"CHICKENS COME HOME TO ROOST": Industrial Reorganization, Seniority, and Gender Conflict in the United Packinghouse Workers of America, 1956-1966.

This article examines the impact of seniority rights on the labor force and the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA) during a period of industrial restructuring and job scarcity. Historians have shown how gender was entrenched and maintained in production systems through sex-based job classifications, differential wage rates or dual seniority. In addition, they have explored the ways in which male union officials, as well as rank-and-file, participated in the creation and maintenance of gendered work structures. Furthermore, several historians have demonstrated that women sometimes joined men in the protection of sex-based occupational arrangements. UPWA women, as they lost jobs in the 1950s and 1960s, used women's activities committees to analyze the ways industrial transformation made them especially vulnerable to job displacement. At local, district and international conferences, they announced that the machine menace is stalking all union members and demonstrated how the menace attacked women's jobs first. In addition, women were confined to the first three or four slots of a wage scale that contained between 20 and 30 brackets. These unskilled or semi-skilled jobs were more susceptible to replacement by machines and job combinations than skilled men's positions. UPWA women focused on dual seniority as the key source of their disproportionate vulnerability to job displacement.