La Privatización de los Servicios Públicos

The shortage of women workers in construction in the UK has in recent years received considerable attention from academics and policymakers, although this has focused largely on women professionals, particularly engineers and surveyors (for example, Bagilhole, 2002; Dainty and Bagilhole, 2006; Faulkner, 2009a; 2009b; Greed, 1991; 2000; 2006; Henwood, 1998; Miller, 2004; Powell et al., 2009; Watts, 2007; 2009a; 2009b), rather than on women in the manual trades (Clarke and Gribling, 2008; Clarke and Wall, 2004; Wall, 2004). The under-representation of women in science,

engineering and technology (SET) has been the focus of government attention as an issue affecting economic growth and productivity (Kirkup et al., 2010: 3) and an area of skill shortages, evidenced by the government support of the UKRC, a body seeking to address the under-representation of women in SET.

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While the construction industry did little to encourage women’s participation until the 1990s (Bagilhole, 2002: 69), since then it has been subject to a “plethora of government initiatives for change” (Rhys Jones, 2006: 262), with the Latham Review in 1994 for the first time focusing on the low representation of women and BME people. It

recommended an increase in the numbers of women and the pursuit of equal opportunities measures to address the macho and adversarial culture. Efforts by the industry to train and recruit more women (Bagilhole, 2002; Greed, 2006; Gurjao, 2006; Miller et al., 2004a) have seen some increase in the numbers of women in professional construction roles (Dainty et al., 2001: 297; Dainty and Bagilhole, 2006: 99) and women starting to enter influential positions within the industry (Watts, 2009a: 39). Men, however, have been found to be resistant to initiatives to change the industry’s culture and practices, such as long hours working and geographical flexibility (Dainty et al., 2001). Furthermore women in construction are often disappointed or cynical about the superficial nature of commitment to equal opportunity measures and lack of real change (Greed, 2000). Indeed Greed (2000; 2006) has conceptualised the industry as ‘Planet Construction’, reflecting its self-contained separation from wider social changes, such as those affecting gender relations in other sectors. She describes the male-

dominated ‘tribes’ that compete with one another, and further notes the class divisions, with roles strongly differentiated, where “every man knows his place and ‘who’ is above and below him” (Greed, 2006: 74). Both women and black male construction professionals face barriers to progression (Greed, 2000: 188).

Women have not increased their numbers in the skilled manual trades in the UK and have received less academic attention than women in construction professions, with a valuable exception being Clarke et al’s (2004) international collection of analysis of women in construction trades. A historical perspective (Clarke and Wall, 2004) illustrates moments when women increased their numbers in the building trades, for example during the two world wars of the twentieth century and in the 1970s and 1980s when local authority building departments took measures to recruit women. In London this was due to a combination of feminist campaigning (in particular through Women and Manual Trades), commitment from the then Labour-led Greater London Council (GLC), women’s training workshops (supported by local authorities and the European Social Fund), the support of construction union UCATT and the equal opportunities policies of Labour-run local authorities (Wall, 2004). Close links between the women’s

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training workshops and the Direct Labour Organisations (DLOs) of certain Inner London boroughs enabled many tradeswomen to gain work, with 266 women working in just seven Inner London DLOs in 1989 (Pyke 1989, cited in Clarke and Wall, 2004). These were exciting times, recalls Wall (2004: 167), who herself trained and worked as a carpenter during the 1970s and 1980s:

“For a few exciting years in Inner London it seemed as though women were at last gaining some foothold in the most gender-segregated industry of all time.”

However, progress was not long-lasting and Wall (2004: 168) notes that by the early 1990s the construction industry was in deep recession and redundancies had affected many in the local authority DLOs following the imposition by the Conservative government of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT). The opportunities offered by women’s training workshops and their links with the DLOs also came to an end. The exclusion of women and ethnic minorities from skilled construction jobs has continued, as a result of structural obstacles relating to work-based training, informal methods of recruitment and employment conditions such as the requirement for long hours on site that are inflexible for those with family commitments (Byrne et al., 2005; Clarke and Gribling, 2008). Even where there was a commitment to recruit a diverse workforce, as in the building of Heathrow Terminal 5, in reality few women and local people gained work on the project, with one of the main reasons being the lack of work experience placements available to those studying in local colleges (Clarke and

Gribling, 2008). The authors concluded that there was no shortage of those in the target groups for recruitment (including women and ethnic minorities) looking to train and work in the industry. Similarly, large numbers of women have registered an interest in jobs building the Olympic Park in East London, contesting the myth that women are not interested in working in construction (Foster, 2010). This indicates that supply-side explanations for occupational segregation that focus on women’s ‘choices’ alone are inadequate, and that demand-side or structural causes are also significant (see 2.2.1). Some studies from the US have examined women’s experiences of manual construction work (Weston, 1982; 1998), also addressing issues of class and sexuality (Paap, 2006), affirmative action programmes (Price, 2004) and the experiences of lesbian workers in construction (Denisson and Saguy, forthcoming; Frank, 2001) (see 2.3.3), the equivalent of which I have not found in the UK literature. Paap (2006: 137) describes how

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masculinity. Despite the seemingly insulting nature of the term, men used it about themselves to assert their “animal” strength and physicality, associated also with a raw sexuality, that defines their masculinity and places it above femininities or more “effeminate” white-collar masculinities. Thus men who may be at the lower end of the class hierarchies of the sector attempt to assert power over both women and other men who are not considered sufficiently masculine.

Women workers in transport in the UK have received less attention from academics and policymakers than women in construction. The literature on gender in the transport sector tends to focus on gender differences in transport use (Hamilton et al., 2005) and its restrictive effect on women’s labour market participation (Dobbs, 2007); on female- dominated areas such as cabin crew (Hochschild, 1983; Simpson, 2004; 2005;

Whitelegg, 2009); or on historical accounts of women transport workers (Rotondaro, 2004; Stanley, 2008; Wojtczak, 2005). Additionally a study of restructuring in the transport and logistics sector focused on its effects on women managers (Simpson et al., 2003), finding evidence of long working hours. While there is a small amount of

research on women in seafaring occupations, this thesis focuses on surface and

underground passenger transport (buses, railways and underground rail), so this has not been examined.

Little has been written about the experiences of UK local bus drivers, (Reynolds and Rose, 2009), and I have found no research on the specific experiences of women bus workers. Reynolds and Rose (2009) examine the emotional effects of working in what has been described as the ‘worst job in the world’, but find a more complex experience of both ‘ups’ and ‘downs’ with benefits deriving from a sense of control and job satisfaction, as well as stress from passenger behaviour. Only 10 per cent of their sample of drivers was female, so the study is primarily an analysis of the emotions of men.

A common feature of the construction and transport sectors is long working hours: using Labour Force Survey data, the TUC (2008a) showed that 22 per cent of those in construction worked more than 48 hours a week (exceeded only by mining and quarrying) as did 19.5 per cent of workers in transport, storage & communication. These figures are well above the average of 12.9 per cent of employees who work over 48 hours a week. While long working hours predominantly affect male employees, more than a fifth (22.2 per cent) of long hours workers are female (TUC, 2008a). It may

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be hard for women to resist the long-hours cultures of these industries; Watts (2009a: 48) found that women engineers adapt to male work patterns, commonly working an average 50-hour week.