The Closed Shop:
Closed to Women or Closed to Automation?

Significant bodies of literature have examined the political links between gender and technology, technological change and unions, and unions and gender relations. But fewer studies close this circle and examine how gender, technological change, and union organizing interact simultaneously to shape each other's politics. The few that do rightly identify unions, particularly craft unions, as both outcomes and reproducers of patriarchal power structures. However, the broad persistence of patriarchal attitudes limits their ability to explain patterns of variation in women's workforce inclusion. To address this gap I develop a theory that identifies different union strategies of labor force control as central to understanding their responses to new technologies and women workers. I test this theory through case comparisons of typographical unions in the United States and Britain from the 1830s to the 1980s. I show that, where the closed shop was obtained through a strategy of incorporation, unions were more receptive to women workers and new technologies. But where the closed shop was maintained through a system of strict apprenticeship, unions were more obstructive towards new technologies and more exclusionary towards women.