We Are in This Dance Together

Price (paper): $25.95  
Price (cloth): $72.00  
Subtitle: Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm
Written by Nancy Plankey-Videla
Subject: Sociology, Latin American Studies
Paper ISBN: 978-0-8135-5302-3
Cloth ISBN: 978-0-8135-5301-6
Pages: 264 pages
Publication Date: July 2012

Praise for We Are in This Dance Together:

"Plankey-Videla's engaging ethnography of a Mexican factory illustrates the ways in which team production, gender, and labor resistance interact. It should interest readers in sociology, gender studies, and labor studies as well as anyone interested in the political economy of globalization."
—Ruth Milkman, professor of sociology, CUNY Graduate Center

Description:

Changes in the global economy have real and contradictory outcomes for the everyday lives of women workers. In 2001, Nancy Plankey-Videla had a rare opportunity to witness these effects firsthand. Having secured access to one of Latin America's top producers of high-end men's suits in Mexico for participant-observer research, she labored as a machine operator for nine months on a shop floor made up, mostly, of women. The firm had recently transformed itself from traditional assembly techniques, to lean, cutting-edge, Japanese-style production methods. Lured initially into the firm by way of increased wages and benefits, workers had helped shoulder the company's increasing debts. When the company's plan for successful expansion went awry and it reneged on promises it had made to the workforce, women workers responded by walking out on strike.

Building upon in-depth interviews with over sixty workers, managers, and policy makers, Plankey-Videla documents and analyzes events leading up to the female-led factory strike and its aftermath—including harassment from managers, corrupt union officials and labor authorities, and violent governor-sanctioned police actions. We Are in This Dance Together illustrates how the women's shared identity as workers and mothers—deserving of dignity, respect, and a living wage—became the basis for radicalization and led to further civic organizing against the state, the company, and the corrupt union to demand justice.

NANCY PLANKEY-VIDELA is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at Texas A & M University. She studies inequality in the workplace.

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Price (paper): $25.95
Price (cloth): $72.00