SUMMER 2026
ISSUE 07

₁ This piece is jointly published with Notes From Below. See Notes From Below, issue 27 (2026).

₂ Though subsequently reprinted elsewhere, this pamphlet was first published by the El Paso chapter of REFORMA, an autonomous group within the American Library Association that remains committed to circulating and promoting Spanish-language materials.

₃ Louise Lamphere, From Working Daughters to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in an Industrial New England Community (Cornell University Press, 1987), 4. Lamphere gives a succinct overview of this literature and research stream in “Bringing the Family to Work: Women’s Culture on the Shop Floor,” Feminist Studies 11, no. 3 (1985): 519–540.

₄ Lamphere, “Bringing the Family to Work,” 519-521.

₅ Patrick Cuninghame, “For an Analysis of Autonomia: An Interview with Sergio Bologna,” Left History 7, no. 2 (2000): 89–102.

₆ Much of the account on the writing of the Farah pamphlet in this article is gathered from Gail Hershatter, in personal conversation, October 30, 2025, and November 4, 2025.

₇ Gabriel Solis, “Farah’s Fifty Years Later: A History of Class Struggle in the Borderlands,” Spectre, June 16, 2022, https://spectrejournal.com/farahs-50-years-later.

₈ Gail Hershatter, in personal conversation, October 30, 2025.

₉ Peter Friedlander, The Emergence of a UAW Local, 1936–1939 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), xxv. See also Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James L. Leloudis, Robert R. Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher R. Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

₁₀ See Bruno Cartosio, “Note e documenti sugli Industrial Workers of the World,” Primo Maggio 1 (1973): 43–56.

₁₁ Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig, “Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story,” in Mexican Women in the United States: Struggles Past and Present, ed. Magdalena Mora and Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1980), 126–7. The walkout itself was inspired by reprisals that had occurred at the San Antonio Farah plant, and word had trickled back to El Paso.

₁₂ Alessandro Portelli, “Oral History in Italy,” in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, ed. David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum (AltaMira Press, 1996), 391–416.

₁₃ For a dissection of a resonant historical example, see Ardis Cameron, “Bread and Roses Revisited: Women’s Culture and Working-Class Activism in the Lawrence Strike of 1912,” in Women, Work & Protest: A Century of US Women’s Labor History (Routledge, 1987), 42–61.

₁₄ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 121–125.

₁₅ Gigi Roggero, “Notes on Framing and Re-Inventing Co-Research,” ephemera: theory & politics in organization 14, no. 3 (August 2014): 515–523.

₁₆ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 126.

₁₇ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 126.

₁₈ Hershatter notably encountered similar patterns in her oral histories of women in post-revolutionary China. See Gail Hershatter, The Gender of Memory: Rural Women and China’s Collective Past (University of California Press, 2011), and Hershatter and Honig’s first books: Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford University Press, 1986); and Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford University Press, 1986).

₁₉ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 137.

₂₀ For an analysis of the maquiladoras in Juárez, see Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly, For We Are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier (State University of New York Press, 1983). Lourdes Arguelles conducted an explicitly militant inquiry among undocumented women workers in Arizona, California, and New Mexico in the late 1970s; see Lourdes Arguelles, “Undocumented Female Labor in the United States Southwest: An Essay on Migration, Consciousness, Oppression and Struggle,” in Between Borders: Essays on Mexicana/Chicana History, ed. Adelaida R. Del Castillo (Floricante Press, 1990), 299–312.

₂₁ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 143.

₂₂ Coyle, Hershatter, and Honig, “Women at Farah,” 139.

₂₃ Emily Honig, “Striking Lives: Oral History and the Politics of Memory,” Journal of Women’s History 9, no. 1 (1997): 139–157. See also Emily Honig, “Women at Farah Revisited: Political Mobilization and Its Aftermath among Chicana Workers in El Paso, Texas, 1972–1992,” Feminist Studies 22, no. 2 (1996): 425–452.

₂₄ See Michel Pialoux, Le temps d’écouter: Enquêtes sur les métamorphoses de la classe ouvrière (Éditions Raisons d’Agir, 2019).

₂₅ Vicki L. Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930–1950 (University of New Mexico Press, 1987), 35. Other studies could be cited here, like Thomas L. Dublin’s Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826–1860 (Columbia University Press, 1981), an influential account of the 19th century Lowell Mill workers.

₂₆ Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, 35–39.

₂₇ Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, 71.

₂₈ Vicki Ruiz, in personal conversation, October 22, 2025; see also Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, 78–84; Vicki L. Ruiz, From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1998), 81–82.

₂₉ On earlier instances where the impact of informal work groups could be felt, see David Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (Cambridge University Press, 1980); see also Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives, 21–39.

₃₀ The contextual information on Shapiro-Perl’s participant observation study comes from a personal interview with her, December 9, 2025. Shapiro-Perl later went on to work in the communications department for the Service Employees International Union, producing documentaries such as Si Se Puede, an account of the Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles with a focus on the Battle of Century City. She later codirected the Community Voice Project, a digital storytelling effort of neighborhood-level organic leaders in Washington, DC. Shapiro-Perl previously met with Ann Bookman, who had recently completed fieldwork in an electronics factory, to discuss the upshots of these embedded inquiries into working-class life and the concept of workplace culture. Ann Bookman, personal email, April 14, 2026.

₃₁ I thank Ann Bookman for locating key moments in the work of these feminist anthropologists: the symposium “US Women and Resistance in the Workplace and the Community,” organized by Sandra Morgen for the 1984 American Anthropological Association Annual meeting; the spring 1985 meeting held at the Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, convened by Morgen and Bookman, which brought together the participants from the 1984 symposium for further discussion; and the subsequent release of the collection Women and the Politics of Empowerment. Bookman’s doctoral dissertation, “The Process of Political Socialization Among Women and Immigrant Workers: A Case Study of Unionization in the Electronics Industry,” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1977), was a highly influential reference point for many writers in this milieu. A condensed version can be found in Ann Bookman, “Unionization in an Electronics Factory: The Interplay of Gender, Ethnicity, and Class,” in Women and the Politics of Empowerment, ed. Ann Bookman and Sandra Morgen (Temple University Press, 1988) 159–179.

₃₂ I owe the phrase “inquiry into the lives of workers” to Gail Hershatter.

₃₃ Paul Buhle has been a tireless chronicler of this radical orientation of the Rhode Island labor movement. See Paul Buhle, “The End of the Craftsmen’s Era: The Brown & Sharpe Strike; A Journalist’s Report from 1982,” in From the Knights of Labor to the New World Order: Essays on Labor of Culture (Garland Publishing, 1997), 127–131; his Working Lives: An Oral History of Rhode Island Labor (Rhode Island Historical Society, 1987); and his coedited collection A History of Rhode Island Working People, ed. Paul Buhle, Scott Molloy, and Gail Sansbury (Regine Printing Co., 1983). The spring 1978 issue of Radical History Review contains invaluable articles and oral histories on important strikes and labor movement culture in Rhode Island’s history across the 19th and 20th centuries.

₃₄ Nina Shapiro-Perl, “Resistance Strategies: The Routine Struggle for Bread and Roses,” in My Troubles Are Going to Have Trouble with Me: Everyday Trials and Triumphs of Women Workers, ed. Karen Brodkin Sacks and Dorothy Remy (Rutgers University Press, 1984), 193–208; Nina Shapiro-Perl, ”The Piece Rate: Class Struggle on the Shop Floor. Evidence from the Costume Jewelry Industry in Providence, Rhode Island,” in Case Studies on the Labor Process, ed. Andrew Zimbalist (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 277–298.

₃₅ I take the phrase “speed of the line” as an index of workers’ control from an interview with Susan Reverby, January 8, 2026.

₃₆ Heide Gerstenberger, “The Political Economy of Capitalist Labor,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 2, 2014, https://viewpointmag.com/2014/09/02/the-political-economy-of-capitalist-labor.

₃₇ Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (University of Illinois Press, 1986); Barbara Melosh, “The Physician’s Hand”: Work Culture and Conflict in American Nursing (Temple University Press, 1982); Patricia Zavella, Women’s Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Cornell University Press, 1987); Susan Reverby, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing, 1850–1945 (Cambridge University Press, 1987); Karen Brodkin Sacks, Caring by the Hour: Women, Work, and Organizing at Duke Medical Center (University of Illinois Press, 1988); The Work Relations Group, prepared by Jeremy Brecher, “Uncovering the Hidden History of the American Workplace,” Review of Radical Political Economics 10, no. 4 (1978): 1–20.

₃₈ Porter Benson, Counter Cultures, 228.

₃₉ Brodkin Sacks, Caring by the Hour, vii–xi. Interestingly, the data workers stated that Brodkin Sacks’s first draft would be “appropriate for a leaflet if, and only if, they were in the middle of a union battle.”

₄₀ Shapiro-Perl, “The Piece Rate,” 298.

₄₁ Shapiro-Perl, “The Piece Rate,” 298.

₄₂ See Joseph Nocera, “The Cufflinks that Went to China,” The New York Times, January 21, 2006. From a peak of 40–50,000 employees across the sector, by the mid-2000s that number had dwindled to less than 1,000.

₄₃ Asad Haider and Salar Mohandesi, “Workers’ Inquiry: A Genealogy,” Viewpoint Magazine, issue 3,   September 27, 2013, https://viewpointmag.com/2013/09/27/workers-inquiry-a-genealogy/. For more on the Correspondence group, see Kent Worcester, C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (State University of New York Press, 1995); Stephen M. Ward, introduction to Part 1 of Pages from a Black Radical’s Notebook: A James Boggs Reader, ed. Stephen M. Ward (Wayne State University Press, 2011), 37–41.

₄₄ David Stark, “Class Struggle and the Transformation of the Labor Process: A Relational Approach,” Theory and Society 9, no. 1 (1980): 89–130.

₄₅ Patricia Zavella, “‘Abnormal Intimacy’: The Varying Work Networks of Chicana Cannery Workers,” Feminist Studies 11, no. 3 (1985), 552.

₄₆ See the organizing done by Home Depot and Lowe’s workers in the United States, where merchandising service associates have been crucial to getting organizing committees off the ground.

₄₇ Lamphere, “Bringing the Family to Work,” 526.

In the summer of 1977, Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig made the trek from the San Francisco Bay Area to El Paso, Texas. Coyle taught at a Head Start program in San Francisco at the time and later became a documentary filmmaker; Hershatter and Honig were graduate students at Stanford University, specializing 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 neighborhood. 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.²

Also that summer, on the other side of 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 with other migrant ethnic groups that had been living in New England for some time.³ 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, labor-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.⁴ While depictions of the labor process were front and center 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 deindustrialization 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 labor, as well as in the relations of authority between employers and employees. It also sapped the strength of previous formations of working-class autonomy, and above all, the enduring strength of small shop-floor groups that held sway over the labor 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 unorganized workforce in increasing numbers. These feminist historians and researchers connected with workers who powered the recomposition of the labor 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 organization, it is crucial to acknowledge the innovations of these feminist historians and ethnographers that made it so.⁵ 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, the 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 popularized. Yet it retains significance for us at Long-Haul, for whom this earlier brand of workers’ inquiry models a confrontation with the kinds of questions and tendencies that we attempt to archive and circulate today. 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 organize in the future. Second, it has given us a way of thinking about the complexities of class relations as they actually exist in messy reality. Third, it has encouraged us to embrace a process of experimentation, of trying out new things with the goal of producing a new class politics.

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 labor 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 realize their own power, and how did they hold on to them after the fact?¹⁰ At Farah, for instance, the courageous attempts at organizing, which resulted in rounds of firings, stuck with women who were not vocal sympathizers 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 and what remained of this period of unflagging militancy. It is notable that the fieldwork of these US practitioners of workers’ inquiry 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 that 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 recognized. 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-organizers 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.”¹⁶ 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 organizing efforts. During lunch time, workers circulated among the tables to sound out each other’s sentiments about the union.”¹⁷

At times it was evident where the Farah workers had undergone revolutions and 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.¹⁸ 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 organizing 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 unionized 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.”¹⁹ 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 labor market segmentation between Chicanos and undocumented workers born in Mexico that could be exploited by cost-conscious employers.²⁰ Even auspicious pockets of working-class power, armed with trade-union backing, faced hard limits in an era of runaway shops, sectoral reorganization, 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.”²¹ This interplay between movement and conditions is an ongoing question for organizers. In a closing section, Hershatter, Honig, and Coyle consider the long-term politicization 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 organize 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.”²² Two timelines are in tension here. The expansive lens indicates how some women caught the organizing 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 organizing 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.”²³ 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.²⁴

Other historians would pick up the thread Hershatter and her coinquirers 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 labor struggle: the fight for unionization 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. Ruiz tracks the “cannery culture” that coalesced from everyday interactions and extended family ties, giving rise to peculiar lingos, latticelike webs of acquaintances and familiar associations, and subversions of divisions of labor 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.”²⁵ 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.²⁶ 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.”²⁷ 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 labor organizers recognized and reinforced the durability and affective strength of these networks. Luisa Moreno, a seasoned activist who was union rep for Cal San, had already organized 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.²⁸ 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 counterinstitution, 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-organization that directly challenged management’s authority and morals, imparting deeper associations to the meaning of workers’ control.²⁹

Rhode Island, the smallest US state, crammed in the lower half of New England, was an unlikely hub of labor struggle in the late 1970s and early 1980s.³³ Lamphere taught at Brown University and worked at an apparel plant in Central Falls as part of the project that would become From Working Daughters to Working Mothers; Susan Porter Benson finished her book on the historical formation of department sales worker culture while also teaching at Brown. The Community Labor Coalition provided logistical and financial support for labor actions big and small, the most prominent of which was the prolonged, hard-fought Brown and Sharpe Manufacturing Company 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, utilizing the persistence of the piece-rate system to stave off attempts to improve their conditions. In an underresearched industry like costume jewelry, the very description of the work structure and labor process had significant stakes. Just as importantly, Shapiro-Perl outlined the methods and takeaways of the unlikely or unseen modes of shop-floor resistance displayed by the low-wage women workers during 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 the 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 labor process.³⁴ On the other hand, the shared strategies that jewelry workers exercised within that labor 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 behaviors 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.³⁵ In the give-and-take between the broader conditions that force most people to work for a living, the “open constraint and repression” that 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.³⁶

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.³⁷ Porter Benson provides the clearest definition of work culture: “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, and often “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.”³⁸ 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 book 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.’”³⁹ 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 labor process per se” and those that challenge the “larger social relations that govern production.”⁴⁰ 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.⁴¹

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.⁴² 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 analyzed 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.⁴³ 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.⁴⁴

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 Santa Clara 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.”⁴⁵ 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.⁴⁶ Where do “crosscuts,” or opportunities, exist for overturning the routine despotism of management and glimpsing genuine alternatives?⁴⁷

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.