My university is unusual in that we have a written agreement with the three major trade union confederations in the Canadian province of Québec, giving them free access to university resources for training and research projects. 

“Being treated as if
we are identical to men  is not the same as being given equal treatment”
– Karen Messing

I have been paid by the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) to give ergonomics training to hospital cleaners and personal support workers in the Confederation of National Trade Unions, and I have received university money to study work/family balance among retail sales staff members of the Quebec Labour Federation. The effects of precarious contracts on adult education teachers, members of the Centrale des syndicats du Québec – the Quebec Union Confederation – is also on the jobs done list.

This privileged situation has allowed my team to study women workers’ forced choice between economic equality and their health over several decades. When women suffer at their jobs, we are often reluctant to complain. 

Nothing special

Women are often ashamed to ask for much-needed adjustments to their equipment, tools, environment, and work schedules, because it seems like asking for “special” treatment. But being treated as if we are identical to men is not the same as being given equal treatment.

A bit of history. In 1993, the women’s committees and health and safety committees of all three union confederations asked us to design a long-term research project to study women’s occupational health. At that time, women’s situations and biology were excluded from most health and safety research.

AUTHORITATIVE  Karen Messing’s latest book, Bent out of shape: Shame, solidarity and women’s bodies at work, describes the major conclusions of the long-term research collaboration with unions in Quebec, Canada. more

We built a team that included both ergonomists and specialists in law and public policy. The formal partnership lasted 17 years, and the research efforts have continued in various forms since then. The research collaboration led to some improvements in women’s working conditions, but also to some failures. 

Striking success

Hotel room cleaners face constant pressure to clean more rooms in less time. Hotels have multiplied the number of little bottles that have to be refilled and the size of beds that need to be made and changed. 

INVISIBLE HARM Women have fewer workplace accidents, but more musculoskeletal disorders caused by the jobs, ‘Bent out of shape’ author Karen Messing found.

My colleague Ana Maria Seifert observed cleaners at work and characterised the effort involved in lifting queen- and king-sized mattresses and difficulties in pushing too-heavy carts over too-high elevator (lift) sills. She noted that more work had to be done if a guest was leaving than if the guest was staying for an additional night.

Ana Maria also noticed that hotels were outsourcing the washing of bedsheets, resulting in sheets with holes in them that only became visible during the bedmaking process, increasing the number of times the workers needed to shift the heavy mattresses. 

Her reports helped mobilise the cleaners, who went on strike and got their room assignments cut and adjusted for more intensive cleaning assignments. The hotels had hired workers from different immigrant communities, often divided by language barriers. During the mobilisation, the different groups were able to set up lines of communication, strengthening their union.

Heavy going

In Québec, women and men involved in direct patient care such as feeding and bathing used to be assigned separate tasks and different pay, with women given “lighter” tasks. 

When it became illegal to post jobs by sex, the jobs were merged. Men could no longer be required specifically to do heavy lifting. During our educational sessions, both women and men complained about this, saying the merger was unfair to men, since they in fact still did the lifting. 

“Women are not shrunken men, and there are sex differences in responses to toxins and to physical exposures.”

This complaint led to an observational study of women and men attendants, with attention to those tasks that required physical effort. It turned out that the women were doing 30 per cent more tasks involving physical effort. 

Yes, on the rare occasions when extreme effort was involved – mastering a psychotic patient, rescuing a morbidly obese patient who was sliding out of her chair – some people preferentially called on men, but most of the time, women were doing more.   
When nurses asked for help with physically-demanding tasks, they were four times as likely to call on women attendants than men – women were making up for what they saw as unfairness by exerting more effort. 

We tried to discuss our conclusions with the local union, but they didn’t believe our numbers. We were sad because of all those women feeling ashamed that they weren’t doing enough. We took the problem to the union headquarters who sponsored a – should I say lively? – discussion between their women’s committees and the (male-dominated) health and safety committees. 

These issues take a lot of time to discuss and not many unions have that much free time. The unions are still working on how to get better recognition for the risks and requirements of women’s work.

Building power

The unions have been active in getting policy change. With the help of our law professors and policy analysts, they now have better advance notice for work schedules, leave for family reasons, and harassment.

CATERED FOR? Women face different risks and their bodies respond differently to the risks the face, Karen Messing found. But she said union action can make it better.

But now there is a new threat, and it comes from our success. In our current occupational health and safety legislation, industrial sectors are prioritised based on the rates of past compensation, creating a vicious cycle where there are fewer inspectors and fewer claims in the sectors where women work.

A new law has been proposed where, for example, hospital workers have a very low priority for intervention, despite everything we were supposed to have learned about the dangers of infection, shift work and overwork during the pandemic. 

The partnership denounced the low priority for prevention given to the sectors where women work. With the unions, we were able to coordinate with women’s groups to denounce the treatment of women in the bill. 

The government has responded by a sneaky amendment that gives all jobs equal priority, while drastically reducing the mechanisms available for prevention. We think they are hoping to divide us by pitting women against men, but the alliance has held up.

Lasting legacy

Together we have trained people who work in health and safety enforcement as ergonomists, inspectors or even managers. Many students were trained during this collaboration and eleven are now professors, at six universities. 

The team has now taken different forms and is involved in new struggles. Some of our members are involved with immigrant and racialised workers, some are critiquing the individual-based management indicators of performance, some are trying to make occupational health scientists include more women, and some are suggesting new ways to train young workers.

Karen Messing is an emeritus professor at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

Bent out of shape Karen Messing’s latest book, Bent out of shape: Shame, solidarity and women’s bodies at work, describes the major conclusions of the long-term research collaboration. Women still work in a limited number of professions and jobs and are still confined to lower ranks within professions. Within a job title, women do specific tasks and have specific exposures. Although men have more industrial accidents, women suffer more from work-related musculoskeletal problems and from organisational stressors like insufficient support and excess demands. The complexity and risks in women’s work are largely invisible to their supervisors and employers, and to many occupational health scientists and practitioners. Women are not shrunken men, and there are sex differences in responses to toxins and to physical exposures, although not enough is known about how women’s bodies react to chemical and physical exposures at work. Although the average woman is different from the average man, some women are bigger, stronger and heavier than most men. When women try to enter jobs previously done only by men, or even in jobs occupied by many women, employers make little or no effort to adapt the jobs and tools to women’s size, shape and physiology. This leads women to experience conflict between their wish for economic and social equality and their desire to protect their health. Work schedules are still organised as if workers have no outside responsibilities, leading to unfairly variable, unpredictable, and extensive schedules.  The work-family interface is still treated as the workers’ problem even though the employer should also be responsible for smoothing the interface. Bent out of shape: Shame, solidarity and women’s bodies at work, Karen Messing, published by Between the Lines, 2021. ISBN13/Barcode: 9781771135412. £14.94. UK orders from Central Books. www.centralbooks.com. Telephone: 020 8525 8800. Other books by Karen Messing.

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WOMEN WORK

Women workers face the double disadvantage of discrimination and unaddressed and under-estimated hazards at work. It’s a big challenge for unions – but it’s one Canadian professor Karen Messing tells Hazards can be addressed through a collaboration between researchers and unions that enhances workplace organisation.

Bent out of shape: Shame, solidarity and women’s bodies at work, Karen Messing, published by Between the Lines, 2021. ISBN13/Barcode: 9781771135412. £14.94. UK orders from Central Books. www.centralbooks.com. Telephone: 020 8525 8800. Other books by Karen Messing.