Global Women's Work

Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy

Beth English, Mary E. Frederickson, Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138036581
• eBook ISBN: 9781351713474
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume considers how women are shaping the global economic landscape through their labor, activism, and multiple discourses about work. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars, the book offers a gendered examination of work in the global economy and analyses the effects of the 2008 downturn on women's labor force participation and workplace activism.

The book addresses three key themes: exploitation versus opportunity; women's agency within the context of changing economic options; and women's negotiations and renegotiations of unpaid social reproductive labor. This uniquely interdisciplinary and comparative analysis will be crucial reading for anyone with an interest in gender and the post-crisis world.

PART I

Women’s agency

The chapters in Part I look at women’s agency from multiple vantage points and geographic positions. Women’s agency, by which we mean the capacity of an individual or group to make choices and act on them, together with activism and organization, provide key lenses through which to examine and analyze women’s experiences in, and interaction with, a social and economic world that stretches beyond home and family. Part of this involves analyzing how women are negotiating the future for themselves and their families through economic options, and how those choices changed in the face of the 2007–2008 global recession when protections against gender discrimination established in the late twentieth century, were bypassed, ignored, or rescinded with the onset of the economic crisis.

The set of essays that follows looks at women’s agency from a global perspective, a macroregional standpoint, and from the viewpoint of the nation-state. From a global perspective, Eileen Boris engages grassroots feminist campaigns that became international efforts to combat capitalist restructuring of home labor during the last third of the twentieth century and into the 2000s. She evaluates a series of home work campaigns in which women challenged the usual definitions of employee and worker, and developed new tactics to redress the traditional categories of labor long used by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Subsequent essays focus on China, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States, nation-states that vary widely in their interpretations and policies regarding women’s agency. From a macroregional perspective, Gabriella Berloffa, Eleonora Matteazzi, and Paola Villa analyze women’s employment in the European Union (EU) in the two decades following the inception of the European Employment Strategy (EES) in 1997. They ask whether the strength and visibility of gender equality in the EU in the 1990s was the result of women’s agency and a shared concern about gender equality as a goal in itself, or whether it was seen as a necessary tool for the achievement of the overall employment targets agreed upon within the EU. As the global recession deepened, gender disparities increased, especially for young mothers who experienced a much lower employment probability than young fathers. By 2016, they find large gender disparities in all European countries and call for a reconsideration of the gender equality issue within the EU.

In sharp contrast to the regionally centralized policies regarding gender equality in the EU, national strategies in China, Bolivia, Brazil, Turkey, and the United States vary widely in terms of the consequences of potential intersections between women’s agency, activism and organization, and the state. In China, as Xiaodan Zhang documents, capitalist development run by the Chinese Communist State had a deep impact on women workers’ empowerment and disempowerment in the reform era between 1978 and 2010 when an increasingly market-driven economy and patriarchal state contributed to a movement of “returning home” for women workers whose wage-earning capacity had once empowered them. Like Berloffa, Matteazzi, and Villa, Zhang calls for a review of women’s agency in the context of an increasingly gendered Chinese society, a growing class gap, and a neocapitalist ideology that legitimizes the disempowerment of women. As we witness the widespread growth of strike activity in China in the past 15 years, the patriarchal state–led movement calling women to return home, documented by Zhang, highlights the historical complicity between capital and patriarchy using socially and culturally ascribed gender roles to maintain continuing economic growth.

Ongoing research in Bolivia, Brazil, and Turkey also reveals complex patterns of women’s agency reflected in rapidly increasing labor force participation and attendant new forms of relationships, activism, and organization. In Bolivia, women’s agency has been strikingly evident in the organizing capacity of poor peasant women and their struggle for political recognition and better living conditions. Among the poorest in Bolivia, these women incorporated the activist and organizing traditions of both labor and peasant movements into their own independent women’s organization, while belonging to the “National Confederation of Peasant Workers in Bolivia.” Documented in the work of Anne Marie Jeppesen, these women have gained political influence despite barriers that include poverty, illiteracy, family responsibilities, male chauvinism, racism, and harassment. Jeppesen argues that in the interconnected and globalized world of post–2008, national government policies and female agency make a vital difference in overcoming the effects of social inequality. Bolivian women migrants to Brazil, interviewed by Katiuscia Moreno Galhera and João Paulo Candia Veiga, demonstrated the same capacity to gain greater agency and turn oppressive situations into opportunities for emancipation by carving out places for themselves in the garment clothing chain in the city of São Paulo. Moreover, whenever possible, these women become entrepreneurs who, while a minority among female Bolivian migrants to Brazil, own their own sewing machines and workshops. Seeking new horizons in another country instead of engaging in collective action at home. “Neoliberalism and poverty create agency,” one of Galhera and Viega’s interviewees, a Bolivian anarchist, argued. The entrepreneurial mulieres advenus—“adventurous” Bolivian women—who are part of the Bolivian diaspora and the subject of Galhera and Viega’s research, demonstrate the complexity of women’s agency filtered through the variables of class, race/ethnicity, nationality, age, gender, religion, generation, and personal aspirations.

Like the entrepreneurial mulieres advenus migrating out of Bolivia to new lives in Brazil, in Turkey, women have entered a new era of waged labor. The rise of an urban economy dominated by services rather than industrial production has prompted a shift in the feminization of labor, as well as the development of a gendered work culture in urban Turkey. In response, women workers have cultivated new bodily and interactional forms of agency, adopted new norms of sexualized behavior, and developed new language patterns. Traditional concepts of sexual modesty and propriety have been challenged, or given way entirely, as women have expanded their roles in the public sphere and shaped new forms of agency.

Many of the changes women are experiencing as they move into the urban workforce in Turkey in the twenty-first century, were faced by late nineteenth-century women in the United States. Nevertheless, despite a century of workforce participation by U.S. women, equality in the workplace remains an elusive goal. Brigid O’Farrell’s chapter on “Gender, Work, and Recession,” examines the effects of the Great Recession on women workers in two distinct occupational categories: low-wage domestic caregiving and higher-wage jobs in the construction trades. As she highlights ongoing job segregation within these occupations in the context of a global economic framework, O’Farrell argues that legislation and enforcement provide a critical framework for achieving gender equity in the global economy. She also contends that legal strategies are not enough. Examples of activism, organization, and agency by domestic workers and tradeswomen provide insights into strategies for achieving gender equality despite economic setbacks, increasing class inequality, and political resistance from conservative governments in the United States and around the world.

Each of the essays in Part I of Global Women’s Work, underscore the critical nature of women’s agency and its reflection in deliberate and independent gendered actions within the family, the workplace, and the community. At the same time, this work emphasizes the relative fragility of women’s agency, as in the compelling case of the EU and its governmental retraction of women’s rights in the face of the global economic slowdown and EU-wide economic crisis; the long history of women workers fighting for gender equality in the workplace in the United States; and the massive retrenchment of women’s empowerment in China since 1978. This unevenness of women’s agency across time and place underscores the importance of examining the connections between nation-states, regional economies, and global economic platforms.

1

Recognizing the home workplace

Making workers through global labor standards

Eileen Boris

Apologizing for her absence from a union meeting, Ahmedabad resident Shanta, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of six with a tubercular husband, explained, “I didn’t go because I thought if the seth [subcontractor] finds out, he won’t give me any work. That meant no food for my children, or going back to domestic help.” Still, she told the canvasser from the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), “I prayed for the meeting’s success.” Although the work rolling agarbatti (incense sticks) as part of India’s expanding informal sector in the 1980s was demanding, it paid better than working as domestic help and could be combined with watching one’s own children.¹ Nearly a quarter of a century later, other Asian women workers returned to household work when garment manufacturing left for cheaper locations, an organizer from HomeNet Thailand reported in 2013.² In places such as the Philippines, some paid women workers labored in the homes of nearby women, joining the ranks of transnational mothers cooking, cleaning, and caring for yet another group of women—those who entered the labor market as part of the managerial professional class in Los Angeles, New York, Rome, and elsewhere (Parreñas 2001; Huang, Yeoh, and Abdul Rahman 2005; Ray and Qayum 2009; Lutz 2011).

Outworker, household worker, working mother, employer of other women, and consumer of their goods: these often distinct positions in the global economy converged at the end of the twentieth century and were sometimes held by the same woman. This chapter examines grassroots feminist campaigns that moved to the international scale to combat capitalist restructuring that uses living dwellings as places of employment. It considers two sides of home labor: putting-out systems, known as outsourcing, for the making of goods; and bringing-in systems, known as insourcing, for the making or maintenance of people exemplified through paid domestic and care work. Over the last half-century, home workplaces, rather than disappearing as relics of an earlier state of economic development, have expanded in the wake of profound transformations in the gendered international political economy.

From a theoretical perspective, this analysis distinguishes between processes often conflated under the term outwork: manufacturing work and housework or care work, which are often dichotomized as productive and reproductive labor (Estévez-Abe and Hobson 2015). It is true that for employers, paying for household work is outwork insofar as a woman or family provides its reproductive labor to another. But from the standpoint of the home as a place of employment, it is more accurate to speak of the employment of domestic workers as insourcing because the worker comes into the home. Paid domestic work is commodified labor, but its outputs are a mixture of intangibles and material products that forge or produce the home and its people. The labor involved dissipates through the very quotidian nature of cooking and cleaning or becomes manifested in the bodies that incorporate such offerings, including caring. In contrast, outwork moves production from factories, offices, and other sites into living spaces; commodities made in dwellings subsequently circulate from their place of fabrication to be sold like any other good. Each form of home labor suffers from what Maria Mies labels “housewiferization,” the mystification that the worker is just a housewife or that she labors for love, not money. Homeworkers often claim to be undertaking piecework for pin money, or as a leisure activity, and thus do not appear as real workers in their own minds nor in the minds of others (Mies 1982). Observers often have interpolated the household worker with the housewife. But most cleaners and caregivers understand that they are workers even if they develop attachments to homes and families that can complicate these relations (Glenn 2010).

The rich academic literature on gender and globalization considers transnational motherwork and migrant domestic work as one category and microenterprises and industrial outwork as another (Anderson 2000; Mehrotra and Biggeri 2005; Lutz 2008; Cox 2013; English 2013).³ In discussing their interconnection through the broader category of the home as a workplace, I build upon my previous scholarship on each form to consider developments during the last third of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first, arguing that the new outwork and the newly prominent household work posed similar challenges to a labor standards regime forged with the industrial worker (marked as male and white) in mind (Boris 1994a, 1994b; Boris and Prügl 1996; Boris and Parreñas 2010; Boris and Klein 2012; Boris and Fish 2014a). My concern is less with documenting the global order than with campaigns that occurred to make home labor legible as a type of employment and thus covered by minimum wage rules and occupational safety and other labor standards. But standard-making has come with a price, as it squeezed home labor into categories based on the male industrial and formal sector worker as the norm (Vosko 2010). SEWA and other feminist organizations thus have had to balance creating new entities to meet the circumstances of their members by insisting on being treated just like any other kind of worker, maintaining demands for special treatment to compensate for a gendered-derived precarity as part of the quest for social justice.

On a global scale, campaigns for acceptance of home labor as work occurred through the convention-making process of the International Labour Organization (ILO). Unique among international organizations, the ILO has three components: the International Labour Office (the Office), the International Labour Conference (ILC), and the Governing Body (GB). Its tripartite organization—all national delegations have government, employer, and worker representatives, as do most committees—distinguishes the organization from other institutions of global governance. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: perspectives on gender and work in the global economy
• PART I: Women’s agency
• PART II: Exploitation vs. opportunity
• PART III: Negotiations of social and reproductive labor
• Index