The Death of Fordism and the Family Wage in Labor Documentaries: A Feminist Analysis

Abstract

This paper analyzes three labor documentaries released from 1989 to 1991, which depict the United States’ assumed transition from a Fordist to post-Fordist economy. Feminist textual analysis focuses on the depiction of workplaces and gender roles in Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women. The analysis demonstrated that discourses of epochal change in the context only held true if one looked at a slice of the U.S. labor market largely dominated by White men. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of industrial Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces. Long-standing sexual divisions of labor were unambiguously repeated in post-Fordist work and intensified in a discussion of the family wage.

During the 1980s, surprisingly similar accounts of U.S. labor, production, and markets appeared across different genres of public discourse. News coverage argued a fundamental shift, mirroring the industrial revolution, was at play in the U.S. economy (Behr, 1987; Kilborn, 1983; McCormick & Powell, 1988; Nicholson et al., 1982; Pauly, 1982; Rudolph, 1986; Serrin, 1982). Time offered a typical description of the conjuncture in which concurrent recession, the loss of thousands of industrial jobs, and the rise of a service-based economy signified a “wrenching” economic shift:

Four years after the official end of the last U.S. recession, American factories ranging from textile plants in North Carolina to machine-tool plants in Ohio are still closing their doors. Amid that painful change, the number of U.S. blue-collar jobs has dramatically declined, just as employment in the newer and often lower-paying service sector has soared. The hard fact is that the nation is coping with one of the most wrenching economic transitions since the turn of the century. (Rudolph, 1986, p. 58)

The article was conventional because it articulated pain and decay to factory shutdowns. Both news and scholarly writing described these events using a language of crisis, citing these “wrenching” changes as evidence of the overthrow of one economic system for a new one. A body of theory developed in the 1980s and 1990s that attempted to understand such wrenching economic changes in tandem with social and cultural change, which labeled this conjuncture post-Fordism.

Does this view of epochal change hold up when the paid labor of women is our focus? This paper demonstrates continuity and change in the period through a feminist analysis of three documentaries depicting workers and workplaces, which were filmed and screened in the context when the U.S. supposedly shifted from Fordism to post-Fordism. Documentary film is an important realist genre providing resources to make sense of the economic issues facing the country at the time. Roger and Me examined widespread shutdown of General Motors’ (GM) plants in Flint, MI in 1988 (Moore, 1989). American Dream depicted United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) Local P-9 on strike at a Hormel plant in Austin, MN from 1985 to 1986 (Kopple, 1990). Fast Food Women investigated post-Fordist low-wage service work where the preferred workers were poor women (Lewis, 1991). Each worked in the tradition of social justice documentary advocacy for working-class people in the face of corporate greed. This essay begins by reviewing theories of post-Fordism, particularly how the theories figured post-Fordism's differential effects on people based on their gender, race, and class. Next, an analysis of the documentaries, focused on their representations of workplaces, gender roles, and the family wage, is discussed. The essay concludes by critiquing the ways truths created about post-Fordism 30 years ago continue to inform contemporary understandings of the U.S. economy. The analysis indicated that claims of a massive economic shift from Fordism to post-Fordism only held true if one looked at a slice of the labor market largely dominated by White men. Focusing on women in the world of work these documentaries represented highlighted similarities between Fordist and post-Fordist workplaces and emphasized long-standing gender ideologies that recast the family wage as a weapon to use against working-class families. Only the good pay and benefits of Fordism were dead (including a family wage), while the alienating work (if one could get it) was not.

Post-Fordism, Gender, Race, and Nation

Both Fordism and post-Fordism signify specific relationships between production and consumption. Gramsci (1971) coined the term “Fordism” in reference to Henry Ford and the type of assembly line production Ford pioneered. This mode of production served as a synecdoche for Fordism, one component part that signified the whole of an economic system associated with mass manufacturing, unionized labor, and large U.S. corporations. According to Gramsci, Ford's assembly line production and wage structures coalesced with a mode of consumption emphasizing mass-produced goods. The workers who manufactured the products were paid enough to consume those same products.

Major industrialized nations’ shift from a primarily manufacturing economy to a primary service economy is what some scholars have labeled post-Fordism. (Amin, 1994; Clarke, 1991; Hall & Jacques, 1989; Harvey, 1989; Piore & Sabel, 1984). Theorists agreed on some basic causes and contours of this new post-Fordist phase. Between 1968 and 1973, the 1944 Bretton Woods Accord was refigured in response to rampant inflation, devaluing the U.S. dollar in the world market by eliminating the World War II-era fixed exchange rate between the dollar and gold. The 1970s oil crisis caused U.S. corporate profits to drop. Many manufacturing jobs were outsourced so increasing amounts of mass-produced products for U.S. consumption were made elsewhere by workers paid too little to buy the products they made. In the U.S., real wages and union protections declined while economic stratification between white-collar knowledge and service industry workers and pink-collar service workers increased. The days of blue-collar workers becoming middle-class people living comfortably in the suburbs appeared to be over, and increasingly, two incomes were necessary for maintaining a middle-class household. New technology and new business practices changed the typical structure of work hours, pay, benefits, and even places where work might happen in white-, blue-, and pink-collar sectors.

A variety of post-Fordist scholarship from divergent conceptual traditions and focusing on a wide variety of sites developed over the last 30 years. Critical/cultural scholars analyzed who was impacted by post-Fordist changes, but the initial foundational cultural studies writing about the topic was underdeveloped in its analysis of gender and race. In these first studies, post-Fordism signified a dramatic downturn in industrial labor, which was always already asserted to be White and male. According to one foundational text, The Condition of Postmodernity, the core group of workers under Fordism was a “predominantly white, male, and highly unionized work-force,” “a steadily shrinking group” since the 1970s (Harvey, 1989, pp. 138, 150). Stuart Hall and British New Times theorists from Marxism Today, the journal of the British Communist Party, agreed. They discussed “a decline in the proportion of the skilled, male, manual working class” (Hall, 1989, p. 118), claiming “semi-skilled work in mighty manufacturing plants [was] in decline,” as were “male, manufacturing unions” (“The Manifesto For New Times,” 1989, pp. 23, 29). Scholars often gendered masculine and sometimes understood as racially White the whole of large-scale, unionized manufacturing. Generally, the key cultural studies literature failed to note the effect manufacturing decline had on Black workers, especially in U.S. auto and steel cities. Gender and race were explicitly tied to understandings of economic systems, and sentiment focused on (White) unionized men's decline was common among these theorists.

Interdisciplinary feminist research demonstrating foundational theories of post-Fordism inadequately attended to the work of women subsequently developed. Feminists critiqued Harvey and New Times for their inattention to gender as an analytic category and inattention to feminist theoretical insights, which challenged their basic premise of a newly fragmented culture organized exclusively by class (Basu et al., 2001; Deutsche, 1990; Massey, 1991; McRobbie, 1991; Morris, 1992). Others showed that such inattention is a feature of all major theorizations of post-Fordism, including those of the Regulation School and Flexible Specialization approach (McDowell, 1991; Wigfield, 2001). Gender continued to be ignored in work on immaterial and affective labor, paradigmatic forms of post-Fordist work (McRobbie, 2011). Feminist scholars demonstrated all theoretical traditions related to post-Fordism assumed struggles based on gender, sexuality, nation, and/or race as secondary to those based on class.

Analysis of these changing socioeconomic conditions without foregrounding gender is woefully incomplete. First, the post-Fordist conjuncture includes significant changes in women's roles in the workforce. Post-Fordist capitalism depends on women's labor (McDowell, 1991, 2008; Mohanty, 2003; Walby, 2002). The same decades consolidating post-Fordist labor practices in the U.S. and U.K. saw feminist advocacy centered on women's labor (McRobbie, 2011). Wage stagnation, increasing numbers of service jobs, and women's increasing public role coincided to increase women's official labor market participation (Walby, 2002; Wigfield, 2001). Feminine sex-typed work created the conditions of possibility for decentralizing labor processes that post-Fordist organizations rely on, as poor women around the globe are preferred workers for “flexible” jobs (McDowell, 1991; Mohanty, 2003).

Second, post-Fordist work was fundamentally feminized regardless of who performed the work. Growth in the U.S. labor market was and remains in service jobs, which are largely female-sex-typed. They are low-wage, low-hour, flexible for the employer, and able to be disassembled and reassembled in different places with the least expensive reserve group of laborers (McDowell, 2008). These low-wage jobs also often “draw on . . . stereotypical attributes of femininity including docility, empathy . . . , the ability to cope with dirt or bodily emissions, . . . [and] the production of a courteous ‘smiling’ performance” (McDowell, 2014, p. 34). The feminist literature on the feminization of the workforce is detailed and long-standing, thus an important area to consider for this aspect of post-Fordist work.

A focus on gender demonstrates post-Fordist capitalism “as it functions now depends on and exacerbates racist, patriarchal, and heterosexist relations of rule” (Mohanty, 2003, p. 510). Additionally, such a focus allows us to determine capitalism's differential effects across the globe as well as on different populations in the U.S. along with lines of wealth and privilege (Mohanty, 2003). Finally, the practice of excluding gender as an object of analysis ignores the centrality of women to representations of post-Fordism. This paper adds to the literature with its investigation of gender in documentaries concerning post-Fordist change in the U.S.

Gender in Representations of Post-Fordism

Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women are paradigmatic labor documentaries that explored the context of Fordist workplaces giving over to post-Fordist ones. The feminist analysis presented here focuses on how the documentaries depicted workplaces and workers. We see workplaces taking the worst of Fordism, leaving sex-typing of jobs intact, but continuing to affirm the ideology, feeling, and politics of the family wage to women's and families’ detriment. First, though, the basic narrative and features of each documentary are reviewed.

The Documentaries

Part memoir, part labor documentary, part quest narrative, Roger and Me explored a profitable company shutting down plants and laying off thousands of workers in Flint, MI. Hometown to filmmaker Michael Moore, Flint was also the birthplace of GM. Since the late 1970s, local activists pressed the city government to get assurances GM would keep jobs in Flint in return for tax abatements (Thorne, 2019). Moore, confronted with GM's outsourcing of these plants and jobs to Mexico, set out to find CEO Roger Smith, meeting with community members across class strata along with the way. Moore created his now-famous “persona as the naïve ‘little guy’ who is just trying to figure things out through a folksy process of trial and error” in his quest to find Smith (Corner, 2015, p. 182).

The documentary was not only controversial but also incredibly important. Some reviewers complained the film presented events that took place over a decade as if they happened more quickly and in different chronologies (Orvell, 1994). Then 1990 Oscar nominators passed over Roger and Me. Filmmakers lashed out at the Academy for overlooking “this year's most visible, biting documentary, one that's already proved itself the people's choice” (Ebert, 1990). Critics and scholars credited the film with reviving documentary and turning it into entertainment audiences pay to see in a mainstream movie theater (Orvell, 1994). It earned a spot in the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry (Library of Congress, 2013).

The second documentary analyzed is Barbara Kopple's Academy Award-winning American Dream. Kopple, already famous for her 1977 strike documentary Harlan County, USA, turned her lens to the Hormel plant in Austin, MN. The strike stands out for its length and controversy (Marks, 2019). National evening news covered the picket line in Austin multiple times, which led to a national boycott of Hormel products (Marks, 2019). Like Roger and Me, American Dream began with a profitable company cutting workers’ pay. Despite record-breaking profits, Hormel slashed wages by over 20% to match those in other parts of the meat packing industry (Baier, 2010). In 1985, Hormel employees rejected management's additional wage cut, refusal to deal with injuries caused by speedups, and elimination of long-standing contractual agreements like seniority privileges and 52-week layoff notice (Horowitz, 1992). Their union, UFCW Local P-9, hired Corporate Campaign to help with contract negotiations. Seen as an important new strategist in labor negotiations at the time, Corporate Campaign worked to make unions and corporations more evenly matched during contract negotiations by using publicity targeting the company and its financial backers. Over the course of contract negotiations, the UFCW demanded P-9 members take pay cuts, accept other safety and benefit concessions, and avoid a strike. When P-9 voted to strike instead, they started a clash with UFCW as well as Hormel. With a traditional observational and expository style, the documentary focused on the picket line as well as P-9's unfolding struggle with UFCW and the P-9 members who disagreed with the strike (Orvell, 1994). Eventually, 400 union members returned to work by crossing a picket line composed of their families and fellow community members (Horowitz, 1992). According to American Dream, Hormel never hired back 80% of those who remained on strike and fired nearly 600 employees at other Hormel plants who honored roving picket lines set by P-9.

The final documentary studied, Fast Food Women, compliments the other two films through its depiction of a post-Fordist service industry. Anne Lewis, associate director and assistant camerawoman in Harlan County, USA, created Fast Food Women to explore the difficulties of low-wage, low-hour fast food jobs (Buckwalter et al., 2012). The 28-min documentary interviewed nine women who worked in fast food in eastern Kentucky, one restaurant co-owner and manager, three corporate managers, and one journalist. The women described their experience of working for minimum wage with no health insurance or other benefits in places where managers refused to schedule anyone for full-time hours. It was partially funded and distributed by Appalshop, a well-known media arts and media education center in southern Appalachia, and like other Appalshop films, Fast Food Women employed direct cinema techniques (Hale, 2017). Traditional interviews received a significant amount of screen time. Yet, Fast Food Women was not at all like the cemented representations of Appalachian poverty and was one of a few Appalshop films widening the representations of Appalachia (Hale, 2017; Hanna, 1998, pp. 399, 411). The film could be set in any small, majority White, rural U.S. town. It illustrated a type of thoroughly contemporary U.S. workplace that employed around 1 million people in 2019 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2019a, 2019b). Screened at several national and international film festivals, Fast Food Women also earned national broadcast audiences when it appeared on PBS's series P.O.V. and The Learning Channel's series The Independents: Through Her Eyes (Lewis, n.d.).

Depicting Fordist and Post-Fordist Workplaces

The analysis begins by examining how the documentaries represented workplaces. These representations emphasized Fordism's absence, but a focus on women's workplaces painted a complicated picture of industrial Fordism's continued presence in post-Fordist workplaces. Footage detailing post-Fordist workplaces emphasized they were Taylorized factories—a paradigmatic Fordist workplace structure. Although the absence of Fordist workplaces argued that Fordism disappeared, Fast Food Women's production remained Fordist, without the relatively good pay and benefits. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces.

First, the disappearance of Fordism structured each documentary. Both Roger and Me and American Dream revolved around a lack of mechanized (and relatively well-paying) Fordist work. Roger and Me stemmed from the undoing of a basic part of Fordism—workers are paid enough to buy the products they produce. The move of U.S. production to Mexican maquiladoras broke this Fordist system, which the film addressed early on. A classic voice-over expository used reinforcing visuals, and an exceptionally familiar song evoked a place, time, and feeling, in this case, “Mad Mexico” by Syd Dale. Moore's voice over detailed Roger Smith's “brilliant plan” for GM: “First, close 11 factories in the U.S. then open 11 in Mexico where you pay the workers seven cents an hour.” Even Fast Food Women, which detailed post-Fordist service workplaces, showed that this work emerged for many women because unionized mining work was no longer available to their husbands. The absence of Fordist work caused the post-Fordist work in this case.

Second, these documentaries afforded little screen time to Fordist factory work, keeping audiences from visualizing this work. Roger and Me used a few minutes of silent footage of one assembly line from a news broadcast as well as footage of the last GM truck going down the line before that plant closed. Finally, we see an idled assembly line when we arrived outside of Fisher Body Plant Number One on its last day, two weeks before Christmas. This factory was the center of the 1936–1937 Flint sit-down strike. In the film, men looked out the window; the line was no longer running when the camera crew arrived. The scene became funereal. A GM spokeswoman told the crew as she kicked them off the property, “It's a very sad time. . . . It's a very private, emotional, family time . . .” Then, GM sent the line workers home with flowers. A TV news reporter said that one worker told him: “You know when they send you flowers. When you die.” The factories moved to another place, the paternalistic Fordist relationship broke, and employees witnessed their own funeral as autoworkers.

About four and a half minutes of American Dream depicted the slaughterhouse, again devoting little screen time to Fordist labor. This included footage contemporary to the making of the film and archival footage from the 1950s. First, contemporary footage showed the initial process of killing hogs, then, beheading the carcasses and butchering increasingly small parts of the animals. It was loud and bloody. Beheading the hogs slowly (about 30 s of footage multiple times) provided a visual metaphor leading viewers through the increasing conflict between Hormel and P-9, up to calling the strike. Second, when paternalistic mid-20th century owner, Jay Hormel, and the past were invoked, archival footage showed workers entering the plant and working in several stages of processing meat. In these fewer than 2 min at the beginning and end of the film, there was no diegetic sound, only voice-over, placing this past in a silent, faraway frame. Overall, there was little time devoted to and little detail offered concerning Fordist factory work in the documentaries. Additionally, these two documentaries depicted Fordist factory work as dead, its bustle in a silent, faraway past.

In contrast, Fast Food Women emphasized similarities between fast food work and Fordist manufacturing while documenting fast food workplaces extensively. Fast Food Women showed the back of the restaurants where the women subjects worked in detail. Well over half of the 28-min documentary was B-roll and interviews recorded in the workplace.

Fast Food Women depicted fast food work as deskilled, automated labor prone to speedups, like labor in Fordist factories. We see various Taylorist assembly lines used in each fast food chain. The deskilled food assembly lines suppressed employees’ inventiveness. Managers stated they were looking for “a different kind of employee,” not one who was creative, but instead “more content with following procedures” and making each item the same. The film also highlighted the speed of the work in each of these restaurants. Sweating employees wiped their brows. “If you’re slow, you get behind, you’re in a hole,” which meant big trouble in fast food according to Sereda Collier, a line cook in a Kentucky Druckers restaurant.

In addition to speed and automation, fast food work was physically difficult like other types of manual labor. Lewis showed viewers the physical dangers of these women's work. For example, Sereda said, “I’m real tired. My feet hurts (laughs), and I feel like I’ve got about 5 pound of grease on me. . . . It's hard. It's been hard.” Jennie Gibson showed her burns from the fry vat. Several women used industrial machinery, large knives, and other dangerous tools while talking about their lack of medical insurance.

What may strike the viewers’ senses the most, however, was the soundscape demonstrating how loud these workplaces were. Film works through sound: the soundscape plays a sometimes overlooked but key ingredient to create the world film and documentary strive to present (Ruoff, 1993). The soundscape in Fast Food Women established that these restaurants were noisy and mechanized, not unlike Fordist industrial work. Diegetic ambient sound—layers of fryers and grills sizzling, automatic cooking machines droning, beeping timers, and car noise from the drive-thru—created a din running along with all the action in restaurants. The jarring restaurant soundscape continued after the moving visuals ended, the screen went dark, and the film transitioned to the credits. The speed of the work, the physical difficulty of the work, the deskilled assembly line structure of the work, and its automated, noisy environment combined to highlight the similarities between fast food and factory work, ultimately leading viewers to see a complicated picture of the demise of Fordist workplaces and rise of post-Fordist workplaces.

The documentaries frame Fordism as dead and past. Despite this fundamental argument, a female sex-typed workplace demonstrated post-Fordist work structures and Fordist work structures actually coexisted.

Gender Roles and Labor

Unlike representations of workplaces, where the distinction between Fordism and post-Fordism is messy, the documentaries show the sexual division of labor unambiguously. When we look at who is depicted as workers and what kind of work they do in these documentaries, Fordist workplaces were primarily the domain of men and post-Fordist workplaces were primarily the domain of women.

On this count, Roger and Me was the most complex. It depicted the Flint, MI workforce in its diversity in terms of race and gender. The largest share of workers depicted were White men, followed by Black men, and then a few women who seemed to be mostly, although not exclusively, White. Although men were the subjects of more interviews, there were substantial interviews with women throughout the film and multiple women were depicted on the assembly line or identified as assembly line workers in their interviews.

In contrast, relations among men structured American Dream. Women were dominant characters in Kopple's earlier Harlan County, USA (Hale, 2017), but in American Dream, the plant, the union, and the strike were presented as the province of White men. The only named characters were White men. The limited amount of plant footage almost exclusively depicted White men. In union meetings, women (all White) spoke little and were outnumbered but present in the background. The single woman who spoke at length in this context was not an employee, but the wife and daughter of Hormel employees. We see the most and the most vocal women on the picket line, which does represent the fact women who worked in the plant and women related to plant workers played key roles in the strike (Schleuning, 1994). Nonetheless, men expressed all strike planning, strike voting, and dissent about the strike. Individualized conflict between men organized the narrative: the head of Corporate Campaign versus the UFCW Vice President in charge of packinghouses, the P-9 president versus the main dissident who became union president once UFCW disbanded P-9, and one striker versus his brother who eventually crossed the picket line to return to work.

Fast food had male managers and female employees. This repeated another key feature of Fordist manufacturing. Industries predominately employing women assembly line workers, such as textiles, shoes, or paper, had male owners, managers, and overseers. In Fast Food Women, every worker depicted was a White woman; every manager was a White man.

Although deskilled fast food work could be alienating, the film depicted the humanity of the women interviewed amidst their dehumanizing work conditions. As the film unfolded, we saw progressively fewer men/bosses and entered the women's same-sex world of work. Smiling, the women talked to each other with camaraderie. Sereda and other experienced workers taught and encouraged newer hires. Training another woman, Sereda softly explained, “Here, let me show you. You’re fine. I didn’t get it right the first time.” Some women were interviewed in cozy homes or yards with flowers bathed in the setting sun. We learned about the women's lives and cares as well as saw how that translated into their work.

Overall, the documentaries about Fordist work highlighted men in that work, and the bulk of post-Fordist service workers were women. Some of these depictions of gender roles in the labor market simply reflected what one would find in these workplaces. Packinghouses generally employ many more men than women, and work in packinghouses as well as on auto assembly lines is strongly sex-typed, determining where the relatively fewer female employees will work (e.g., in trimming and packaging meat or sewing upholstery and sorting parts in an auto factory). Minimizing women's roles in the P-9 strike, however, was not accurate to what happened in Austin. Regardless of the truth of the representations, however, the documentaries established these domains by sex, Fordism as male and post-Fordism as female, repeating long-standing gender role ideology and sexual division of labor.

Family Wage Ideology

The intensification of a traditional sexual division of labor as a practice, feeling, and ideology animated some men's discussion of the family wage in these documentaries. These documentaries explored various facets of the family wage as participants talked about and acted out their economic lives, eventually laying bare the disingenuousness of claims concerning a family wage in this historical context. The family wage—meaning a man's pay should support himself, his wife, and his children—was an ideal more than a reality for working-class people and non-White people in the U.S. historically. Although unions argued for a family wage, working-class families rarely experienced it in the 19th and 20th centuries when many relied on wage earning by men, women, and children (Milkman, 1987, p. 121). Even when women were not part of the official labor market, they earned money for the household through piecework or taking in laundry or a boarder (Mitchell, 1986). Family wage ideology often provided an excuse to pay women less despite the fact women may have been sole earners or otherwise earning essential family income.

The customary way working-class families survived through both official and unofficial money-making is seen in Roger and Me. Explicit claims about a family wage were few in the documentary. However, we meet women who worked in unofficial parts of the labor market. The founder and former host of Flint's feminist radio show worked as an independent contractor for two well-known multilevel marketing companies (MLMs). Over the course of the film, her husband still worked at GM, but she stated she “didn’t want to take any chances” after seeing several of her friends’ husbands lose their jobs—despite the fact that MLM consultants often lose money (Liu, 2018). Another well-known character, the woman who sold rabbits as “pets or meat,” described her sources of income as Social Security and the unofficial labor of breeding dogs and rabbits. As she killed, hung, and skinned a rabbit for meat, she talked about this type of work as one she did because “I was brought up to learn to survive.” Women in working-class households traditionally earned income outside of the official labor market, and Roger and Me used such labor to illustrate the economic precariousness citizens in Flint faced under GM's disinvestment.

The American dream Hormel workers sought was often explicitly tied to family wage ideology, and the film demonstrated this was an attitude more than an explicit material reality. Themes concerning family wove through the film narrative in the familial ties of the small town of Austin, the invented familial atmosphere of the union hall, and the familial disownment of those who crossed the picket line (Rabinowitz, 1996). Financially supporting a family was the only reason union workers gave for considering crossing the picket line and returning to work. During a general membership discussion concerning whether to continue the strike, one man said, “my family's starving. I’m not getting a damn thing from anybody other than $40 a week, just like everybody else in here.” Another interviewee explained, “if things haven’t changed substantially in two or three days I will base my decision on the fact my family is number one in my life, not my union.” To those who remained on the picket line, striking was also a family affair, albeit a different one. One stated, “I’ve got a wife and three kids, and I love them. They’ll understand later. If it comes down to losing [their house], we’ll survive.” Another man on the picket line described his wife and children encouraging him not to cross because he couldn’t live with himself if he did. In the film's only interview with a woman, she explained her husband “took a stand and refused to go across the picket line. I’m glad he didn’t because I wouldn’t have wanted him to.”

The men who eventually crossed the picket line and returned to work justified their actions by invoking the family wage. The climactic scene that ended with dissident union members crossing the line began with them discussing why it is ethically wrong to cross a picket line and what good union members they have been. Then, they invoke the family wage. One man, describing that both of his children have part-time jobs and his wife has a full-time job, said, “they all go out to work, and I stay at home playing with the cat. What kind of provider is that?” Another continued, “It may sound corny, but a person takes a lot of pride in being a breadwinner and providing for your family. When you can’t do that. . . .” Then, they wept. This scene showed the family wage structured their attitude about what it meant to be a man. If other people in the household were bringing in income, it didn’t seem they were going to starve. But they did need to feel like men. Although the logic of a family wage had been under attack since its inception; had been unlikely as many working-class families in the 19th and 20th centuries relied on wage-earning by men, women, and children; and was an increasing rarity with few households able to subsist on a single income since the 1970s, it justified the most fundamental anti-union act by these men.

The context surrounding the film unraveled the claims to a family wage many of the striking men asserted as their province. In an era of deindustrialization, “these men [were] victims as much of a passé version of masculinity as of an outmoded form of unionism apparently ineffective against vicious corporations” (Rabinowitz, 1996, p. 58). The film and the strikers saw that these crying men and the UFCW's tactics were retrograde, but their tears did not fail to elicit emotion. One review commented, “If you thought you could never feel compassion for a scab, I dare you to see this film” (Christgau, 1993, p. 123). Yet, what was it about this context that could animate sympathies for an outmoded patriarchy when it was clear, at least to the striking P-9 members and their supporters, the tears were an edifice, an excuse for undercutting the union local?

The contemporaneous postfeminist media context supported the feminized affect of these White, working-class men in despair. Media texts privileged postfeminist men who performed feminine roles while remaining at the center of narratives in which women were absent (Projansky, 2001, pp. 84–86). Modleski (1991) argued the late 20th century crisis in masculinity resulted in a feminized male subjectivity—a process by which, she explains, “men ultimately deal with the threat of female power by incorporating it” (Modleski, 1991, p. 7). Thus, performing both typical female and male roles naturalized male supremacy (Vande Berg, 1993). When an “otherwise tough, proud worker [was] broken down to tears by the spectacle of his own powerlessness” in American Dream (Orvell, 1994, p. 14), powerlessness he felt when his wife and kids went off to work in the morning and he didn’t, that worker occupied feminine domestic space and affect. The preferred reading is that we feel sorry for their loss of connection to masculine public space and/or find their patriarchal and anti-union stances acceptable. Recentering what was lost at Hormel as something lost by White men, that it was both a wage and a feeling of masculinity, obscured the fact contemporary global capitalism and union busting hurts men, women, gender nonconforming people, and children. For example, most of the people hired to replace P-9 strikers were Mexican migrant workers (Marks, 2019), members of a much more socioeconomically and politically precarious group, who we do not see in American Dream.

Unique in this context, Fast Food Women demonstrated family wage ideology was harmful to both women and men. Marion Clark, fast food franchise co-owner and manager, reported he regularly gets 1500 applications when he has an opening, 95% of which are from women. Asked why the applicants were predominately women, he cites “the pay rate,” asking “Am I gonna get a man with three kids to support, or two kids, or one kid or married” applying for a minimum wage job? This statement is juxtaposed with workers’ interviews clarifying these part-time jobs were often the sole source of income in their households. A later part of Clark's interview stated all his employees were women whose husbands had lost their mining jobs. The editing technique used here is a common one in documentary—a creation of rhetorical continuity, which “implies that a cut between two different scenes will create a juxtaposition that contributes to the film's overall argument” (Middleton, 2002, p. 57). The editing established a main argument in Fast Food Women: family wage ideology is a lie managers used to pay women less.

A small, regional fast food chain's executives claimed they couldn’t compete with large, multinational U.S.-based companies (his example was IBM) in terms of offering benefits. When pressed, he did not say that was because their profit margin was too thin to spend more on personnel, but instead told the story of a fictional, allegedly typical fast food worker, 16-year-old Suzie, whose father was a unionized coal miner with “every benefit under the sun.” “Suzie doesn’t need benefits,” he concluded. The film immediately returned to the restaurants, where there were no teenage workers. Again, editing highlighted the inconsistency between owners’ and workers’ versions of their economic situation through juxtaposition. Each paternalistic statement by a manager reasserting a family wage ideology was countered with interview footage of women who stood in the face of such statements, their lives highlighting the discrepancy between a family wage ideal and the material economic situation of 1980s Appalachia. Managers and executives posited this vision of their employees in order to justify not offering benefits, full-time pay, or more than the federally-mandated hourly minimum wage. Gender afforded a justification for poor working conditions, which is the other side of the family wage. These fast food managers asserted that men support their children and wife, so women are not working to support a family even when they, in fact, were doing so.

These documentaries illustrated the unfinished business of feminism is tied up in the family wage. Historically,

in rejecting the androcentrism of the family wage, second-wave feminists never sought simply to replace it with the two-earner family. For them, rather, overcoming gender injustice required ending the systematic devaluation of caregiving and the gender division of labor, both paid and unpaid. (Fraser, 2013, p. 217)

Contemporary feminist and labor demands for a living wage must support all members of the labor force as they play a role in caring for other people, both financially and personally.

The three lines of discussion outlined here did not present a smooth picture of gender, Fordism, and post-Fordism. Although Fordist work was presented as in the past by Roger and Me and American Dream, Fast Food Women argued that paradigmatic post-Fordist service work was like Fordist work, breaking down the distinction made across the documentaries that men dominate Fordist workplaces while women dominate post-Fordist ones. Finally, each of the documentaries painted fundamentally different pictures of the family wage—as supplemented by the unofficial labor of women, as a feeling desired by men, and as a lie spun by management to justify low wages and no benefits for their female workers. Although fundamentally different pictures, none were encouraging. In the contemporary context, when households rely on wage earning by all adults (Williams, 2010), the time is past for treating the family wage as a labor ideal.

Conclusion

Documentaries are both a “window on the world,” showing us a version of reality, and selective representations of feelings and ideology. In this essay, I examined labor documentaries’ grappling with a rising post-Fordist economic structure and how gender played out in their representations of economics and workplaces. The documentaries showed the absence of certain Fordist workplaces. They also showed that Fordist practices like fast-paced Taylorism lived on in post-Fordist service workplaces. Despite Fordist work being depicted as men's and post-Fordist work as women's, the conventional sexual division of labor persisted in post-Fordism. Finally, the documentaries showed that the Fordist family wage was dead although men talked about it as if it was not.

This feminist analysis of Roger and Me, American Dream, and Fast Food Women uncovered that attention to gender complicates our ability to draw hard distinctions between Fordist and post-Fordist economic structures. First, the sexual division of labor and international division of labor drove workplaces before, during, and after the height of Fordism. Gender issues in the workplace, like sex-typed labor, exceeded an easy distinction between Fordist and post-Fordist contexts. As Mohanty (2003) showed, post-Fordism only intensified the sexual division of labor and international division of labor, and we see some examples of that in these documentaries. Their husbands’ loss of good-paying coal jobs with good benefits led women to fast food work in Fast Food Women. The situations giving rise to Roger and Me and American Dream illustrated the ties between U.S. industrial work and Mexican industrial work. Outsourcing entices U.S. companies because of the international division of labor and the lower pay, lower workplace standards, and lower environmental standards it creates.

Yet, our lasting structure of feeling steeped in pain and images of decay created regarding plant shutdowns and blue-collar job loss focuses on Fordism ending (Leary, 2011). Roger and Me and American Dream represented this structure. Elements of the two documentaries relegated labor politics to the past or espoused a retrograde vision of wage-earning in a family. They focused on jobs as they died in a U.S. context. These two texts were high-status documentaries with larger audiences. They represent an enduring structure of feeling that we see across time in the U.S. (e.g., in 1980s news, in political ads like presidential candidate John Kerry's in the early 2000s, in 2016's Hillbilly Elegy . . .) indicating its emotive currency. If our focus is on the death of Fordism in particular industries in the 1980s (U.S. steel, auto manufacturing, and meat processing), populated by workers who are implicitly White and male, we continue to focus on a relatively privileged group of workers (McRobbie, 2011, p. 66).

Rather than emphasizing this enduring structure of feeling about working-class loss, Fast Food Women entreated us to focus on the hollowing out of pay and benefits in the jobs that surround us now. Indeed, feminists have shown that the more significant, overarching change of the period transitioning from Fordism to post-Fordism is women's long-term, mainstream participation in the official labor market, leading to increasing class divisions among women (McDowell, 1991, 2008; McRobbie, 2011; Walby, 2002). A gender-focused analysis of workplaces in this essay uncovered post-Fordism's links with Fordism, like fast food's Taylorist assembly lines, physical hardship, and sex-typed work, plus ideologies and emotions justifying women holding low-paying service jobs. More media like this might help U.S. society develop affective connections that promote justice for working-class women.

Finally, the family wage is complex. Women have never been able to occupy the subject position of breadwinner. We saw this in Fast Food Women. Now men also struggle to be breadwinners, as American Dream indicated. All people deserve decent pay, but, for feminists, the gender order of the family wage always seemed less helpful than moving to give value to women's sex-typed work. These documentaries point to a reason why. In them, post-Fordist exploitation of traditional gender ideology decimated Fordist practices of family wage pay and benefits. For decades now in the U.S., all adults are in the labor market regardless of gender, so everyone is losing out as pay, benefits, and working conditions devolve (McDowell, 1991). Family wage arguments worked to improve working-class lives in the past, but that time seems over, and we need new strategies to seek justice for working people, especially women.

We continue to be confronted by efforts to understand economic change and celebrations of the post-Fordist service, knowledge, or tech economy. Feminist analysis of these three documentaries demonstrated that conventional explanations only held true if one looked at a slice of the labor market largely dominated by White men. Otherwise, and specifically if you focused on working-class women, much had not changed. Focusing on feminine sex-typed labor demonstrated the worst elements of industrial Fordism remained in post-Fordist workplaces. Long-standing sexual divisions of labor were unambiguously repeated in post-Fordist work and intensified in a discussion of the family wage.