Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere — Airlines and the Gendering of Organizational Culture – By Albert J. Mills
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2007.00659.x |
| Author | Melissa Tyler |
| Published date | 01 December 2007 |
| Date | 01 December 2007 |
The book compares four recent attempts to organize large numbers of workers in
LA in the past 20 years, two of them successful and two of them failures. The two
successes have received considerable attention in the past: the famous SEIU ‘Justice
for Janitors’ struggle immortalized in Ken Loach’s film Bread and Roses, and the
drywallers’ struggle that doubled the wages of immigrant workers hammering up
interior walls in residential construction. The two failures are less well known: an
attempt to unionize the truckers at the LA port and an attempt to organize the
garment workers of the Guess clothing company. The book argues that the key
differences between the successes and the failures can be found in the practices of the
unions undertaking the organizing. Highly aggressive, strategically focused leadership
combined with massive commitment of resources is needed. The two failures lacked
one or the other, and the two successes combined both.
Milkman admires the SEIU greatly and the end of the book details its growth in
recent decades while most other unions have been shrinking. She also addresses the
SEIU’s breakaway formation from the AFL-CIO, the Change to Win coalition. The
book ascribes to the entire Change to Win coalition all the positive things it details in
the SEIU and argues that the unions within it are likely to lead any future resurgence
in union organizing or in building organizational power.
This speculation about Change to Win is probably the least grounded of the book’s
assertions. It is not at all clear that the entire coalition has caught on to the SEIU’s
ability to organize widely and successfully. While the book depicts the Change to Win
member unions’ breakaway from the AFL-CIO as a principled one based on the need
to organize, it is hard to see that as the basis of the split. In fact, the Change to Win
unions have very little in common beyond their opposition to paying dues to the
AFL-CIO and it is difficult to see them as a unified group with a common vision or
programme. Only time will tell if Change to Win evolves into a lasting and principled
formation capable of moving together, but the early years have not been all that
promising.
Whatever quibbles one might have with this book, overall it is a gem. I highly
recommend it as one of the most thought-provoking works to come out on US labour
in the past few years. The recent resurgence of the labour movement in Los Angeles
deserves its own chronicler and analyst, and Ruth Milkman has fulfilled that role
admirably in this book.
Bruce Nissen
Florida International University
Sex, Strategy and the Stratosphere — Airlines and the Gendering of Organizational
Culture by Albert J. Mills. Palgrave Macmillan, Houndsmills, 2006, xvii +301
pp., ISBN 1 4039 9857 4, £58.00
A rare thing in organization studies, this book is a fascinating historical account of a
particular sector of employment, one that provides a rich and well-illustrated descrip-
tion of how discriminatory practices develop over time. Based on meticulous archival
research and in-depth interviews, it documents the gendering of three international
airlines — British Airways (BA), Air Canada and Pan American Airways (Pan Am)
throughout the course of much of the twentieth century. The analysis is organized
around key periods in the recruitment, selection, supervision, promotion and repre-
sentation of airline employees, focusing largely (but not exclusively) on the gendering
872 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2007.
To continue reading
Request your trial