the labour reserve: the floating; the latent; and the stagnant. .... Government. 1965- ...... 1964-79. -12.615. 32 .555 .383. ( 5 .534) (10 .137). Government. 1964-79.
Jane Humphries
The `Emancipation' of women in the 1970s and 1980s : From the latent to the floating WOMEN'S ROLE IN the `industrial reserve army' has been an
6
important theme in socialist feminist analysis . This article discusses the literature on this theme, distinguishing between the cyclical reserve army hypothesis and more secular formulations. It reviews the concept of the reserve army in the writings of Marx and Engels, in particular the three forms of the labour reserve : the floating; the latent ; and the stagnant . The concept of an industrial reserve cannot be applied to women without some apprecation of Marx and Engels' vision of female proletarianization . The author uses American data to explore the hypothesis that women constituted a latent reserve army of labour which is in the process of being fully assimilated into the labour force . Socialist feminists have suggested a variety of mechanisms whereby partriarchal social relations facilitate the continued growth and development of a capitalist economy . While the same ideas do not always appear in all socialist feminist writings, different authors having their own emphases, one theme that is almost universal concerns women's role in `the industrial reserve army' . Women are said to provide a reserve of labour which can be mobilized according to the needs of capital accumulation (hereafter known as the Reserve Army Hypothesis (RAH)) . A first distinguishing characteristic of this literature is
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN that, possibly because of the relative ease with which the RAH can be translated into testable hypotheses, it has been the subject of more empirical investigation than other socialist feminist themes. There have been several important studies of changes in women's participation in the dramatically transformed wartime economy (ILO, 1946) ; several studies which emphasize the importance of ideological factors in the mediation of the demands of the economy (Humphries, 1976 ; Mason, 1976), and most important of all, several studies which emphasize constraints operating on capital in its mobilization of women workers and which therefore constitute a criticism of the RAH in its crudest form . Specifically it has been argued that occupational specialization by sex creates an inflexibility in the labour market which prevents women's expulsion during periods of declining demand for labour (Milkman, 1976; OECD, 1976) . This qualification has informed subsequent empirical work which has attempted a synthesis of the reserve army and the occupational segregation approaches in an investigation of the conditions under which women would and would not operate as a reserve army of labour (Bruegel, 1979 ; Rubery and Tarling, 1982) . A second distinguishing characteristic of this literature has been its emphasis on the business cycle rather than the longer run accumulation process . The idea of a distinctive female response to short run labour market conditions dominated the initial discussions (Benson, 1969 ; Mitchell, 1971) and the empirical studies described above are concerned primarily with the procyclical movements in female employment . The reserve army hypothesis has become the cyclical reserve army hypothesis (CRAH) . Even when an author is critical of the argument that women constitute an industrial reserve, the definition of the latter in terms of response to the level of activity goes unchallenged (Szymanski, 1976) . The important exception here is an article by Margaret Simeral (1978) which contends that in Marx's and Engels' work the army has both a secular and cyclical function, a position which has some commonality with the argument developed below . The present paper is developed within these traditions with an important qualification . I argue that the existing literature is confused by the meaning of the industrial reserve army, that the identification of the industrial reserve army with cyclical variation in employment and unemployment is unduly restrictive, and that Marx and Engels had something more in mind. The concept of an industrial reserve cannot be applied to women without some appreciation of Marx's and Engels' vision of female proletarianization . The latter employs not
7
CAPITAL & CLASS 8
only the concept of a reserve army but also the idea that the substitution of female for male workers constitutes an inevitable corollary of capitalist accumulation (hereafter known as the substitution hypothesis (SH))' . The paper is organized as follows : section I discusses recent formulations of the cyclical reserve army hypothesis with particular emphasis on Rubery and Tarling's UK work. Some results obtained by applying the Rubery and Tarling model to the US are presented . Section II contains a brief review of the concept of the industrial reserve army in Marx's and Engels' writings and an attempt to distill out of this a model of the proletarianization of women which is then tested in section III using American data . The us is taken, in this context, as representative of trends in advanced industrial capitalism . Of particular importance to the general theoretical position expressed by the author here and elsewhere is the conclusion that the concept of a feminized reserve army has no mechanical universal validity but is subject to a historically specific interpretation .
Women as a `reserve army'
In the existing literature women's identification with a labour reserve has been tested by observing the variation of female employment with total employment, an approach introduced by Bruegel (1979) and refined by Rubery and Tarling (1982) 2 . The `reserve army' is understood to constitute a buffer over the business cycle, and the ebb and flow of labour is conceived in cyclical terms . Rubery and Tarling modelled this by regressing the percentage change in female employment on the percentage change in total employment, the reserve army hypothesis being that female employment is more cyclically volatile than total employment . If this is the case then the coefficient on total employment, l3, should be significantly different and greater than one' . Using primarily UK data but also extending their analysis to other advanced industrial economies and disaggregating to various levels, Rubery and Tarling found some interesting patterns in their regression results (p .51, ff .) . Analysis using UK broad sector data resulted in support for the CRAH in manufacturing only . The significant result in the case of all industries and services, Rubery and Tarling held to reflect the dominance of manufacturing . In the case of the us at an analogous level of aggregation, Rubery and Tarling reported l3 coefficients significantly greater than one for manufacturing, finance, and all industries and services, although they had reason to qualify the latter two results . Similar regressions for the us, also by major industrial
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN divisions, but covering a longer time span, are reported in table 1 . The results confirm the general finding of greater cyclical volatility of female employment in manufacturing . Women's employment changes were also significantly more volatile in mining and wholesale and retail trade. The data did not however support the Rubery and Tarling finding of fi significantly greater than 1 in finance nor in aggregate employment on non-agricultural payrolls . The case of mining is interesting, but such a small proportion of women is involved that it is hard to interpret the results . Here US and UK data tell different stories, as Rubery and Tarling found a very low coefficient in mining which implied a significant negative relationship between the share of women's employment and changes in total employment . At this level of aggregation the results provide only limited support for the empirical version of the reserve army hypothesis, greater cyclical volatility being confined primarily to the manufacturing sector . These results, however, relate as much to the simplistic modelling of the reserve army hypothesis as to the actual role of women in the employment structure. As Rubery and Tarling point out even if women are employed in the cyclically sensitive areas they are also employed in relatively stable areas, for example in clerical work, and moreover in employment sectors where women predominate they must necessarily form the core labour force as well as fill the secondary jobs (Rubery and Tarling, 1982, pp .53-54) . These authors are thus persuaded to move to a less aggregated level than broad industry divisions in order to capture the effects of women performing different functions within an industry's labour process . Before following them however it becomes necessary to reconsider the concept of a reserve army and particularly to see how that concept informs, and is informed by, a more general and longer run theorization of women's involvement in paid production . My starting point here is Marx's and Engels' own discussion of `relative surplus population' .
In 1798, the Reverend Thomas Malthus in a classic example of blaming the victim ascribed the misery of the working class to its propensity to increase its numbers ahead of the accumulation of capital . Elevated to `a principle of population' by reference to some empirically dubious arithmetical progressions, the Parson's thesis provided a pseudo-scientific basis for anti-working class legislation in the century that followed and remains prominent in casuistry supporting anti-welfarism today . Marx's determination to expose the reification implicit in bourgeois science and reveal numerous `natural phenomena' as
9
Marx and Engels on `the industrial reserve army'
Table 1 : Changes in United States female employment and total employment on non-agricultural payrolls by industry division Sector
Years
alpha
beta
R 2 (adj)
Total
1965-79 1961-79
Construction
1965-79
Manufacturing
1961-70
.963 ( .0699) 1 .346 ( .153) .4889 ( .158) 1 .230 ( .0503) 1 .284 ( .190) 1 .186 ( .0969) 1 .188 ( .167) .9885 ( .163) 1 .176 ( .169)
.931
Mining
.015 ( .002) .0296 ( .0072) .048 ( .0097) .0066 ( .0019) .0124 ( .0051) .0015 ( .0033) .00097 ( .0061) .0098 ( .0077) .0076 ( .0062)
Transport and Public Utilities Wholesale and Retail Trade Finance, Insurance and Real Estate Services Government
1965-79 1961-79 1961-79 1965-79 1965-79
Source : us Department of Labour
5% Significance level Ho : Beta < 1 Hi : Beta > 1
.809 .379 .971 .760 .892 .733 .718 .771
*(-)
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN attendant upon social organisation, specifically the exploitative social relations of capitalism, made for an obvious antagonism, which was strengthened by the vulgar anti-socialism which popular Malthusianism fed (Meek, 1971) . Marx's and Engels' attempts to rebuff Malthusianism reflect their fundamentally different theoretical perspective, for while Malthus saw `the population problem' as a natural result of `human nature', Marx and Engels argued that absolute movements in population were not responsible for the relative proportion of labour to capital, but rather that the historical laws of motion of capital themselves, in particular the rising organic composition of capital constantly re-created a relative surplus population : The demand for labour is not identical with the increase of capital nor supply of labour with increase of the working class . It is not a case of two independent forces working on one another . Les des sont pipes . Capital works on both sides at the same time . If its accumulation, on the one hand, increases the demand for labour, it increases on the other the supply of labourers by the `setting free' of them, whilst at the same time the pressure of the unemployed compels those that are employed to furnish more labour, and therefore makes the supply of labour, to a certain extent, independent of the supply of labourers . (Marx, 1967, p .640) . In the course of this debate Marx and Engels introduced the concept of the industrial reserve army which specified the relative surplus population as a social phenomenon specific to capitalism . Marx describes all under- or unemployed labour as its members, but as under- or unemployment can take several forms so can the labour reserve (Marx, 1972, p640 ff) . Marx identifies three such forms : (1) the floating ; (2) the latent ; and (3) the stagnant . Although elsewhere Engels, in particular, focusses on the role of the business cycle in creating and recreating the reserve army (Engels, 1962), here Marx explicitly excludes cyclical unemployment as a separate category, the cycle exacerbating under-and unemployment of all kinds .
The Floating Labour Reserve Marx identifies the floating reserve with workers experienced in capitalistically organized and centralized industry . Explicitly three kinds of workers are involved : firstly, adult males whom Marx sees as `let go' because they could command higher wages than juveniles, although the source of this bargaining power remains mysterious ; secondly, specialized workers who become unemployed because of technological change or
11
CAPITAL & CLASS 12
changes in the sectoral composition of output and who remain `chained' to a particular branch of industry ; and, thirdly, older workers who are `set free' because of the debilitating effects of industrial employment . Women are not only not included in the floating reserve but are explicitly identified as substituting for those prime age males who constitute its ranks . A rise in women's share in total employment thus characterizes the process whereby the floating reserve is produced and reproduced . Here as elsewhere, Marx's delineation of the reserve army is historically specific. Not only Marx and Engels, but many of their conservative as well as radical contemporaries, believed that the modern labour process, since it reduced the physical strength needed in production, facilitated the mass substitution of women and juveniles for more expensive male adults, and that this process was well underway in that epitome of nineteenth century industrialism - the cotton industry . Whether technological change did result in a restructuring of the labour force by age and sex either in individual nineteenth century industries or in the economy as a whole remains questionable . The only relevant micro-level study with which the author is familiar, Lazonick's analysis of the impact of the self acting mule, (1979), which Marx himself used as an example of technological change associated with dilution, draws negative conclusions . However Lazonick's argument that the organization of adult male workers in the context of a highly competitive industry, prevented the masters from using the self actor to substitute juvenile and female labour, does not eliminate the possibility that there was dilution in the aggregate . Adult males may have retained their principal positions within the labour process but their proportion to the total factory population may have declined. A lack of data makes it very difficult to investigate this and other aggregate versions of `the substitution hypothesis', and the issue is further clouded in that even if the early factories employed high proportions of women, often the handicraft production that was displaced was also 'feminized' (Tilly and Scott, 1978 ; Bythell, 1978 ; Pinchbeck, 1961) . At the macro level available evidence suggests that there was no mass movement of previously unproductive women into wage labour or that women were substituted for men on a large scale . While it is not my intention to deal with the failure of widespread substitution to occur in the course of industrialization in this paper (but see Humphries,1977 ; Humphries and Rubery, 1981) ; I will argue that the substitution hypothesis is more appropriate to contemporary advanced industrial capitalism and indeed that this process is underway in the United States . The
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN interesting question today concerns the interaction between such a secular substitution process and a sex-segregated productive structure ; though it should be apparent that a sexual division of labour is less of an obstacle to secular substitution than it is to substitution over the business cycle . The Latent Labour Reserve
The latent labour reserve Marx describes in the concrete terms of the labour potential in precapitalist agriculture . As capitalism permeates the agricultural sector, `the law of capitalist accumulation' (i .e . the rising organic composition of capital) reduces the demand for agricultural labour which thus constitutes a source of labour for non-agricultural employment . The production of this latent reserve relies upon labour saving technological change in capitalist agriculture . Marx's vision here seems to have been historically accurate, for agricultural employment does decline both absolutely and relatively during industrialization with rising productivity preventing a decline in agricultural output . The value of this category to capital lies in its dormancy combined with a responsiveness to the demands of the accumulation process . Agricultural migrants initially are perfect members of the latent reserve since not only are they attracted to industrial employment without any increase in existing wages (i.e . available in elastic supply) but also during periods of reduced demand for labour they can be persuaded to drift back to their native villages thus reducing the cost of recession to capital, which one way or another is partially responsible for the otherwise bloated welfare rolls and escalated costs of maintaining urban law and order in the face of high unemployment and mass deprivation . But over time rural migrant labour loses these happy qualities . Migration becomes increasingly permanent for larger numbers of people and extends intergenerationally . Ties with the rural areas are lost . Simultaneously capitalism develops to the point when it can finance a higher level of unemployment - indeed this is a contributory reason for the migration assuming a more permanent character . Thus while for a time the cyclical demands of capital can be absorbed by the latency of the agricultural reserve, secular trends undermine that very latency . The latent relative surplus is converted into a floating relative surplus as industrial capital expands . The rise in female participation rates in the post World War 2 period constitutes a re-enactment of the same process - the discovery, exploitation, and, I will argue, ultimate conversion of a second latent labour reserve . Housewives like precapitalist
13
CAPITAL & CLASS 14
agricultural workers initially constituted a pool of unexploited labour hidden in the sense of not representing a drain on the capitalist surplus, but able to respond to the demands of the economy . This is obviously what socialist feminists have in mind when they identify women with `the reserve army' . Again capital could work on both the demand for and the supply of this labour . Capital's infiltration of household production has, at least partially, displaced household workers making them available to industrial production . While it might be thought that housewives constituted a superior labour reserve in that they could be permanently maintained as a temporary supplement, the modern household sector unlike precapitalist agriculture is no repository of means of production that can be spread over more workers without a collapse of productivity at the margin . The argument here is that women have been rapidly assimilated into the labour force, initially primarily as a result of expanding demand in 'feminized' sectors but increasingly because of pressures on working class standards of living (Applebaum, 1981 ; Currie et al, 1981 ; Humphries and Rubery, 1981) . There is no slack in the household economy capable of absorbing a large scale retreat of women workers . Thus in the 1980s the identification of women workers with a latent industrial reserve is anachronistic . This has several implications . First, the exhaustion of the latent reserve army means that capital has to recreate such a reservoir elsewhere, the obvious target being Third World countries with their own relative surplus populations_ Metropole countries must struggle only to design institutions (temporary passports, guest worker arrangements, immigration regulations) which preserve the temporary status of such workers .` Second, and more important to the argument developed here, the assimilation of female workers creates a historic conjuncture in which the classic Marxian substitution effect can come into play . Thus over the course of development of capitalism, these two aspects of the reserve army interact to facilitate the accumulation process . The mass substitution of female labour did not happen in Marx's own time because women, by and large, remained a secondary element in the latent reserve ; Marx's own emphasis on agricultural labour was historically corrects But this ordering has been destroyed in the post World War 2 period and circumstances are now conducive to the operation of the substitution effect . I argue below that this effect is already empirically discernible .
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN
The Stagnant Labour Reserve The third form of the relative surplus was something of a residual category . It included those who were employed or underemployed in precapitalist sectors of the economy, in outwork, handicraft production, etc ., but also extended to pauperized labour and the `dangerous classes' ; the unemployed and petty and not so petty criminals . Although these different categories share characteristics, they are also marked by basic differences . Workers in precapitalist industry, like those in precapitalist agriculture, constituted a latent reserve that could be absorbed as capital expanded, again with capital operating on both the demand and the supply of labour . Moreover this labour often possessed the skills or at least the discipline that was desirable in the early factory labour force . The same cannot be said of the 'lazarus layers' . It seems inconceivable that these latter individuals could ever be usefully mobilized in capitalist production, although they may well have served some function in terms of the operation of the system as a whole . For example, their mere existence, whether or not they could actually displace existing workers, might have served to discipline the employed although it is hard to see how they could have represented a dormant threat if displacement was patently inconceivable . Modern analogues for these groups exist . Sections of the economy remain imperfectly penetrated by capital : the household sector can reasonably be thus interpreted ; and labour employed therein constitutes, a modern stagnant reserve . The nineteenth century's unemployed and unemployable lazarus layers have their modern counterparts although again a simple functionalist interpretation of their existence seems weak . Women are undoubtedly disproportionately represented in the stagnant reserve given their predominance in low productivity, badly paid secondary jobs . The role such women workers play is practically synonymous with their functioning as a latent reserve and comments offered in the latter case are again relevant . Female assimilation The argument of this paper is that in the modern period women constituted a labour reserve, which has been gradually exploited by capital: witness the secular increase in female participation rates since World War 2, particularly those of married women . During the years when women were being drawn into the active labour force their employment was likely to be more cyclically volatile than that of men . Thus the usual interpretation
15
CAPITAL & CLASS 16
of the reserve army hypothesis is a cyclical reflection of the secular process of erosion of a latent reserve . Women, as the `newest' workers initially may be disproportionately represented in cyclical unemployment, but as their conversion from a latent reserve progresses women workers are assimilated into the labour force and a secular homogenization of labour begins to dominate their cyclical differentiation . Of course, it is possible that women may be a peculiar latent reserve incapable of true absorption because of sex segregation in the employment structure . The latter has however no basis in the laws of motion of capitalism which predict that as women are taken up they are converted in representative proportions into `primary workers' . As such they may suffer cyclical unemployment but with no higher frequency than their male counterparts . This model suggests that the observation of a sex segregated employment structure and women's relatively lower wages, rather than signalling sex discrimination on the part of employers or other (male) employees, simply reflects the historic assimilation of the latest latent labour reserve, which happens to be female and whose initial experience in paid labour is in secondary employment . There may, of course, be sex discrimination on the part of individual employers and/or workers, and there may be reasons for collective capital to seek to permanently crystallize the existing structure of employment along sex linked lines, but these forces are antithetical to the logic of capitalist development . For once women have been drawn into the labour force in large numbers, their relatively lower wages must force a substitution of the kind Marx envisaged . This is the prediction of the theory . It is, of course, extremely difficult to translate these secular trends into hypotheses that can be tested with existing data, expecially as the more dramatic of these developments are still very recent . Hence the empirical evidence cited below is suggestive only . Rising female participation rates are sufficient documentation of the exploitation of the latent reserve of female labour . The Bureau of Labour Statistics in predicting female participation rates (which they have consistently underestimated in the post World War 2 period) were dismayed to find that if they simply extrapolated the participation rates of women aged 25-29 from their rapidly rising trend of the 1970s they would exceed the rates for men of comparable age groups before the 1980s are over (Us Department of Labour, 1979) . This rather disturbing result was avoided by the sure, if unimaginative, device of a ceiling to the female rate derived from the male rate . The emancipation of female workers from their latent
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN status would be reflected in a gradual diminution in their disproportionate sensitivity to cyclical unemployment . Our already rather negative results on the reserve army hypothesis tend to support this argument as does the empirical evidence of both Szymanski (1976) and Simeral (1978) . However Szymanski takes the position that women have been integrated into the permanent labour force, while I believe this process to be only currently underway (and here the six years since Szymanski's article appeared are crucial) . In terms of the earlier empirical version of the CRAH I anticipate lower coefficients in the more recent period than in the 1960s and 1970s . Going beyond the existing empirical work to an examination of the substitution hypothesis the problem becomes definitional . What do we mean by substitution? The simplest and most obvious case where female employees replace men is only detectible at the level of the firm, and even then may be obscured by a simultaneous restructuring of the labour process, introduction of new machinery, contracting out of certain activities, etc .' While micro studies are urgently needed in the us context, the present essay is concerned with a more macro perspective . At this level the relative growth of female employment associated with the restructuring of the economy, that is the relative growth of the feminized sectors, has become a commonplace of advanced industrial economies . In the 1950s and 1960s the dramatic growth of the service sector and derived demand for women employees promoted the rapid increase in female participation rates . But as long as male employment continued to grow, albeit less rapidly than female employment, a rise in women's share of total employment might not be considered `substitution' . More recently, in the US the continued increase in female employment in the face of a falling or stationary total number of jobs must imply that women are advancing at the expense of men although whether this process can be called `substitution' is also a matter for debate . At a more disaggregated level substitution implies female penetration of male dominated sectors of the labour force and, following Marx, attention is focussed particularly on the industrial sector . Investigation of the substitution hypothesis therefore involves analysis of the rate and distribution of growth in female employment . The argument again seeks to distinguish between patterns observed in the 1960s and recent experience . Whereas earlier women's employment growth would be concentrated in feminized sectors, in the last decade I anticipate their growing significance in new areas . Also of interest is the hypothesized increasing vulnerability of men to . ejection into the floating reserve, tests of which unfortunately founder on the inadequacy of unemployment statistics c.
&
C . 20-B
17
CAPITAL & CLASS 18
and (again) the difficulties of micro-level studies . However some simply collaborating evidence might be obtained from trends in the relative incidence of unemployment among men and women in employment . If women are actually being substituted for men in production, then there would be a positive relationship between unemployment rates and the relative share of women in employment .
From the latent to the floating Women's `emancipation' in advanced industrial capitalism
It was argued above that if women have made the transition from the latent to the primary reserve there would have been a decrease in the relative volatility of their employment over time . Still at the highest levels of aggregation (i .e . industry division), as a crude test of this hypothesis, I sub-divided the time series into two subsamples : 1965 to 1974 and 1974 to 1979 . The hypothesis of a secular decline in the cyclical volatility predicts a fi significantly greater than 1 in the first period and significantly less than or equal to 1 in the second period . The results are reported for all industry divisions except mining and construction in table 2 below . In only three cases was there any evidence of a decline in the relative volatility of women's employment . In both total non-agricultural employment and services employment although the CRAH could be neither rejected nor accepted in the earlier period, li was significantly less than 1 in the later period . However in neither case did an F test reveal significant change in the structure of the equation between sub-periods . In government employment l3 was significantly greater than 1 in the early period but not subsequently which again lends some support to the hypothesis of transition from the latent to the primary reserve . In manufacturing female employment was more cyclically volatile than total employment in both sub-periods . In the other major industry divisions the results were not significant . However given the relatively poor performance of the CRAH at this level of aggregation it is not surprising that tests which make further demands on the data should be inconclusive . The major stumbling block here is that the data series is really too short to test for structural change over time . Following Rubery and Tarling the cyclical reserve army hypothesis was then tested at lower levels of aggregation, that is by major industry groups . The results, reported in table 3 below suggest similar patterns in the employment of women across industries in the us and UK but can also be interpreted as rather striking evidence supporting the argument that a sex differential in the cyclical volatility of employment simply indicates that the absorption of female workers is incomplete . After estimating the
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN equation relating changes in female employment to changes in total employment and testing for the significance of the 13 coefficient, I ranked industry divisions according to the percentage of women employees in total employees in 1979 . The results are reported in table 4 . In durable goods industries there are no 'feminized industries', that is industries in which women represent more than their share in total employment, although miscellaneous manufacturing is getting close . In all industry divisions where women comprise more than approximately one fifth of the labour force the CRAH was accepted . The interpretation is that
19
Table 2 : Changes in female employment and total employment on us nonagricultural payrolls by industry division, sub-period analysis Sector Subperiod alpha 13 RZ(adj) 5% significance Ho : 13< 1 Hi : 13 > 1 Total employment 1965-1974 1974-1979 Manufacturing
1965-1974 1974-1979
Transport and Public Utilities
1965-1974 1974-1979
Wholesale and Retail Trade
1965-1974 1974-1979
Finance, Insurance and Real Estate
1965-1974 1974-1979
Services
1965-1974 1974-1979
Government
1965-1974 1974-1979
.011 ( .004) .082 ( .002) .008 ( .002) .008 ( .003) - .006 ( .011) .017 ( .006) - .005 ( .007) .012 ( .006) - .003 ( .012) .015 ( .005) .004 ( .010) .286 ( .007) - .008 ( .005) .028 ( .010)
1 .080 ( .126) .891 ( .043) 1 .219 ( .060) 1 .278 ( .065) 1 .523 ( .504) 1 .230 ( .177) 1 .33 ( .184) .975 ( .177) 1 .234 ( .302) 1 .041 ( .128) 1 .082 ( .229) .633 ( .139) 1 .5376 ( .110) .284 ( .439)
.900 .988
*(-)
.981 .987 .504 .904 .865
.854 .662 .929 .725 .796 .960 - .130
*(-)
CAPITAL & CLASS 20
industries where women are less than 20% approximately of total employment (the empirical cutoff point is given by the 19 .2% female share in the machinery industry) they have not yet penetrated a wide range of production jobs but are likely to be concentrated in clerical work, cleaning, packing etc . Whatever else may be said about this segmentation it does afford some relative protection in the business cycle hence the rejection of the CRAH in such industry divisions . Where women comprise more than 20% of employment they have obviously penetrated beyond their traditional enclave . As production workers and often relatively recently recruited production workers their employment pattern is consistent with the CRAH . The results for non-durable industry divisions are even more suggestive . Here we have two industries, apparel and
Table 3 : Change in female and total employment on us manufacturing payrolls by major industry group 1961-1979 Durable Goods
Industry Group
alpha
.011 ( .004) Lumber and .040 Wood products ( .010) .021 Furniture and ( .007) fixtures .011 Stone, clay and ( .004) glass products Primary metal .031 products ( .008) .007 Fabricated metal products ( .005) .050 Machinery except electrical ( .006) Electric and .002 electronic equipment ( .003) .014 Transportation ( .011) equipment Instruments and .004 related products ( .004) Miscellaneous .008 manufacturing .002 industries Total
beta
R2(adj)
1 .413 ( .080) 1 .202 ( .178) 1 .204 ( .126) 1 .131 ( .101) 1 .077 ( .166) 1 .432 ( .091) 1 .316 ( .109) 1 .408 ( .049) 1 .235 ( .184) 1 .341 ( .070) 1 .225 ( .045)
.945
5% significance level Ho : beta _< 1 Hi : beta > 1
.714 .833 .874 .696 .932
*
.890
*
.978
*
.710 .953
*
.976
*
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN leather, which are `feminized', that is the employment of women exceeds 50% of total employment . Here women have clearly moved beyond their latent reserve status and become fully integrated . Consequently, as predicted, female employment in these industries is not relatively more affected by booms and slumps . In the middle range of industries defined by the share of women's employment in total employment, that is 20% to 40%, which here means paper and allied products through to textile mill production the CRAH was accepted . The exception here is the tobacco industry where women comprised 36 .6% of all workers in 1979 but where the 13 coeficient was not significantly greater than one . The explanation for this exception may lie in technological changes in the industry . Certainly tobacco is distinctive in other relevant respects, being the only industry in which the
Table 3 : Change in female and total employment on US manufacturing payrolls by major industry group 1961-1979
Non Durable Industry Group
Total
alpha
.004 ( .001) Food and kindred .012 products ( .002) Tobacco - .010 manufacturers ( .005) Textile mill products .005 ( .001) Apparel and other .002 textile products ( .001) Paper and allied .001 products ( .004) Printing and .015 publishing ( .003) Chemicals and .010 allied products ( .003) Petroleum and .023 coal products ( .007) Rubber and .005 miscellaneous plastic ( .006) products Leather and .010 leather products ( .003)
beta
RZ(adj)
1 .324 ( .045) 1 .540 ( .191) 1 .293 ( .175) 1 .141 ( .033) 1 .014 ( .023) 1 .294 ( .116) 1 .171 ( .098) 1 .339 ( .107) 1 .107 ( .265) 1 .219 ( .095)
.980
1 .087 ( .063)
.781
5% significance level Ho: beta < 1 Hi : beta > 1
*
.749 .985
*
.990 .872
*
.885
*
.896
*
.478 .902
.943
*
21
CAPITAL & CLASS 22
trend in female employment is negative and women represent a decreasing share of the labour force over time . While Rubery and Tarling have a dual labour market interpretation of the link between the relative volatility of women's employment and the importance of female labour within an industry, the argument here is that any greater cyclical volatility reflects the imperfect absorption of female labour . As women come to represent the major share of employment in a sector their employment cannot be substantially more cyclically volatile than total employment . This is what the cross-section tells us . Women's role as a cyclical buffer emerges as a characteristic feature of a phase in the process of their emancipation from the latent to the floating labour reserves . Attention is forced back to the longer run process of proletarianisation and in particular to the substitution hypothesis . It is difficult to separate out the effects of the business cycle from these secular trends both empirically and
Table 4 : Ranking of industry division according to the share of women in total employment in 1979 Durable Miscellaneous manufacturing industries Instruments and related products Electric and electronic equipment Furniture and fixtures Fabricated metal products Machinery except electrical Stone, clay and glass products Transportation equipment Lumber and wood products Primary metal products Non-Durable Apparel and other textile products Leather and leather products Textile mill products Printing and publishing Tobacco manufactures Rubber and miscellaneous plastic products Food and kindred products Chemical and allied products Paper and allied products Petroleum and coal products
Share of women workers 47 .4% 42 .6% 42 .4% 29 .6% 20 .9% 19 .2% 18 .8% 15 .6% 15 .0% 10.7%
81 .9% 60 .7% 47 .4% 39 .1 36 .6% 35 .2% 29 .4% 24 .4% 22 .9% 12 .5%
i >1
* * *
* * * * * *
EMANCIPATION' OF WOMEN conceptually . Substitution is arguably furthered during the upswing when new capacity is installed and there are more opportunities for modification of the labour process, tighter labour markets and smoother relations with trade unions (Bruegel, 1979) . But on the other hand, as Rubery and Tarling note, prolonged recessions like those currently experienced in the UK and US may have very different implications for substitution than the kind of `managed recessions' experienced earlier (p54ff) . The cycle may be an intrinsic element in the secular process of substitution . More specifically the current deep recession, following the long boom of the 60s, when rising demand for labour promoted dramatic increases in female participation rates, in conjunction with a transformation of the American family, has created conditions in which substitution of women for men may be a logical response across a wide band of jobs within diverse industries . A direct confrontation of the substitution hypothesis imvolves an analysis of the distribution of the growth in female employment . If women are simply responding to an increased demand for female labour within already feminized industries, we would expect to find a major part of the growth in female employment concentrated in the latter kind of industry . Alteratively substitution of women for men within the industrial structure would involve a high proportion of the increase in
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Sit-1
