Narratives at Work: Women, Men, Unionization, and the Fashioning of Identities

In February, 1948, a group of fish and blueberry processors formed the exclusively female, Ladies' Cold Storage Workers Union at Job Brothers fish plant in St. John's, Newfoundland. Unusual for the time, this organization was founded in the context of structural and social change in the Newfoundland fishery that altered the social relations of paid and unpaid work for women fish plant labourers. Cullum carefully explores this specific labour process and provides an open reading of the workers' narratives; a study of how the women of Job Brothers recounted stories of their work and domestic lives, and thus fashioned shifting identities as gendered, classed, and racialized subjects.