Processing discontent: Women's organizing and the Newfoundland Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers Union, 1971--1987

This thesis aims to explore the motivations and processes underlying women's active organizing in the Newfoundland, Fishermen, Food and Allied Workers Union (NFFAW) during the 1970s and 1980s. Central to this interdisciplinary analysis is an exploration of how and why the organizational structure of the union produced a hierarchy of interests where the assumed gender neutrality of the collectivity obscured the exclusion of women's needs from the union's agenda. By identifying and questioning the gendered subtexts of the priorities and practices of the NFFAW, as well as the official discourses used to mobilize and promote the interests of the rank-and-file, I attempt to reveal the norms and assumptions which defined the scope and character of women's paid employment and labour organizing during this period. My focus is on understanding women and men's motivations for catering paid processing work, the hierarchical and gendered division of labour within fish plants, and the ideologies and discourses which informed and sustained these divisions. I provide evidence to suggest that, by the 1980s, collective identities had been fashioned from the common experiences of fishery employment in rural Newfoundland and that workplace cultures had not only emerged among workers, but had also fundamentally transformed women's strategies of workplace resistance. The formal and informal networks of understanding which emerged from these cultures were integral to subsequent efforts to address women's needs and promote 'feminist' process by establishing a Women's Committee within the NFFAW's formal leadership structure. I argue further that only through the processes of separate organizing were women able to collectively challenge the gender neutrality of union practices and processes, and articulate their gendered needs to the broader union membership.