Engendering Occupational Health and Safety: RSI in the Poultry Processing Industry

Abstract

This thesis explores the gendered discourses that surround the experience of Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) for women workers in the poultry processing industry. RSI is a significant and debilitating injury and is one of the major occupational health and safety concerns for all assembly line workers. While there is a wealth of research on RSI, very few studies use a gender analysis to understand the experience of this injury. Despite RSI being a key concern for many women workers, women for the most part are ignored in research. When women are central to the analysis of RSI, injured women are labelled as neurotic, weak and marginal workers.

The thesis explains why women are represented in this way in the RSI literature. It identifies two powerful discourses at the centre of explanations of RSI, which also inform occupational health and safety research generally. The first, occupational health and safety discourse, ignores women or draws on a construction of woman that defines her primarily as wife and mother and excludes her from the category of worker. The second, medical discourse, centralises women in the analysis of occupational injury based on reproductive function, psyche and physicality. I argue that while each of these discourses conceptualise gender in a different way, they both draw on a modernist conceptualisation of gender which essentialises gender categories. Men and masculinity are used as a basis for all experience against which women’s experiences are compared and measured, thus limiting our understanding of those experiences. This has meant that women’s physiological, psychological and social differences to men are prioritised in women’s occupational health research, rather than the hazards and risks that they face at work.

This thesis offers a more meaningful explanation of women’s experience of RSI through postmodernist critiques of modernism. It deconstructs the essentialist conceptualisation of gender found in modernism and thereby disrupts the knowledge claims made about injured women workers. In particular, postmodernist insights serve to highlight the ways in which medical discourse constructs illness, disease and other social realities such as gender. However, recognising gender as a constructed category also challenges its very utility as an analytical tool. This makes talking about women as a group problematic.

The central argument of this thesis is that we need to maintain gender as an analytical concept. I argue that to speak meaningfully about women as a group we need to expand on the modernist conceptualisation of gender by incorporating insights from postmodernism. Modernism reveals the material structures that impact on gendered experience while postmodernism reveals how those experiences are constructed via dominant discourses.

These dominant discourses surrounding gender were evident in the stories of twenty-five injured poultry process workers who were interviewed as part of this research. The workers’ narratives illuminate the dominant constructions of gender that surround contemporary experiences of RSI. At the same time, their narratives highlight how women contest and negotiate these constructions through defining themselves as workers rather than women.

The study demonstrates that reading the women’s stories through a modernist and postmodernist lens reveals how gender continues to structure our experiences. This has significant implications for both occupational health and safety research and feminist research. Engendering occupational health and safety research through the incorporation of postmodernism’s emphasis on the discursive provides new ways of understanding injury and disease at work. Utilising a broad definition of gender has the potential to yield new insights into not only women’s occupational health and safety concerns, but also men’s. Furthermore, engendering occupational health and safety could provide a deeper and richer understanding of the occupational health and safety implications of our globalised economy.

Finally, this thesis provides evidence that gender continues to significantly impact on our lives. Over the last two decades, there have been debates surrounding the utility of gender to adequately understand our experiences. This thesis clearly demonstrates that gender still matters. It matters on both a material and a discursive level.