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- Title
GENDER IN STORE: SALESPEOPLE'S WORKING HOURS AND UNION ORGANISATION IN NEW ZEALAND AND THE UNITED STATES, 1930-60.
- Authors
Roberts, Evan
- Abstract
Explanations for the weakness of retail employees' unions have often emphasized that a high proportion of salespeople were women with low attachment to the labor force and unions. Comparing the experience of salespeople's unions in Wellington, New Zealand, and Saint Paul, Minnesota, this article shows instead that perceptions of women as consumers shaped the political environment in which retail unions tried to control working hours. After 1930's legislation in both countries denied salespeople the forty-hour week other occupations had been granted, retail unions in Saint Paul and Wellington focused their efforts on achieving a forty-hour, five-day week. While both unions were successful in gaining their forty-hour week, when that goal had been accomplished they lost the commitment of their members, revealing the structural limitations of craft-based unionism trying to organize workers in an industry which was organized on merchandise, not functional, principles.
- Publication
Labour History, 2002, Issue 83, p107
- ISSN
0023-6942
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/27516885