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Women’s employment in traditionally male manufacturing jobs is hindered by both formal and informal structures (Levine 2009). In light of recent recessionbased changes in the Ontario economy, it is becoming more important for women to maintain well-paying manufacturing employment. Women face different challenges in the home and workplace than men. This paper investigates the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) Union’s unique women’s advocacy program, as a promising mechanism to secure women’s safety at home and at work, while protecting their employment status. Drawing on ethnographic research with women auto workers and union women, our findings suggest that the CAW’s women’s advocacy program is innovative and beneficial in maintaining women’s employment as they attend to personal problems. This program can be extended throughout other locals and unions to assist women dealing with violence and other issues related to work-life experience. or decades academic and community-based feminists have argued that perhaps the most significant step towards women’s equality is their employment in well-paying, secure jobs (Arber and Ginn 1995, Armstrong and Armstrong 1978, Blau et al. 2002, Hartmann 1979). Yet research in the last several years also makes it increasingly clear that simply getting wellpaid jobs is not enough to provide equality and security for women (Yates and Leach 2006). Other issues intervene in destabilizing women’s work lives, some of these associated with the job itself, such as the “climate” for women at the workplace, and time demands placed on women; others are associated with issues women bring to work, such as experiences of violence at home, or the F 45 Just Labour: A Canadian Journal of Work and Society—Volume 16—Spring 2010 demands their families place on them. It is increasingly clear that both these sets of issues create complications for women’s work lives that men do not face, undermining women’s ability to get—and keep—decent jobs (Browne et al. 1999, Joshi et al. 1996, Levine 2009, Lewis 2001). Furthermore, there are limited resources available to assist women navigate these issues, in both union and nonunion workplaces. Drawing on our research with workers in the automobile industry in Ontario, this paper considers first, some of the very gendered conditions that women face in the industry, where there have been—and despite the industry’s transformation, will continue to be—well paid jobs. Then, through an examination of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) union’s women’s advocate program, we consider the role that a dedicated workplace women’s advocate can play in improving the lives and livelihoods of women manufacturing workers. Despite their presence in CAW workplaces since 1993, and despite the wealth of research on women in Canadian unions, we have found no scholarly analysis of the role of formal women’s advocates in unionized workplaces. This paper, then, represents a preliminary analysis of a formal women’s advocate program within a major union. We argue that a workplace women’s advocate is a practical step that moves towards addressing issues that women face at work, especially, but not only, in male-dominated workplaces. Our research was conducted in partnership with the Women’s Committee of CAW Local 88 at an assembly plant in Ontario.1 The research was carried out by a team of academic and community researchers as part of a CommunityUniversity Research Alliance. In this research we have employed an ethnographic approach to understanding the lives and needs of women in the auto manufacturing industry. This approach involves assembling data acquired through interviews, focus groups, and surveys with workers at a major Ontario assembly plant, through formal and informal discussions with our CAW research partners, and formal plant tours, to construct our understanding of women’s work in an auto assembly plant. This paper takes as its starting place, material drawn from 7 interviews conducted by telephone in 2008, and one focus group of 5 women conducted in 2007, all of whom had left the assembly plant. These women told us of the conditions of work they encountered and of their reasons for leaving. In keeping with our research collaboration, we have also drawn on the knowledge and expertise of the CAW women members of our research team for their identification of the issues, as both auto workers and informal women’s advocates. The broad picture that emerged, of the major gendered issues that women autoworkers face, led us to investigate further the program that was quite frequently referred to by those we interviewed as an invaluable resource for women—the CAW Women’s Advocate Program.

Who Will Fight for Us? Union Designated Women’s Advocates in Auto Manufacturing Workplaces