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Other aspects of the work experience of waitresses fostered women's leadership in subtle but powerful ways. The craft and sex segregation of work, for instance, solidified the occupational ties among waitresses while mitigating their identity with male workers in the craft. The strict categorizing of waiting jobs by sex meant that waitresses and waiters rarely worked together in the same house. This internal segregation of waiting work physically separated women and men food servers and created the basis for a collective identity among waitresses. Yet unlike women in many other sex-segregated workplaces, waitresses continuously interacted with male cooks, bartenders, and busboys, as well as male customers. These exchanges were often fraught with conflict that derived in large part from the structure and demands of the workplace itself. In order to survive, waitresses developed ways of manipulating these interactions and asserting their own ends. The daily adversarial maneuverings with men prepared waitresses for the conflicts that emerged in their own union. Indeed, the arguments between waitresses and their male co-workers on the shopfloor influenced their readiness to engage in conflict with these same union brothers in the union hall. How could they accept paternalism in the union when they so firmly rejected it in the workplace?
The kinds of skills acquired by waitresses in their daily work life transferred directly to union leadership. At work, waitresses learned to take charge verbally with customers, to deflect criticism and sarcasm by developing their own quick-witted retorts, and to be persuasive in their interactions so that their needs as waitresses would be met. Practice in “thinking on your feet” and in sharpening sparring skills came in handy during union debates, grievance meetings, and negotiation sessions. The women who survived as waitresses were the ones who learned to control situations by initiating action rather than those who let the customer define the interaction.53 This boldness became a habit with some waitresses and aided them in their union activities. They were not intimidated by men, nor were they accustomed to following the male lead. Unlike the office environment, for example, waiting work discouraged traditional female behavior.54
The hotel and restaurant industry was shifting geographically. In the 1940s and 1950s, the center of the industry moved away from its traditional urbanized core to new unorganized, hostile territories: the Deep South, the Southwest, and into the suburbs.7 With the lower and middle classes relying as never before on eating out, the restaurant sector also burgeoned at a dizzying rate. Low-priced, quick-style eateries opened by the thousands, scattered haphazardly over the new decentralized landscape and drawing in a rash of young new recruits with little experience or understanding of unionism. The union found it virtually impossible to keep control over such a rapidly expanding, geographically dispersed work force.
Perhaps the most significant structural change, however, was the transformation of countless small independent proprietorships into chain outlets under the control of national and international conglomerates.8 In 1931, fewer than 3 percent of the nation's restaurants were chain-operated; in the 1980s, McDonald's alone accounted for 17 percent of all restaurant visits. From the family-style chains (Howard Johnson's, Denny's, Sambo's) to the fast-food empires (McDonald's, Burger King, and Pizza Hut), the species proved almost invulnerable to organizing.9
As nonunion competition proliferated, skepticism about the benefits of unionism spread among organized employers. When enterprising young applicants appeared daily at their kitchen doors seeking work, union employers resented having to hire through the union. Although inexperienced, these fresh-faced workers, so flexible and eager to please, seemed preferable to seasoned, union-conscious workers who were accustomed to strict craft classifications and other contract protections. Moreover, as the unionized work force aged, employers had to call the hiring hall three or four times before a young attractive woman would be sent.10
With the extension of the Taft-Hartley Act to the hotel and restaurant industry in 1955, and the passage of the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959, the ability of waitress unions to exert control over their occupation was severely hampered.11 Closed shops, the removal of members from the job for noncompliance with union bylaws and work rules, union membership for supervisors, top-down organizing, long-term recognitional picketing, and secondary boycotts all became illegal. Locals lost their ability to set entrance requirements for the trade, to oversee job performance, and to punish recalcitrant members.12 And once the fining system lost its teeth, “you couldn't enforce the contract, you couldn't even get a quorum” for union meetings, recalled waitress official Clela Sullivan. Union-sponsored training programs declined; hiring halls fell into disrepair and neglect.13 By the late 1960s, the key tenets of occupational unionism lived only in the minds of an aging waitress membership.
[...] Innovation, she argues, is a collective process. And as CEOs skim billions off of share buybacks, the people and institutions who help feed their profit margins—from blue-collar workers to public-sector researchers—may not be getting the credit and cash they deserve. Making a fairer and more equal economy in such a context will mean not just redistributing wealth, but reassessing who society’s wealth creators really are. It’s to that end that Mazzucato invokes Industrial Workers of the World founder Big Bill Haywood: “The barbarous gold barons do not find the gold, they do not mine the gold, they do not mill the gold, but by some weird alchemy all the gold belongs to them.”
nothing groundbreaking but a good summary
But the really basic problem with GDP is that by not making value judgements, we confuse rents with profits. If we don’t know the difference between value creation and value extraction activities—the kind that are charging prices or earning fees, and hence are included in GDP—we risk passing off anything included in GDP as value creation. In the process we reward those activities, so it becomes sort of a feedback loop: because they’re valuable, we consider them valuable and they will be valued by society so policymakers will try to increase those activities, and that then also increases those activities’ share of GDP.
Do you think Claire knows?
Claire talks to me every night, and I don’t say a word about you, and she must wonder why I don’t say a word about you.
Then Claire knows.
Some afternoons she spoke to him in an earnest schoolgirl French—as though she were not someone who had grown up alongside him, almost a sibling. Or she’d move away from his desire and read him a description of a city. Sometimes she snuggled against his brown shoulders and after making love burst into tears. There were times she needed this boy or man, whatever he was, to cry as well, to show he understood the extremity of what was happening between them. When he was in her, about to come, looking down on her, his passive face looked torn open, but still he was wordless. It was easier for him. He did not accompany her down to the farmhouse each evening and eat a meal with her father and sister, and play a game of whist during which she’d look up suddenly to see Claire staring at her, attempting to break into her privacy. They were long, maddening, sterile games of chance and counting and collecting pairs or runs, with her father keeping score obsessively. (Besides, Coop was the only one among them good at cards. There were games in the past, Anna remembered, when he would sit laughing at their incompetence.) Worst of all, she had to sleep in the bed next to Claire in mutual silence.
The husband, smoking his pipe, would walk the perimeter of the walled garden and consider how well the pollarding of the trees had succeeded. He would eventually circle the house to where the door leading to the back pasture would be open, and through the opening see Anna hunched over the table writing, or reading some large book, never looking up, never conscious of him a few yards from her open doorway, and he’d shake his head and drift away. The woman was from America, his wife had told him. When she stood up she was as tall as he was, lightcoloured hair to the neck. She looked strong and healthy. She had asked him in her New World French where the good places to walk were, and he had drawn a map with the best paths, routes that weaved through other properties and crossed the river. He reminded her to close all the gates. When the owner of the manoir came there, he’d always be driving off immediately— to pick up floc from an Armagnac distillery or on some other errand. But this guest was different. She had no desire to spend time in town. She was content here. She might spend half an hour talking when they came their one day a week, but then she would be back at the table, with her books. He knew she walked into the village now and then. As a postman he travelled all the time, it was in his blood. Staying in a house the whole day seemed unnatural. So when she asked him into the back room, and escorted him through the lean corridor of the house to the kitchen, where he saw the open door leading to the pasture, which was where he had stood watching her work the previous week, and where now she offered him a sheet of paper, he drew the map for her clearly and to scale—his job had taught him exact kilometre distances and property boundaries and stream beds. He drew the rectangle of the house and a quick oval for the herb bed, then re-created the world outside, ending with distant copses and deer forests, dismissing places she should avoid, those that tourists inhabited. In Anna’s terms the map was a ‘keeper,’ and she might one day frame it and hang it in her living room on Divisadero Street in San Francisco, a private core of a memory. In some part of her mind, she felt that if worse came to worst, she could always escape back here.
<3
France had meant a quiet and anonymous time for Anna. Apart from the visits of Monsieur and Madame Q, she saw no one. And there was nothing in the house of the writer to remind her of North America. She was escaping the various aspects of her professional life—acquaintances, deadlines, requests for prefaces—all of which, if she were in her real world, would be essential duties. The only thing that had truly jostled her in the time she had spent so far in the Gers region of France was the group of men at the crossroads with their dogs, the men’s tongues lolling in parody and their fists twisting in the air as she walked away. She felt at ease in the modest house, her curiosity almost aimless, as if she were beginning a new life. She was enjoying the process of filling a notebook with fragments and even drawings, something quite apart from her research. If there was the sound of a bird through the open door by her table she would try to articulate it phonetically on the page. She did this whenever she heard one clearly enough. And when she leafed through her obsessive notes, Anna would find a series of chords of birdsong, or her drawing of a thistle, or of the Qs’ Renault.
reading this makes me want to spend some time in a remote village in france lol
He was certainly not vain, freely admitting his thick girth, his imperfect health. After they had eventually made love satisfactorily (as far as she could assume for both of them), he stood and tested his calves in a naked leap, then strolled to the window, opened it and smoked a cigarette there, gazing out, not caring how he looked in that sunlit posture. He would mention later that he was unconcerned with his ‘silhouette.’ Anna had met no one like him. There appeared to be no darkness in him. Though he would tell her of an earlier relationship that had silenced him completely, and how he had almost not emerged from that. He was in fact coming out of that privacy for the first time with her. All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love—seemingly the most natural of acts.