Facing Down the Dragon, With Solidarity

Karen Messing begins her latest book with the stories that must be told. The accounts that she shares in Bent Out of Shape loosen the wheels for everyone to tell as well— and to break their silence. Secrets keep the systems rolling, bodies hurting, and psyches broken along with its path. Karen Messing’s voice matters. She has been a critical contributor and feminist lens, globally, on the plight of women performing at work, in nontraditional as well as traditional jobs, and a guidepost for the engagement of workers’ voices and knowledge in occupational health research and intervention. New Solutions readers may be familiar with her prior ground-breaking works about why research conclusions based on male workers don’t apply to women, why scientists must talk to and learn from workers when conducting occupational health research, and the urgency to unpack the myths of “safe” and “light” women’s work through ergonomic analyses. In this remarkably personal and important book, Messing gleans stories from a 17 year-long collaboration between research scientists, legal scholars, and the members of Canadian trade union women’s committees. She brings us back to a time when the male gaze was unrelenting and ubiquitous, where men were entitled to comment, judge, and assess any aspect of women’s bodies, brains, and potential, especially at work. Although presenting a number of carefully detailed examples, Messing reflects on the gendered manipulations, humiliations, trickery, groping, and assaults that are institutionalized in so many low-wage or traditionally male workplaces. Shame excels at its primary goal: to maintain power relations and to sustain the status quo. Each generation has its own sickening version of these abuses and Messing shares hers. The mortar for the tiles of shame is laid early, reinforced everywhere, and residue remains despite a lifetime of intentionally routing it out and scraping it off with force. We know that poorly designed jobs often lead to injury and illness, and that such design can be physical, psychosocial, or economic. Shame about work-related injuries and illnesses—and the resultant silence—is only possible when workers are blamed, afraid of job loss if they leave or are fired, or fear retaliation and humiliation if they stay. The silence is compounded when complaints feed the external myths about women’s inability to perform the work as assigned, often work that shouldn’t have been designed that way for ANY human. Internalized beliefs that women’s bodies are “different, abnormal, weaker” contribute to such silence. Although acknowledging the grave injustices men face in unsafe workplaces, Messing reminds us “it is most often women (and gender non-conforming men) who experience a forced choice between gender equality and their health” (p. xvii). And why does Messing describe only cisgender women in this book? Messing clarifies in her introduction that “... in the unionized, low-paid workplaces (where her research was conducted), trans and nonbinary women have not been visible.” Given the documented harassment and discrimination of gender nonconforming workers, it is reasonable to hypothesize that a nonbinary or transidentity in similar work environments would add layers of additional risk in terms of psychosocial hazards and misfitting job design. The remedy to these ills? Solidarity, of course; but we learn it is easier said than done, with multilevel challenges, tensions between collective and individual needs, with varying levels of support and recognition from union leaders, employer representatives, research scientists, and government officials. Sometimes it works beautifully, in examples that Messing celebrates. Sometimes it doesn’t work and Messing gets big points for her rare honesty.