Everything in Its Place

The packing shed was a long, low cathedral of corrugated roof and echoing concrete, and without the line running it felt like a church after the congregation had left. Forty trestles stood in rows, each with its stool, its rack of labels and its pile of unwashed tins. The air smelled of brine and bleach and cold iron.

Ruth Haddow, the forewoman, stood at the head of the line with her arms folded, fifty-two years old and pink to the elbow from forty years of salt water. She had the stare of someone who’d been waiting a long time to be asked the right question, and who did not intend to waste it.

She handed you a grade chart as one hands over a summons.

“Forty women pack, forty men fill the vats,” she said. “We’re graded light work. We’re paid forty per cent less. Twelve per cent off us is not twelve per cent off them.” She nodded across the yard at the strike hut, its stovepipe smoking. “There’s not a woman on that committee. We do the tea rota.”

On the chart, in the owner’s hand, the logic was written plain: women’s work was whatever the men weren’t doing. Jonah read it twice and passed it to you without a word, in the manner of a boy who has just discovered that arithmetic has opinions.

“I’ve been here since I was fifteen,” said Ruth. “Nobody ever asked me what I thought the pay cut meant. They know what it means.”