Gendered Work in Asian Cities

The New Economy and Changing Labour Markets

Ann Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317129639
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

Do the new Asian economies encourage gender equality? Ann Brooks provides a unique insight into this question by assessing the impact of the new economy and the changing labour market on women in Asia. Theoretical debates around globalization, gender and social change are combined with empirical research on professional women in two cosmopolitan cities: Hong Kong and Singapore. The author's research shows that even in such cosmopolitan cities where women tend to have a strong advantage there is a 'new dynamic of inequality'. This makes the examination of women's labour market participation and ambition in these environments very different to previous research. The research is set against the backdrop of Southeast Asia more generally and international comparisons are also drawn. It will be of interest to scholars in sociology, economics, gender studies, business studies and Asian studies.

Chapter 1

Globalization, Gender and Changing Work Cultures in Asia

This chapter explores the impact of globalization on gender, and changing work cultures in Asia. The chapter examines the impact of globalization, the growth of the new economy, and its impact on professional women, in the context of organizational and societal change in two global cities in the region, Hong Kong and Singapore. The first section of the chapter frames the theoretical debates, and explores the issues around globalization and socio-economic change and examines the relationship between globalization, and changing work cultures. It also considers the relationship between globalization, gender and labour market segmentation. More specifically this first section of the chapter explores the impact of globalization in the context of Southeast Asia more broadly, and considers issues of transnationalism, gender and the ‘feminization’ of labour regimes in the region. The relationship between globalization and transnational labour migration is considered, and the ‘feminization’ of transnational labour migration is seen as highly significant in the region. The implications of such trends are investigated in the specific contexts of the global cities of Hong Kong and Singapore. The second section of the chapter examines the relationship between globalization, the global knowledge economy, and organizational change and considers the gendered implications of these changes. The third section considers more specific economic and social change in Hong Kong and Singapore, particularly as it impacts on professional women. Both Singapore and Hong Kong, while very different, see themselves as highly significant centers for the region in a number of ways. Both can be defined as ‘global cities’. Both have positioned themselves as ‘market leaders’ in terms of the ‘new economies’, and as ‘global knowledge hubs’ for the growth of the global knowledge economy. Both centers are experiencing rapid economic, social, and political change and dealing with organizational change, and changing work cultures and identities. This chapter examines some of the theoretical underpinnings of the debates around globalization, gender and social change, and considers the particular interpolation of the debates in the context of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Globalization, Transnationalism and Changing Work Cultures

Globalization has become a valuable theoretical framework for investigating some key global and national issues in understanding socio-economic change. What becomes apparent is that national economies are less and less a unitary category in the face of new forms of globalization (Sassen, 1998), and that globalization can allow us to understand the ways in which the global information economy is embedded in local economies and work cultures, and shows the micro processes within localized economies through which globalization exists. However, Sassen notes that mainstream accounts of economic globalization is often confined to a very narrow economistic profile centered on a range of narratives ‘enacted, constituted, and legitimized by men and/or in male gendered terms’ (Sassen, 1998, p.82).

The dominance of world markets has produced global cities whose orientation to world markets has frequently raised questions about the relationship of such global cities with their nation-states and their regions. Singapore and Hong Kong are both global cities but occupy unique relationships in relation to larger economic and social structures, and to their regional location. Singapore is both a global city with a global and international outreach in terms of world markets; and it is also a nation-state occupying a unique position in the region. Similarly Hong Kong is also a global city, but also a Special Administrative Region of China, and thus also occupies a unique position in relation to its regional location.

The emergence of global cities has proved to be ‘a strategic site not only for global capital but also for the transnationalization of labor and the formation of transnational identities ...’ (Sassen, 1998, p.xxx). Such sites offer new economic and political potentialities in the creation of both transnational identities and communities, such communities consist of both the rich, in the form of the new transnational professional workforce, and the poor, in the form of migrant (increasingly female) workers. There are significant social and political implications of the transnationalization of labour, and, as Sassen notes, there has been a failure to create new forms and regimes to encompass these new identities and formations for those who ‘do not regard the nation as their sole or principal source of identification ...’ (ibid.).

Theorizing Globalization as a ‘Cultural Process’

The theorizing of globalization has been decidedly silent on the issue of gender and some theorists of globalization do not deal with gender at all in their major theoretical contribution to the debate on ‘global modernities’ (Featherstone, Lash and Robertson, 1995). There is a lack of agreement among writers about the ‘periodization of globalization’. Robertson (1987) maintains that the uniformity created by globalization in terms of the control of information and capital produces a single social and cultural space. This overarching process of control, which defines the nature of social relations over time and space, can be seen as having precedence over the concepts of ‘nation’ and ‘society’. This model of globalization is one that ‘sees it as an epoch contemporaneous with postmodernity’ (Stivens, 2000, p.28N). This is a position shared by Harvey (1989) and Lash and Urry (1994).

While the cultural theorists’ model of globalization (Robertson, 1992; Turner, 1990) has moved the debate away from a crude preoccupation with the economic, it is a model which does not address the issue of gender. As Stivens (2000, p.10) observes: ‘In order to theorize the global dimensions of culture and society, it is necessary to investigate the interrelations of public and private, of the economy and the domestic, of male and female roles, and of ideologies of work and politics and ideologies of gender.’ It is here that the work of Saskia Sassen (1996) is so relevant to the debates around globalization, particularly her point that as politics becomes more global, human rights become increasingly part of its normative regulation (Sassen, 1996, pp.35-6). This view is shared by those theorists (Ghai, 1999) who argue that the increasing power of corporations resulting from globalization erodes the rights of others. As Stivens (2000, p.12) notes this position receives support from the literature on transnational labour migration (see Ghai, 1999). Sassen (1996, p.88) raises the question of what institution is going to enforce human rights in this new globalized world? Stivens (2000, p.12) also raises the question that: ‘Given the masculinism of existing international structures, how would women’s interests be promoted within such new orders?’ Sassen’s work is particularly valuable in raising both macro and micro dimensions underpinning the relationship between globalization, gender, and social change.

Globalization, Gender and Labour Market Segmentation

Globalization not only provides a valuable theoretical framework, but it is also provides a way of understanding the process of restructuring the global market economy. As Sassen (1998, p.90) shows, globalization has resulted in the formation of new types of labor-market segmentation that highlight ‘strategic instantiations of gendering in the global economy’. In this process she says that two characteristics stand out:

• One is the weakening of the firm in structuring the employment relation which leaves more to the market.

• A second form of restructuring of the labor market is what can be described as the shift of labor-market functions to the household or community.

Sassen goes on to note that both of these trends highlight some very negative aspects of restructuring in relation to labour markets, including ‘a devaluing of jobs (from full to part-time jobs, from jobs offering upward mobility within firms to dead end jobs ...) and a feminization of employment in these jobs’ (Sassen, 1998, p.90). An integral dimension within this relationship between globalization and corporate restructuring has been the ‘transmigration of labour’, which has also been shown to be a significantly gendered process:

The expansion of the high-income workforce in conjunction with the emergence of new cultural forms has led to a process of high-income gentrification that rests, in the last analysis, on the availability of a vast supply of low-wage workers ... the immigrant woman serving the white middle class professional woman has replaced the traditional image of the black female servant serving the white master (Sassen, 1998, p.91).

The labour intensive nature of ‘high-income gentrification’ is an important aspect of the emergence of global cities, and the demographics and patterns of migration entailed in this process. It is a pattern that characterizes many of the global cities of Southeast Asia and is certainly a prominent aspect of the work culture(s) of Singapore and Hong Kong. As Sassen (1998, p.122) notes:

High income gentrification replaces much of this capital intensity with workers directly and indirectly. Behind the gourmet food stores and speciality boutiques that have replaced the self-service supermarket and department store lies a very different organization of work. Similarly, high-income residences in the city depend to a much larger extent on hired maintenance staff than the middle class suburban home.

Globalization thus has a number of ramifications for gender at both ends of the labour market. In addition to the transmigration of (largely female) labour market serving the needs of global cities, at the high income professional end of the market, particularly in the context of corporate restructuring and organizational change, we see an expansion in the number of professional women holding senior positions. This is partly the result of the growing transnational professional labour market, and partly the growing feminization of job supply, and the growing feminization of management, often the indirect result of the global knowledge economy, which has had a significant impact on gender hierarchies in many areas of work.

Globalization and Southeast Asia

The relationship between transnationality, global capital, and the feminization of labour is a particularly interesting one in the context of Southeast Asia. As Ong notes, ‘... in Asia, transnational flows and networks have been the key dynamics in shaping cultural practices, the formation of identity, and shifts in state strategies’ (Ong, 1999, p.17). Transnationalism takes on a particular inflection in the context of the so-called Asian tiger economies, given the history of diasporan trading groups such as the ethnic Chinese, who play a major role in relation to transnational Asian capitalism. As Ong states: ‘Global capitalism in Asia is linked to new cultural representations of “Chineseness” ... in relation to transnational Asian capitalism ... The changing status of diasporan Chinese is historically intertwined with the operations and globalizations of capital’ (Ong, 1999, p.7). These aspects of transnationalism have clear implications for the economies, work cultures and organizations of Hong Kong and Singapore.

Diasporic Chinese within the region have played and are playing a key role in the emergence of a ‘new flexible’ capitalism in the region. In addition as Ong (1999, p.35) argues:

Many formerly colonized countries in Southeast Asia are themselves emergent capitalist powerhouses that are ‘colonizing’ territories and peoples in their backyard or further afield: Indonesia has invaded and colonized East Timor, while Malaysian, Singaporean, and Hong Kong entrepreneurs are factory managers in China, timber barons in New Guinea and Guyana, and hotel operators in England and the United States. These strategies of economic colonization by countries formerly colonized by the West represent new forms of engaging dissent at home and capital abroad.

Women, Labour Migration and ‘Flexible Accumulation’

In framing the debate around ‘flexible accumulation’, Nonini and Ong (1997, p.9) maintain that a ‘constellation of technical, financial and institutional innovations that have occurred since the early 1970s has led to a shift in late capitalism from mass industrial production to globalized regimes of flexible accumulation (Harvey, 1989)’. Drawing on the work of David Harvey (1989, p.147), Nonini and Ong point out that flexible accumulation: ‘... rests on flexibility with respect to labor processes, labor markets, products, and patterns of consumption. It is characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production, new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation.’ As Nonini and Ong go on to show, intrinsic to these changes are the mobility of peoples, commodities, ideas and capital on a global scale. As they note: ‘We can thus speak of the simultaneous implosion of space and the speed up of all aspects of economic (and hence cultural) life, in this latest episode of what Harvey (1989) refers to as “time-space compression”’ (Nonini and Ong, 1997, p.10).

Two major implications have emerged from these developments, the first is the formation of new kinds of social organization, which are de-territorialized and flexible. As Nonini and Ong have observed: ‘Labor markets have been reorganized by new forms of labor regulation ... processes have been increasingly segmented, deskilled, and globalized into a new international division of labor increasingly independent of specific places and their populations across the world. At the same time, a proliferation and segmentation of new commodity markets of global scope have promoted and in turn been fed by new lifestyle consumer constituencies’ (ibid). These changes have not necessarily been positive in terms of the establishment of new work cultures and relationships, as Nonini and Ong observe: ‘Older asymmetrical power relationships are reinforced, while new ones have emerged. Women, in particular, young women, have become the largest section of local populations to be drafted as temporary, contingent, and part-time laborers for industrial subcontractors and other firms using the forms of labor regulation characterizing flexible accumulation (Ong, 1991)’ (ibid). The reorganization of both labour markets and forms of social organization characterized by flexibility and mobility, combined with the formation of new commodity driven consumer markets, is a feature of both Hong Kong and Singapore.

The growth of Asian capitalism has been the subject of considerable tension particularly from moderate and radical Islamist groups, the former who promote a counter discourse around a new Islam, friendly to capitalism, typical of the pronouncements of Malaysia’s Dr Mahathir Mohammed. The latter have more recently been associated with radical Islamist terrorist cells that pose threats to the traditionally stable economic basis of the region. The impact of the latter groups for countries like Singapore and the wider region is as yet unknown (Brooks, 2003). At the opening of the Singapore Parliament (March 2002), the President posed the dual problems of globalization and regional threats to peace from radical Islamization in the following way. On the issue of globalization he noted that other countries in the region including Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong are all pursuing the same opportunities around the development of the global knowledge economy. In addition on the subject of the threat posed by the spread of Islamization he commented: ‘... the spread of narrow, radical interpretations of Islam in the countries around us, influenced by the world-wide tide of Islamic fundamentalism, will have its effect ... A troubled region and an Asean preoccupied with internal problems, mean fewer growth opportunities for Singapore in the region’ (The Straits Times, 2002, p.H2).

Globalization and the ‘Feminization’ of Transnational Labour Migration

The current process of globalization has impacted on patterns and processes of transnational labour migration (Sassen, 1988) and has more recently led to the increasing ‘feminization’ of transnational labour migration. Tyner (2001) shows that the countries of Southeast Asia, particularly South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have become important sites of both capital accumulation and labour in-migration. Tyner also notes that the volume of migration has both increased and become more diversified and in the process he notes the increasing feminization of transnational migration (Tyner, 2001; Heyzer, 1989; Zlotnik, 1995). Robinson also notes that mobility in the global economy was predominantly male until recently with the increasing demand for women domestic workers and the growth of international trade in sex workers (Robinson, 2001).

In the Philippines ... which is the world’s largest exporter of government sponsored contract labor migration over 55 percent of all migrant workers are women (Tyner, 2000a). Reflecting the pervasiveness of gendered stereotypes and the international division of labor, the increase in woman migrants is accounted for by the observation that migrant women are usually concentrated in certain occupations including domestic services, entertainment and health care services (Cheng, 1996, p.139). Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, have emerged as key destinations for female foreign domestic workers (Cheng, 1996; Huang and Yeoh, 1996; Wong, 1996; Chin, 1997) (Tyner, 2001, p.2).

The state frequently intervenes in these instances to control the market when it comes to migrant labour. Christine Chin’s analysis of domestic service in Malaysia shows that it cannot be regarded as simply the movement of women from countries where there is a labour surplus such as Indonesia and the Philippines, to areas where there is a labour shortage. As Chin (1998) notes the state regulates the flow in important ways through controlling the factors such as religion and cost. For example the state in Malaysia insists that Muslim families have Muslim, usually cheaper, servants from Indonesia, while the Chinese have Christian, and generally more expensive, domestic servants. As Robinson notes: ‘... government policy is important in regulating migrant flow in a manner which serves the imperative of the creation of a Malay middle class to counter the economic and social power of the Chinese’ (Robinson, 2001, p.6).

In Singapore, as Heng observes, the Singaporean state, as with many other countries in the region, also profits from the ‘expropriation of female domestic labour that is commonly left outside the purview of protective employment legislation. Singapore, for example, extracts a maid “levy” from the employers of domestic workers (since April 1991, S$300 per worker), a sum that is often greater than the wages the workers earn themselves. The Singapore government reaps S$234 million annually from the maid levy (Heyzer and Wee, 1992), and a massive S$1.3 billion in 1992 from all foreign-workers levies’ (Heng, 1997, p.32).

The Role of Female Migrant Labour in Serving the Needs of Advanced Economies

Globalization has been central in facilitating the movement of capital, commodities and labour. Earlier phases of globalization emphasized the movement of capital and commodities but as Tyner (2001, p.2) notes: ‘... the current phase of economic restructuring is broadly characterized by new centres of capital accumulation and an increasingly differentiated division of labour on the basis of ethnicity, gender and geography.’ As Basch et al. (1994, p.24) contend: ‘... current transnationalism marks a new type of migrant experience, reflecting an increased and more pervasive global penetration of capital.’ The implications of these flows of migrant labour, particularly female migrant labour to work as domestic servants, have meant that professional women gain greater freedom. Lee (1996, p.11) notes that: ‘It is indeed ironic that the economic attainments of many women in host countries (for example women professionals in the United States, Canada ... and Singapore) have come about through the incorporation of women migrants of minority races as domestic servants and childcare providers.’

The governments of Hong Kong and Singapore have adopted an open-door policy with regard to female migrant domestic labour. As Tam (1999, p.264) notes: ‘The prevalence of employment of foreign domestic helpers reflects the assumption behind social policy making that provision of childcare remains the responsibility of the private domain.’ The current policy on foreign domestic labour in Hong Kong puts no ceiling on the number of such work visas, and figures from the Census and Statistics Department in Hong Kong for 1997, show that over 110,000 families, that is, 6.1 percent of all domestic households, employ one or more overseas domestic workers to assist with housework and childcare. Tam (1999, p.265) reports that: ‘About 71 percent of the households who employ live-in helpers have children below the age of 12.’

There is no specific ordinance covering the employment of foreign domestic workers in Hong Kong (unlike Singapore) and in theory they work under the same employment ordinances as local workers, including protection of wages, regulation of gender conditions of employment and employee compensation. However the position of the foreign domestic labourer is, as Tam notes: ‘... vulnerable to discrimination because of their non-citizen status, gender, occupation and income level, as well as employment and visa conditions under which they were allowed to enter’ (Tam, 1999, p.264).

Singapore, like Hong Kong has a history of waged domestic service (Wong, 1996). The rapid transformation of Singapore’s economy involved ‘the massive mobilization of young women on a scale never before experienced in the country’ (Heyzer, 1...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on the Author
• Introduction: Globalization and the New Dynamics of Inequality
• 1 Globalization, Gender and Changing Work Cultures in Asia
• 2 Researching Gender and Professional Work Cultures in Two Global Cities in Asia
• 3 Gender Equity and Organizational Constraints in Professional Labour Markets
• 4 Leadership and Management Issues for Professional Women in Organizational Structures
• 5 Intimacy, Work and Family Life: Social and Personal Issues Confronting Professional Woman in Global Cities
• 6 The New Economy, Professional Women and Social Change
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index