‘She Town’ women have a proud industrial history. But they are facing a new struggle that is driving them into early retirement
Before sunrise on Tuesday last week, amid an amber weather warning and Scotland’s coldest temperatures in 25 years, 62-year-old Sheila Petrie set off on a five-mile walk to work through 15cm of snow. A community-based care worker in Dundee, where public transport was suspended due to the severe weather, Petrie is employed by the city’s council. At 8am sharp, 40 minutes into the journey, an administrator phoned to ask why she hadn’t yet scanned in for her shift.
It’s an example, Petrie says, of being “totally undervalued and completely trodden on by the council,” a relationship that she says has got increasingly worse over her 20-year career and driven her to take early semi-retirement from April. And it is one that stings all the more with the knowledge that her employers have, Petrie believes, been systematically underpaying her throughout that time, because she works in a job dominated by women.
