Manipulation of Gender Roles

The informal manipulation of women's status in the wrap crew situs resembles that found in other situations where male supervisors oversee women employees (Kanter, 1977; Tepperman, 1970). However, the capacity of the male foreman to exercise greater control over women is accentuated by the highly traditional sex roles characteristic of Mexican society. In the wrap crews this takes several forms. First, some foremen attempt to intimidate women workers through overt displays of anger or physical force. These are usually accompanied by threats of firing (i.e., abandonment) if correct behavior is not forthcoming. Incidents of this sort occurred infrequently in my crew, but when they did, they evoked embarrassment on the part of the chastised women. Men were never subject to such assaults. Several male workers commented after one of Antonio's verbal barrages that they would not stand for that kind of abuse if it were aimed at them. But they would not intervene on behalf of the women. As Armando, a fellow cutter, explained: "To a man, that would be a challenge to fight. To a woman, it is not right ... but women are treated that way."

The other side of the same coin is flirtatious behavior. While there are limits to how far this can go^[6] (as in the case with intimidation), flirting by foremen can evoke some degree of cooperation. Several women workers I interviewed complained that foremen flirted with younger women in an effort to get them to work in one job or another or to increase their cooperation with the foremen's rules. For example, a wrapper from Verde complained that foremen attempted to undercut job rotation (described as a way for wrappers and cutters to beat the boredom of the work) in order to speed up production. The foremen, she explained, would flirt with or differentially attend to the needs of young unattached women in order to convince them to stay in one position and not rotate. Flirting or attention-giving is not limited to younger, unmarried women; on several occasions Antonio attempted to placate the complaints of older, married women with charming behavior and compliments.

These devices—discretionary authority, family networks, and manipulation of gender roles—are all elements of control manipulated by the foreman and management to affect the level of productivity and effort of the wrap crew. Together they indicate quite clearly that informal mechanisms of control are at least as important as formal organizational rules and regulations.

On the whole, the reorganization of harvesting into the wrap crew acts to enhance managerial control over the labor process. The structuring of work into isolated activities diffuses the potential for substantive response to speedups or other managerial directives. Formal measures of control are augmented through the manipulation of statuses produced external to the organization. These factors in combination serve to enable the wrap crew's harvest to compete with the ground crew's.