Gender and Employment Restructuring in British National Health Service Manual Work

• Published in: Gender, work, and organization Vol. 6; no. 4; pp. 202 - 212
• Main Author: Kahn, Peggy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford, UK and Boston, USA Blackwell Publishers Ltd 01-10-1999
• Subjects: Employment; England; Gender roles; Health care; Health economics; Health services; Hospital management; Hospitals; Manual work; Manual Workers; Occupational Structure; Organizational Change; Sex; Sexual Inequality; Subordination; United Kingdom; Welfare state; Working Women
• ISSN: 0968-6673; 1468-0432
• DOI: 10.1111/1468-0432.00083

While managerial initiatives to cut costs through increased labour flexibility are widespread, we have limited knowledge of the micro‐politics of gender and contemporary restructuring at the local level: of the processes and dynamics through which flexibility and other initiatives reconstitute or transform gendered patterns of work and advantage in specific workplaces. This case study, based upon extensive interviewing, observation, and examination of documentary materials, examines the gender implications of several different types of restructuring initiatives in three types of manual work at two hospitals in an NHS Trust. On the whole, it finds that restructuring created more continuity than change in gendered patterns of work and advantage in the two sites. The case study suggests, first, that employment restructuring incorporates elements of structural, institutional and interactive gendering; managers use women's subordination in the workplace and labour markets to achieve their objectives, and male workers actively resist loss of their advantages. Second, it suggests that competitive tendering exercises have a disproportionately negative impact upon women workers, while functional flexibility initiatives are somewhat more positive. Third, the case study suggests union resistance to restructuring is limited and particularly circumscribed in relation to restructuring of women's jobs.