do not present unions as the hapless victims of this situation. They argue
instead that US unions’ narrowly economistic and highly sectionalist view of their
own purpose, in place of a militant solidaristic outlook, has reinforced and indeed
entrenched the social order.
This theme is echoed in chapter 2, ‘An Exceptionally Hostile Terrain’, which
interweaves a discussion of the development of business unionism with an analysis of employers’ vicious anti-unionism throughout the twentieth century, and
an overview of the evolution of contemporary industrial relations in the USA.
Here, Fantasia and Voss argue that while US unions had the potential to become
a ‘mass-based radical’ movement, that a ‘domesticated’, ‘compliant’ and ‘pure and
simple unionism’ developed in its place. They explain that this is not only in
relation to the impact of a range of external forces (for example, Taft-Hartley,
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globalisation, employer opposition), but also in terms of the narrow and bureaucratic outlook of unions which, they argue, legitimised and reinforced the union
environment. Chapter 2 concludes with an overview of employer militancy from
the Reagan years onward, including a discussion of the critical role that management consultants have played in further de-collectivising US workplaces.
Chapter 3, ‘Bureaucrats, Strongmen, Militants and Intellectuals’, charts the
development of the ‘character’ of US union leadership. For readers outside the
USA, the chapter is both illuminating and deeply depressing. The typical ‘business
union’ leader is presented as a self-interested, bullying, corrupt, older man. The
argument is supplemented by extracts from speeches and interviews with union
leaders, which at times is very amusing (for example, see ‘notoriety doesn’t excite
me that much’ on p. 91). The chapter ends with a discussion of the leadership
style and strategies of the ‘New Voice’ officials who successfully challenged the
leadership of the AFL-CIO 10 years ago. Fantasia and Voss begin to advance their
argument about the ‘fitful reinvention’ of US unions during the past decade.
Chapter 4, ‘Practices and Possibilities of Social Movement Unionism’, extends
this argument identifying a number of episodes and themes in the development
of what is identified as a ‘new unionism’. This essentially involves the utilisation
of innovative tactics to build political power and circumvent restrictions upon
unions; in so doing, there is a broadening of union concerns and a building of
closer union organisation. Together this gives Fantasia and Voss a hope that
there is a prospect for unions to build a genuinely class-based ‘movement’. After
presenting case studies of union action which in the authors’ view demonstrates
this ‘new unionism’, the book concludes with an analysis of the ‘Two Futures’ for
US unions. It is concluded that while there are formidable internal and external
obstacles to building union power, the ‘social unionism’ identified offers the best
hope for any kind of labour movement renewal.
Hard Work would make a useful addition to the reading lists of many university courses dealing with comparative industrial relations, collective bargaining
and the nature and purpose of trade unionism. At a broader level, this book is
essential reading for anyone interested in the politics and practices of the labour
movement in a time of crisis. If Australian unionists have learned anything from
the experience of their US counterparts it will come in handy now, as they brace
for what will undoubtedly be a dark time.
UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY
RAE COOPER