Women in Auto

Generalizations that working women required a lower wage because they were single, supported by parents and planning to work only until marriage permeated Canadian business and led many industries to replace male workers with lower-paid unskilled women when automation allowed. Women worked on the first magneto-department assembly line when it was introduced at Ford in 1914. Ford eliminated women from its factories approximately ten years later, however, and women remained a small part of the pre-W.W.II auto industry. When women did find work in auto they usually performed what were by then traditional female tasks as clerical workers in offices or seamstresses in cut-and-sew upholstery departments; the possibility of work in smaller auto-parts factories was much better than employment at an automobile manufacturer. The industry hired few low-cost female employees, even during the profitability crises of the depression, because the wholesale exploitation of women as a cheap labour force was simply at odds with an industry that had adopted early-on a high wage policy to encourage the loyalty of working males.

When W.W. II caused major labour shortages, women found greater opportunity for employment at Chrysler, Auto Specialties, General Motors and numerous other companies. Ford employed two-hundred women in its office and wanted to hire women during the war, but when workers struck in defense of equal pay for women - and as such for male job security, Ford decided it would rather hire no women at all than pay them men's wages. While Ford's refusal to hire women in its factory remained something of an exception in the industry during the war, jobs calling for a greater skill level or considered especially important remained the domain of males. Although it was women who built the Browning Automatic Machine Guns at the government owned/General Motors-managed Border Cities Industries, the machine set-up and "most vital inspection work" was performed by men.

The work women performed during the war was no less tedious and alienating than that done by their male counterparts. In some ways it was more so because the jobs deemed "especially suitable" to women were those of detailed and repetitive assembly. Women workers were thankful for their jobs but not averse to the wave of organizing activity that occurred throughout W.W.II. Women participated in strikes and sit-downs like those that occurred at Motor Products Limited, but their participation in union activity was more typically low key. Female workers made greater use of the grievance system than did their male counterparts and those women most actively involved in the public eye were those in the "Women's Auxiliary" the wives of striking men.

Women workers' attempts at resistance were usually personal, individual and gendered. Women worked in a strictly female environment. The jobs they performed were strictly sex-classified and sex-segregated. It was what were possibly conceived by workers as workplace assaults on "femininity" that often elicited the most vehement response. Hairstyles, make-up and clothes were all at issue. Despite the pleading of management about the serious safety hazards long hair posed to workers in the mechanized workplace, disputes and protests over hairnets raged. Seemingly trivial issues such as safety shoes and proper attire acquired Olympian proportions.

With the conclusion of the war so came an end to women's full scale participation in the auto industry. Jobs were reclassified from "female" to "male", and from "light" to "heavy" during peacetime reconversion to justify the massive layoff of female workers. Separate seniority lists for men and women helped ensure returning veterans could reclaim their place in the plants.

With the continued expansion of the industry through the 1950s and 1960s many women returned to work in auto, but sex-based job classifications and separate seniority lists remained and were sanctified in collective agreements that revealed UAW ambivalence to the plight of its female members. By the 1960s many women had been in auto for over twenty years. More sure of themselves and their rights, they challenged the discriminatory attitude of the auto industry and the acquiescence of the UAW. Successfully amending the Ontario Human Rights Code in 1970 to include a provision making sex discrimination illegal, they saw to it that prejudiced collective agreements were superseded by the law, establishing plant-wide seniority and equal pay for women.