In the summer of 1977, Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig made the trek from the California Bay Area to El Paso, Texas. Coyle taught at a Head Start programme in San Francisco at the time and later became a documentary filmmaker; Hershatter and Honig were graduate students at Stanford University, specialising in 20th-century Chinese history. Coyle was the main Spanish speaker in the group. The trio would travel across the Southwest. The sand dunes and the endless expanse of border-country landscape stood in sharp contrast to the varied topography of coastal California. They packed typewriters, tape recorders, and their belongings in Hershatter’s Volkswagen Squareback and rented an apartment in the Five Points neighbourhood. Once settled, the women quickly set about on their itinerary in Texas: interviewing textile workers who had been involved in the 1972 Farah strike and documenting the ongoing effects of the action on the strikers “who initiated and sustained it.” The result was the 1979 pamphlet Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story – a remarkable combination of oral history, chronicle of worker resistance, and social geography of a border city.¹

Also that summer, across the country, Louise Lamphere and several social anthropologists and historians who had conducted ‘shop-floor studies’ held a retreat in Connecticut. Lamphere was spearheading a research project in Central Falls, Rhode Island, interviewing and working side by side with Colombian and Portuguese immigrant women in the apparel industry, as well as other migrant ethnic groups that had been living in New England for some time.² A loose network of feminist scholars had formed, dedicated to studying the informal work cultures and methods of contestation that women workers had developed in specific job sites, across several economic sectors. Crucially, many of these researchers were veterans of the political breakthroughs of the 1960s and 70s. The Chicano movement, the student movement, the feminist movement, and the rank-and-file rebellion that rippled through multiple industries served as resonators. The industrial relations literature, new social history, labour-process theory, radical print networks, and dissident workers’ circles provided points of departure for their view of shop-floor antagonisms, acquiescence, and pushback.

Despite the physical distance separating these developments, they are parallel tracks in a longer story. With overlaps in personnel and interests while retaining distinct styles and projects, groups of feminist historians and anthropologists injected a dose of workers’ inquiry into their respective disciplines. The upshot was a proliferation of vantage points and research angles. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, a time of tremendous change in the worldwide dynamics of capitalist accumulation, the groups launched a cluster of projects – some involving oral history, some participant observation, some industrial ethnography or workers’ anthropology – that questioned what it meant to be working-class even as the prior coordinates of that concept were disintegrating.³ While depictions of the labour process were front and centre in their conversations with workers across disparate settings, the investigators asked questions about what it means to understand oneself as part of the working class, and how that understanding changed over time.

During this period, the inexorable push of deindustrialisation decimated communities, relocated plants, and spurred explosive growth in light manufacturing and service-sector jobs. This process marked a profound transformation in the division of intellectual and manual labour, as well as in the relations of authority between employers and employees. It also sapped the strength of previous formations of working-class autonomy, above all, the enduring strength of small shop-floor groups that held sway over the labour process and the emotional atmosphere in factories or heavy-industry sites. Whatever material reality of the family-wage ideology that existed had been undercut, and women were entering the unorganised workforce in increasing numbers. These feminist historians and researchers connected with workers who powered the recomposition of the labour movement into the 1990s. Workers like these remain at the forefront, but attempts to broadcast and promote their collective intelligence have been forgotten.

If today we accept that inquiry is always tied to microsystems of struggle and different layers of organisation, it is crucial to acknowledge the innovations of these feminist historians and ethnographers that made it so.⁴ The relationships that workers built up on the job, which extended into other sites of social reproduction, were novel and fruitful starting points. Their work was a collaborative effort to uncover how unforeseen solidarities form, solidify, or dissipate. Class was not a premade constituency or a set of stratifications; it was a precarious coming-together of people’s minds and bodies in cafeterias, break rooms, cramped apartments or living rooms, city parks, bars, on picket lines, or other spaces to effect change and take a protagonistic role in that struggle. More to the point: results of these studies have often shown that the process of class formation is fragile, specific, contradictory, and above all, temporary.

This work might appear outdated – nearly 50 years have passed, and new techniques and perspectives have been adopted and popularised. Yet it retains significance for us at Long-Haul, a small editorial collective that publishes grounded accounts of worker writing and whose members largely came out of the graduate student worker struggles of the past two decades at the University of California and elsewhere.⁵ For our part, this work confronted the kinds of questions and tendencies that we regularly attempt to archive and circulate. Reevaluating it has affected our orientation toward inquiry in three ways. First, it has allowed us to understand how experiences are turned into narrative: how the daily, often underdocumented parts of working-class life (the social interactions, ethnic networks, personalities, and informal work groups) get turned into stories and memories that shape how workers organise in the future. Second, it’s given us a way of thinking about the complexities of class relations as they actually exist in messy reality. Third, it’s encouraged us to embrace a process of experimentation, trying out new things with the goal of producing a new class politics.

“We Didn’t Let Our Chain Break”: Women at Farah and Cannery Culture

In El Paso, Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig turned a handful of contacts – parents of a classmate at Stanford, and a West Coast colleague who had participated in strike support – into 70 hours of interviews with approximately 30 workers, a weaving-together of follow-ups, friends of friends, and various other types of connections. This immersion produced a far-reaching inquiry into difficult questions about the intensity, complexity, and trajectory of struggle.⁶ The Farah strike was a highly symbolic flashpoint for the US labour movement in the early 1970s, though it ultimately led to ambivalent outcomes. 4,000 Chicanao and Chicana garment workers – sewists, cutters, machinists, and shippers walked off the job in May 1972 for union recognition. For several years, workers from several departments had assembled an organising committee and sustained a card-signing drive to join the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. The company, a paragon of industrial patronage-style management in the region led by the buffoonish Willie Farah, responded with its own multi-wave attack of intimidation, reprisals, and dismissals. The strike lasted for two years, with a national boycott of Farah jeans that would seize the imagination of the US labour movement. While the workers won their union, disagreements with Amalgamated staff and the financial distress of the company would sap their capacity to sustain their culture of struggle.⁷

Hershatter underscores the simplicity of the principles of inquiry they adhered to: “following your nose, detecting what’s important, keeping your ears open, mouth closed, and approaching people with respect and curiosity.”⁸ Similar to contemporaneous attempts at fusing oral history and labour history, the key was to pinpoint the “crystallizations of meaning” that endured after the immediate circumstances had long passed.⁹ What were the moments, events, impressions, and roles that helped people realise their own power, and how did they hold onto them after the fact?¹⁰ At Farah, for instance, the courageous attempts at organising, which resulted in rounds of firings, stuck with women who were not vocal sympathisers with the union yet nevertheless took part in the wildcat walkout.¹¹ Any inquiry that hit upon these questions required accurate reconstruction and painstaking elaboration. There were few examples to follow in balancing the demand for accuracy with a patient analysis of a strike’s afterlives, what remained of this period of unflagging militancy. It is notable that their fieldwork contains elements of the “activist-researcher” figure prominent in the development of oral history in Italy, which in turn influenced the development of Italian operaismo.¹² In the perspective of anthropologists like Danilo Monaldi and Gianni Bosio, the interview was simultaneously an information-gathering process and a politically significant encounter: a learning situation.

The group’s emphasis was on social relations – not only in workplaces, but in neighborhoods, like the Second Ward barrio of El Paso where many of the strikers had grown up. There were convergences between the sense of community that close-quarters living arrangements and extended family bonds generated and the comradeship that strike duties fostered among workers at Farah.¹³ The interviewers leave ample space for women to examine the relays between family backgrounds, earlier hardships, and the strike. They elicit vivid descriptions of how the complexity of border lives mirrors the interwoven trajectories these women embarked on before and after the Farah event. These reminiscences paint an in-depth portrait of the prehistory of the strike and boycott.¹⁴

Their framework advances the distinction between the “hot” and the “lukewarm” or “tepid” character of inquiry, as Gigi Roggero puts it.¹⁵ These temperature-related metaphors designate the contrast between the sorts of investigations that occur in the midst of an unfolding struggle, when identities inflate and blur alongside an expanding agency, and those “cooler” conversations that seem to identify tendencies or possible lines of collective action that exist but are not always recognised. Multiple timelines intersected in the interviews that the group recorded on tape. First, there was the persistence on display during the early phases of the campaign. Hershatter, Honig, and Coyle candidly describe the underground tactics that worker-organisers resorted to in order to reach their coworkers: “Women hid union cards in their purses, met hurriedly in the bathrooms and whispered in the halls to persuade the indifferent.” The strategic approaches adopted in the lead-up to the strike foreshadowed the sociability and outreach that were so critical to the strike’s success: “The cafeteria was the heart of the organising schemes. During lunch time, workers circulated among the tables to sound out each other’s sentiments about the union.”¹⁶

At times it was evident where the Farah workers had undergone revolutions, deep-seated transformations in their day-to-day lives; other times, the answers would come back in fragments, to be pieced together or intuited from clues or omissions.¹⁷ Their motivating questions were: where could the turning points in the strikers’ connection to this struggle be located? How are they integrated within daily life? This focus discouraged and displaced the prominence of visible events and actions. It prompted a many-sided view that encompassed the diverse scales and arenas where the strike and the longer arc of organising could be discerned.

The findings by Hershatter’s group, published in Women at Farah, are extremely sobering. By the time the three authors arrived in Texas, the power wielded by strike veterans at Farah had been seriously curtailed. Plant closures, layoffs, transfers, on-the-job harassment of shop stewards, grueling contract negotiations, and frustrated reform efforts within union channels, notably by the rank-and-file group Unidad Para Siempre, illustrate the obstacles that the committed unionised workers faced. By the end, the strikers “felt outmaneuvered” by a prevailing climate “in which the company set the terms and the union lawyers made most of the decisions.”¹⁸ Moreover, beyond Farah, the survey of the border economy encompassing El Paso and the nearby city on the Mexican side, Ciudad Juárez, revealed future patterns in labour market segmentation between Chicanos and undocumented workers born in Mexico that could be exploited.¹⁹ Even auspicious pockets of working-class power, armed with trade union backing, faced hard limits in an era of runaway shops, sectoral reorganisation, and an industry built around curbing workers’ influence.

The qualifications at the end of the piece are worth dwelling on: “While the Farah strike did not produce a strong, mature rank-and-file movement, it did help to create the conditions in which one can develop. The workers who made the strike were irreversibly changed by it.”²⁰ This interplay between movement and conditions is an ongoing question for organisers. In a closing section, Hershatter, Honig, and Coyle consider the long-term politicisation of the women involved. A number of the Farah workers went on to become dedicated militants, branching out to show solidarity with local strikes or joining farmworkers’ support committees. Some who left the textile industry resolved to organise the nonunion shops they found themselves working in. Still others who remained working in the main plant were adamant that the aftermath of the strike only bolstered their resolve: “We were closer. We didn’t let our chain break. They tried to break it.”²¹ Two timelines are in tension here. The expansive lens indicates how some women caught the organising bug and committed themselves to struggle in the workers’ movement for the rest of their lives. The short-term lens shows that while the practices and social ties that came out of the strike and workplace organising certainly reflected a burst of common action, even an antagonistic working-class viewpoint, the concentrated effects were provisional and short-lived.

The life stories collected by the coauthors facilitated enduring connections, which served as the basis for continued reevaluation. Honig returned to El Paso in the early 1990s to conduct another round of interviews with some of the strike participants she had talked to over a decade earlier. What stands out when the women recall their years of pickets, solidarity tours, and crowded meetings together is the stress they laid on the fortitude found in discussion and chitchat: “During the two years that we were on strike it was pure talking, to communicate with each other, to chat with each other about what was happening to one another.”²² While this point leads Honig to reassess the function and place of narrative in struggles, which we will briefly return to below, it says a lot about the imperative of listening attentively no matter how punctuated the rhythms of collective action might appear, and finding potential reflections on that activity between the lines.²³

Other historians would pick up the thread Hershatter and her co-inquirers laid down. In her 1987 classic, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, Vicki Ruiz (a fellow Stanford graduate student) applies a comparable oral history framework to a past episode of labour struggle: the fight for unionisation and dignity by predominantly women California cannery workers in the late 1930s to the early 1950s, affiliated with the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA).²⁴ Ruiz tracks the “cannery culture” that coalesced from everyday interactions and extended family ties, giving rise to peculiar lingos, lattice-like webs of acquaintances and familiar associations, and subversions of divisions of labour within plants. “Enough women transcended the barriers of mutual distrust and wage disparities,” Ruiz writes, “that at certain junctures, the parallel networks met and collective strategies…could be created and channeled across ethnic boundaries.” The bonds underneath workplace cultures on the assembly line could likewise be forged through affinities with youth culture, gossip magazines, and Clark Gable. Canning operations were so integrated into the timing of the agricultural seasons that the vegetables the employees processed were rearranged into new codes: a couple who “met in spinach, fell in love in peaches, and married in tomatoes,” for instance, referred to specific months when the produce was canned and packed.²⁵ At California Sanitary Canning Company (Cal San) in Southern California, streetcar stops became congregation hubs in the morning – and “in the course of commuting or on the assembly line, interethnic friendships developed.”²⁶ The peach fuzz that accumulated on the workers’ clothes was a reminder of this cannery work environment and the relationships bound up with it, a signal of solidarity in difference.

Ruiz goes further in demonstrating how labour organisers recognised and reinforced the durability and affective strength of these networks. Luisa Moreno, a seasoned activist who was union rep for Cal San, had already organised alongside garment workers, cigar rollers, and pecan shellers in other parts of the country. With cannery workers, she took a deliberate approach of learning the insider shop-floor language of cannery operatives, cultivating their capacity to think and act, and finding ways for women workers to invent their own strategies or trade union politics.²⁷ Cannery culture was an entry point for Moreno – it went beyond the small, informal groups that resisted speedups or imposed output restrictions in heavy industry. It was a veritable counter-institution, a force field of solidarity that connected not just work teams but the whole sector. It imparted a lexicon, a sense of collectivity, a set of fighting instincts, and means of self-organisation that directly challenged management’s authority and morals, imparting deeper associations to the meaning of workers’ control.²⁸

“In-Between Ground”

In 1978, Nina Shapiro-Perl was a PhD student in anthropology at the University of Connecticut, completing fieldwork in the United States on power relations in contemporary labour processes.²⁹ Shapiro-Parl was part of a cohort of feminist anthropologists who were undertaking “shop-floor studies” and grappling with the possibilities and limits of engaged research alongside working-class women, who had become leaders in labor and community struggles happening in the US.³⁰ She needed to find a workplace to conduct an industrial ethnography – and did, in a costume jewellery assembly shop in Providence, Rhode Island. There, she showed that participant observation in and of the work process was just as crucial to inquiries into the lives of workers as oral history and archival excavation.³¹

Rhode Island, the smallest US state crammed in the lower half of New England, was an unlikely hub of labour struggle in the late 1970s and early 1980s.³² Lamphere taught at Brown University and worked at an apparel plant in Central Falls as part of the project which would become Working Daughters; and Susan Porter Benson finished her book on the historical formation of department salesworker culture while also teaching at Brown. The Community Labor Coalition provided logistical and financial support for labour actions big and small, the most prominent of which was the prolonged, hard-fought Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Co. strike.

Shapiro-Perl signed on as a solderer in the setup and charge department. There, she encountered the seemingly infinite mechanisms companies have at their disposal to exploit workers, utilising the persistence of the piece-rate system to stave off attempts to improve their conditions. In an underresearched industry like costume jewellery, the very description of the work structure and labour process had significant stakes. Just as important, Shapiro-Perl outlined the methods and takeaways of the unlikely or unseen modes of shop-floor resistance displayed by the low-wage women workers in her time at the plant.

Shapiro-Perl followed a specific schedule for registering and recording the gestures, patterns, and declarations that stood out among her coworkers. She would observe what was going on during a particular shift, survey the floor while completing her tasks, and, from those insights, figure out what the social relationships and attitudes among coworkers were like – who hung with whom, who protected whom, who didn’t care for whom. When she went to the bathroom on break, she would take quick notes on scraps of paper in shorthand – often just a name of a colleague and one or two keywords for recollection. She would then shove these in her back pockets upon exiting. Later in the evening, she would sit up in bed and write longer, more detailed fieldnotes, on the basis of those little scraps and her memory. Eventually, she would collapse and fall asleep, to start the regimen over again the next day.

Shapiro-Perl observed that the “fight-back strategies” we find in the struggle for control over the “daily work routine” are a source of both leverage and accommodation, of discontent as well as loyalty. On the one hand, the activity that unfolds in this arena “does not conform to traditional patterns of worker militance,” yet nonetheless involves creativity, edification, and steadfast commitment. This “conduct is no less than a calculated defense of class interests based on an experiential understanding of class struggle,” an index of the antagonism at the core of the capitalist labour process.³³ On the other hand, the shared strategies that jewellery workers exercised within that labour process – pacing production time, manipulating the conditions around them through jokes and antics, tactfully refusing tasks – were still absorbed by management’s grip on the production process as a whole. Supervisors could anticipate certain behaviours of resistance and redirect them. Slowdowns could be foreseen and offset. Because higher-ups commanded the overall “speed of the line” and work structure, they could focus in on particular areas of contention, like the piece-rate or cleaning duties, and chip away at complaints.³⁴ In the give-and-take between the broader conditions that forced most people to work for a living, the “open constraint and repression” which often caused the women to accept management prerogatives, and the informal habits, rules, and strategies workers deployed to negotiate, counter, or deal with these conditions, the former often won out.³⁵

Other authors like Lamphere, Porter Benson, Karen Brodkin Sacks, Barbara Melosh, Patricia Zavella, Susan Reverby, and the Work Relations Group, add nuance to this picture of work culture across a number of occupations and job sites.³⁶ Porter Benson provides the clearest definition: “the ideology and practice by which workers stake out a relatively autonomous sphere of action on the job.” It is “created as workers confront limitations and exploit possibilities of their jobs; transmitted by oral traditions and social sanctions.” It is “very much an in-between ground; it is neither a rubber-stamp version of management policy nor is it an outcome of the personal…characteristics of the workers.”³⁷ Work culture exists in the social interactions and the connective tissues – personal, habitual, instinctual – holding workers together.

The knottiness of work culture creates snags in attempts to capture it. Brodkin Sacks carried out what is described as a “co-analysis” with Duke University medical workers for nearly a decade (through two union drives). When she submitted drafts of a chapter on job tasks and daily interactions of data terminal operators to the workers she’d interviewed for comments, there was significant pushback. Specifically, her informants argued that she had overstated how terrible the working conditions were, and gave her a list of more than a dozen other coworkers to talk to. Brodkin Sacks remarks that this opposition to her account “sharpened my recognition of the complexity of presenting something as seemingly simple as ‘a workers’ perspective.’”³⁸ It is not difficult to imagine that stumbling blocks could arise down the line in the always-indirect translation of work culture into organizing.

Decoding a shop’s work culture can indicate the difference in scope and power between strategies that target the labour process in piecemeal ways and those that challenge the “larger social relations that govern production.” Workers are often caught in a grey area, between individual acts of defiance and careful, concerted, and inoculated plans of action. As Shapiro-Perl states,

The greatest importance of the fightback over piece rates probably lies in the summing up of the struggle itself that has yet to be done…The fightback that the workers wage daily over piecework is not recognized as the struggle against management that it is…The fightback appears as an individual war to win a fair wage or an unsystematic group strategy that rarely gets off the ground. Summing up the struggle can educate the less conscious participants to their existing power as workers, not to mention their potential power. It fortifies and propels the more advanced jewelry workers in their fight for a better quality of life.³⁹

The costume jewelry industry in Providence would be decimated over the next two decades, a casualty of globalization, free trade agreements, and the availability of cheap imports.⁴⁰ But what Shapiro-Perl terms “summing up” among this small crew of women workers is where the significance of inquiry lies. It is conceived as a learning process accentuated by different tempos, incomplete understandings, unavoidable specificities, and pitched at workers whose own reflections generally go unnoticed and unrecorded.

The inquiry concept developed by the feminist historians and anthropologists analysed above is highly relevant to the kinds of writing and analysis Long-Haul aims to publish. We see our work as scanning three areas: the US strand of inquiry, scrambled class relations, and experimentation or coming up with new approaches alongside workers. The US strand of inquiry, in which the Johnson-Forest Tendency played a catalytic role, revolved around a circuit between experience, narrative, and collective action.⁴¹ A worker recounts confronting conditions of exploitation; that recollection leads to an awareness of the stakes of workplace antagonisms; this awareness can be shared with wider layers of workers through publication, distribution, and discussion. Hershatter, Honig, and Coyle also interrogate the link between experience and narrative. First, it matters when and how a particular experience happens in a person’s life. Second, a lesson or point cannot be simply extracted from an account – it will be full of contradictions, gaps, and impasses. Such pitfalls and problems predictably continue to trouble those who take the concept of “consciousness” as paradigmatic today.⁴²

A recasting of class politics requires acknowledging that “class” is not a panacea or a solution to everything. It is something that has to be investigated and reconstructed from the elements of work culture and the neighborhood or family situation, which seep into the immediate job setting that workers experience individually and collectively. Patricia Zavella, in her account of San Joaquin Valley cannery operatives, cites one woman on her ambivalent relationship to her coworkers: “You have this abnormal intimacy. You make friends with people who are totally different than you, just because you work together.”⁴³ Sometimes segregation is maintained, sometimes it is torn down, and these can occur in a single workplace. Particular job posts can unlock lines of communication with various areas of a store or facility.⁴⁴ Where do “crosscuts,” or opportunities, exist for overturning the routine despotism of management and glimpsing genuine alternatives?⁴⁵

Though still a relatively new project, Long-Haul, across its first issues, has carried work that reflects this tradition of inquiry in several ways. The magazine has sought to operate in multiple historical registers and streams of bottom-up communication networks. It has attempted to revive and retool an oral history approach with an emphasis on “fieldwork.” Archival projects are adjusted and tweaked, not for their own sake, but in light of present struggles. This piece on the innovations of militant inquiry in the 1970s and 1980s is one small contribution among the many required for an adequate understanding of the tasks ahead.