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Gendered Labor Relations in the Workplace

Paper Session

Saturday, Jan. 6, 2024 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (CST)

Marriott Riverwalk, Alamo Ballroom Salon A
Hosted By: Union for Radical Political Economics & International Association for Feminist Economics
  • Chair: Srishti Pal, London School of Economics

Global Accumulation & Gendered Class Exploitation: Theory and Evidence from the Garment Industry during the Covid Pandemic

Shahram Azhar
,
Bucknell University

Abstract

The paper conducts a gendered class analysis of the impact of the Covid pandemic on the global garment industry to explain the coproduction of retailers’ profits in the core, as measured by higher retailer markups, and increased exploitation and oppression (wage-theft, intensification, violence) against women working on production lines. We develop the concept of an SRT-augmented rate of exploitation to distinguish between necessary and surplus labor performed at two sites, that of the factory as well as the household. The framework demonstrates how, in the aftermath of supply-chain shortages, gendered forms of absolute & relative surplus-value became critical to retailers’ markups at the cost of immiserating working-class women in peripheral capitalist economies. We posit the ‘housewife proletarian’ as negotiating two crises, a crisis of accumulation at the factory and a crisis of care-labor at home, and show how a dynamic interaction of these twin crises led to increased violence and oppression against women at both sites. We then draw upon a host of empirical sources from recent quantitative/qualitative surveys to explore how working women reported these experiences themselves. The paper concludes by arguing that zooming into these differences, as well as similarities, across peripheral economies can not only improve our understanding of how victims of gendered class exploitation subjectively experienced the transformed biopolitics of Third-world manufacturing in the aftermath of the pandemic, but can also enrich our general understanding of SRT as a theory of under-development by unearthing the structural relations of violence between monopsonic power and gendered class exploitation.

Industrial Policy, Gender and Manufacturing in Indonesia

Shaianne Osterreich
,
Ithaca College

Abstract

Even before the 2008-financial crisis Indonesia was experiencing what was becoming the increasingly common global trend of jobless growth, particularly in manufacturing. With women making up roughly 40% of manufacturing workers, stagnation or decline in this sector would present considerable problems. Meanwhile, new research suggests that some countries are facing pre-mature deindustrialization, with technological change generating shifts in women’s access to decent employment. Where this happens, it is likely to pose challenges for inclusive growth as a result of falling employment shares of manufacturing. (Greenstein 2018; Felipe, Mehta, Ree 2014).

This paper investigates the extent to which technological restructuring and government policy can impact women’s access to decent work in Indonesian manufacturing. Industrial policies that embrace technological change and confront the power structure of global value chains hypothetically work to narrow structural gaps and increase realized benefits from trade and FDI. However, if they are to be successful, they must be planned alongside gender aware employment policies and protections, as well as social infrastructure enhancements that allow for inclusive social upgrading. This paper analyses structural change in overall and gendered patterns of employment and technology in textiles/garments, electronics, and auto parts in Indonesia.

Preliminary evidence suggests that tinkering around the edges with policy cannot itself change the base conditions of the north-south relationship regarding trade and FDI. Furthermore, without direct attention to gender related infrastructure in the care economy and anti-discrimination labor law enforcement in labor markets, women’s participation in manufacturing will still be contingent on low-cost price competitive sectors. Large oligopolistic firms and buyers are still the most likely to govern distribution of the gains from global relations and workers, particularly women, are likely to feel the pain of that uneven relationship.

Spatializing Social Reproduction: Everyday Lives of Migrant Women Factory Workers in Tamil Nadu, India

Sirisha Naidu
,
University of Missouri-Kansas City

Abstract

Debates over spaces of production and reproduction have long animated multi-disciplinary
feminist scholarship on women’s labor. Even while feminists have argued against the binary of
women’s productive and reproductive work, the focus of these debates has primarily centered
around capital centric relations of labor, and not so much around questions of existence, and forms of cooperation that exceed capital-labor relations. In this article, we explore the social relationships and reproductive labors that working-class migrant women workers undertake at home and in their workplace as they mobilize to transform (or attempt to transform) their social conditions. The article is based on fieldwork with migrant women workers employed in a phone assembly factory in Tamil Nadu, India.
JEL Classifications
  • J1 - Demographic Economics
  • B5 - Current Heterodox Approaches