Review of Nancy Plankey-Videla, We are in this Dance Together : Gender, Power, and Globalization at a Mexican Garment Firm

In 2000, Nancy Plankey-Videla began an ethnography at a high-end men’s suit factory in central Mexico. Three months later, reacting to layoffs, bonus cuts, and an effort to break the union contract, which managers blamed on global competition and the U.S. recession, the largely female workforce at Moctezuma went on strike. A corrupt union conspired with management and state regulators to put an end to the strike, but Plankey-Videla was in the right place at the right time to explore how the structure of work (five years earlier the plant replaced piecework with teamwork), the construction of gender (management articulated two constructions of the ideal female worker), and globalization (Mexico was hemorrhaging factory jobs) produced worker resistance. In the process, she explores how work structures create individualism and collectivism, how management manipulates gender roles to gain cooperation, and how globalization is refracted in local ideologies of work and class interest