ABSTRACT
This article provides an introduction to and overview of the current ‘state of affairs’ about the connections between globalization, gender, labour and resistance. Although feminist scholars, in particular, have addressed the gendered dimensions of globalization and its impact on labour markets since the late 1980s, this collection takes us beyond this early work and addresses what has happened in recent years. We suggest that, despite many efforts to improve women’s empowerment through increased access to (material) resources and remunerated activities, their situation on the labour market is in many cases still precarious. In addition, according to ILO statistics men’s position on the labour market has also worsened due to the continuing implementation of neoliberal economic policies and the economic and financial crises of 2008–2009. To better understand the implications of these developments the authors in this collection suggest that applying an intersectional approach is imperative, especially to reveal the multidimensional nature of the gender-labour-globalization nexus and women’s (and men’s) contestations to these transformations.
Introduction
Social movements, academics and policy makers have been addressing globalization-related issues and their gendered dimensions since the 1990s.Footnote1 Questions that have been raised include the potentially positive and negative, as well as differentiated, effects of globalization for men and women, especially when applying an intersectional lens. In other words, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, education and age are all important dimensions to take on board when we analyse the effects of globalization for men and women. This collection builds on these insights and brings together analyses of how women and men have resisted or contested these transformations. Has women’s increased participation in labour markets led to their empowerment or emancipation? Have their contestations and resistances resulted in overall improvements of labour conditions? Or, alternatively, have these efforts not significantly changed their position in society? In other words, do we witness a situation of old wine in new bottles?
As research has suggested, globalization has also transformed and been affected by rearticulations of hegemonic and subordinate masculinities and femininities as well as heteronormativities.Footnote2 While the ‘old’ international division of labour focused on labour as geographically determined, with mostly low-skilled, agricultural and resource-extractive related jobs in the periphery and high-skilled and manufacturing jobs in the core, the Global Division of Labour suggests that the geographical determinants of labour are less important.Footnote3 These ‘globalization-induced’ transformations as well as their contestations have been going on for considerable time, resulting in increased women’s participation in labour markets (as percentage of total female population) in the European Union, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean (see ).
Table 1. Labour force participation rate, female (% of female population ages 15+), per region (1990–2018).
In the regions of North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, female labour participation remained virtually the same, while in the rest of the regions female labour participation went down (see ). In particular in the Global South women’s participation has increased, in some cases significantly, since the late 1980s when we consider their participation in relation to the total labour force (see ). In particular female labour participation increased in the regions of the European Union, Latin America and the Caribbean, the Middle East and North Africa, North America and Sub-Saharan Africa, while in the other regions their participation remained relatively stable over time (see ).
Table 2. Labour force, female (%of total labor force), per region (1990–2018).
Many women joined formal or informal labour markets out of necessity, as debt-related structural adjustment programmes eliminated food subsidies and other social programmes directed at the poor.Footnote4 Others responded to globalization-related transformations of labour markets, i.e. the Global Division of Labour, which targeted women for specific types of work, such as jobs in the service sector, export processing zones or care work, among others.Footnote5 Men’s labour participation, in turn, also underwent significant changes with declining rates of labour participation in all regions, and with many losing stable (and unionized) jobs in the manufacturing sector (see ).Footnote6
Table 3. Labour force, male (% of male labor force), per region (1990–2018).
Women’s increased labour participation was partially out of economic necessity but is also related to their increased ‘emancipation’ and empowerment, which was supported internationally by the United Nations through its focus on gender equality.Footnote7 Yet, 22 years after the International Women’s Conference in Beijing and its Platform for Action, the advancement in women’s economic participation has not resulted in an equivalent progress in gender equality. Instead, there continues to exist gender inequality as women are overrepresented in those sectors that tend to have low salaries and bad working conditions, including a lack of job security, pensions, and few benefits.Footnote8 While this is the case for women in the Global South, it also resonates with the situation many women in the Global North are facing.
Contributions to this collection present a gender analysis of how these issues are articulated in concrete contexts. It does not therefore pretend to be representative, but rather provides a set of articles that engage with the question of how gender, labour and globalization in the Global South are being experienced in such contexts. The contributions reflect different scales of analysis, with some being more regionally focused, while others analyse a specific economic sector or even the connections among gender, labour and authority structures in a specific industry. Several common themes arise from the articles in this collection. For one, the increased participation of women in labour markets since the early 1990s does not necessarily mean that they have ‘benefitted’ from globalization, especially in terms of an improvement in gender equality. While there are certainly improvements in women’s positions, their insertion into precarious jobs and secondary, often segmented, labour markets may have enhanced their visibility and access to income, but this has not necessarily entailed profound transformations in gender roles.
As all the articles in this collection show, one needs to use an intersectional approach to analyse and understand the complex lived realities of women’s, often precarious, labour market participation, their subject positionalities (based on race, ethnicity, class, age, education, sexuality, religion etc.), and dominant gender roles and expectations. In other words, there is no clear linearity between increased labour participation in the context of globalization, empowerment and gender equality. Further, as some of the articles illustrate, despite local and transnational organizing and activism to improve labour conditions as well as gender equality, there is a high degree of malleability which prevents profound transformations toward better labour conditions and gender equality to really materialize.
Articles in this collection
The article by Maria Eugenia de la O and Maria Pacheco clearly illustrates these points.Footnote9 Providing an overview of how neoliberal globalization has been introduced in Latin America and its impact on male and female workers as well as gender relations more generally, the authors conclude that labour market segmentation and continued gender inequality go hand in hand. According to the authors ‘[g]lobalization in Latin America is primarily the product of direct foreign investment, the opening of local markets, and the deregulation of labour markets through measures that favour labour flexibility’.Footnote10 Using five countries in the region for their comparative analysis, de la O and Pacheco find that women constitute about 40% of the labour force in these countries, yet their insertion into the labour market is highly precarious with about 44% to almost 80% of them working in the informal sector, depending on the country. The authors suggest that a combination of neoliberal policies, aiming for economic growth through raising production for exports and a flexibilization of labour markets, has increased labour market related inequalities along gender lines, as labour markets are now highly segmented. This segmentation which has resulted in female workers being channelled into low-end, precarious jobs and facing higher risk of unemployment, while male workers are slightly better of as they face less unemployment and are more likely to gain access to jobs with higher productivity. Moreover, women generally are still responsible for taking care of children and performing other household chores. The authors conclude that new gender inequalities have emerged in the context of segmented labour markets based on what they label structural and conjunctural factors. The structural factors are embedded in traditional gender roles and expectations that shape the insertion of women into formal and informal labour markets. The conjunctural factors are a reflection of global trends that have affected labour markets in general: flexibilization, precariousness and individualization. They conclude that
The first years of Latin America’s globalization seem to have benefitted women by facilitating their insertion in formal, paid labour markets. However, this scenario became less promising in later years due to changes in the quality of employment and the number of jobs available … . This perspective allows for a more nuanced interpretation of the labour markets’ transformations that occurred as local economies opened up to international markets as well as the increasingly global nature of precarious work. After three decades of changes, female jobs strongly reflect multiple expressions of gender inequality and structural deficiencies.Footnote11
De la O and Pacheco’s analysis clearly shows how the early assumptions about a positive relationship between women’s labour market participation and increased empowerment as well as gender equality need to be contextualised. Undoubtedly, some women have benefitted from their labour market participation, but others have found themselves facing multiple (and additional) forms of gender inequality. However, men have also faced increasing job-related forms of precariousness, generating more emigration to the United States in particular.
The next two articles by Domínguez and Quintero, and Fajardo-Fernández et al., focus on how transformations in global production, resulting in the relocation of production processes to the Global South since the 1970s, have created a secondary, precarious labour market for women in export processing zones or maquila (assemblage) industries.Footnote12 Although geographically in different contexts and even continents, the experiences of male and female workers in the export processing zones in Mexico, Central America and Morocco show interesting similarities, not least because the Moroccan government used Mexico’s policies as reference.Footnote13 Both articles emphasize not only the multiple, intersecting forms of oppression and exploitation, but also how women workers have developed strategies of resistance, either through organized resistance in the public sphereFootnote14 or by navigating multiple oppressions by renegotiating the so-called bread-winner model at the household level.Footnote15
In their analysis of mobilizing women workers in the maquila industries in Central America and Mexico, Domínguez and Quintero demonstrate that the societal actors involved still reproduce a differentiation between practical and strategic gender needs, already observed by Maxine Molyneux and Caroline Moser in the late 1980s and early 1990s.Footnote16 Their analysis shows the persistence of such strategies and articulations of resistance and mobilizations. More specifically, the article addresses women’s labour organizing from the perspective of Core Labour Standards (CLS). After a feminist-critical review of the discussion around CLS and their implementation, including using a Corporate Social Responsibility argument, the authors present the experience of several organizations, both NGOs and trade unions, in organizing women workers. These experiences reflect the classical dichotomy between how small trade unions, representing mostly women, and NGOs (eg. Comité Fronterizo de Obreras in Mexico) represent practical gender interests. The former tend to focus on maternity leave, family associated rights and salary issues. In contrast, feminist-oriented NGOs such as Factor X in Mexico or MT in El Salvador, tend to emphasize gender-strategic interests, in particular by raising women’s consciousness and highlighting gender contradictions. Applying an intersectional lens to these experiences of labour organizing reveals the contradictions between different structures or mechanisms of oppression, in particular those of gender and class, but also those of ethnicity, ideology or sexuality. The authors conclude that organizing women workers in export processing zones is complicated as feminist organizations and trade unions encounter barriers to position themselves at the intersection of two oppression mechanisms, that of gender and class. In their words:
The gender-class intersection is not easy to accommodate, as we have seen in most of the cases presented. This may be a reflection of the difficulties of the feminist movement to reach working class women, or of trade unions to become feminist or even reach an understanding and cooperation with feminist movements. Yet, trade unions are the only structures that may represent workers in general and women workers in particular; NGOs cannot replace them in this function.Footnote17
Fajardo-Fernández et al. assume a slightly critical stance toward intersectionality and, using some of the Spanish language feminist literature, suggest that an intersectional approach needs to be ‘contextualised.’ Taking this as starting point they claim that the relocation of global production processes is also embedded in racial dynamics with racialized women and men entering not just segmented, but instead segregated labor markets. Focusing on the two export processing zones of Grand Casablanca and Tangier-Tetouan in Morocco they analyse how these have generated precarious jobs for women workers through racialized and gendered ideologies about their docility. These racialized and gendered ideologies are accompanied by dominant narratives of ‘victimization’ and ‘women without agency.’ Yet, the authors suggest that women and men are engaging in adaptive or accommodating strategies to deal with new lived realities at the household level, which challenge the narrative that women are without agency:
In light of this, the ideal of the ‘two-earner family’ emerges as a more practical model to organize households. In this model, women collaborate in the earnings and men collaborate in the domestic work as a form of adaptation to the requirements of modern life imposed within the framework of other structural changes.Footnote18
As in the case of de la O and Pacheco’s article on Latin America, Fajardo-Fernández et al. conclude that the jobs generated by globalization have not ‘empowered women,’ in the sense of improving their living conditions or increasing gender equality. However, they demonstrate that globally induced industrial relocation, although embedded in gendered and racialized narratives, may also generate changes in the day-to-day lived realities of women and men in terms of their gender roles. Only a critical intersectional approach will reveal the multiple complexities involving changes in global industrial relocation to the Global South.
The final article by Rutherford and BussFootnote19 resonates with Fajardo-Fernández el al.’s analysis in that it discusses global restructuring processes and their effects on families working in the artisanal and small-scale gold mining industry (ASGM) in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. Using an intersectional analysis, the authors explore how changing authority arrangements in these sites frame and can either encourage or hinder women workers’ empowerment. They find that based on their positionalities in terms of ethnicity, class or family belonging, women will survive, fare well in or be excluded from these sites. Rutherford and Buss suggest that the gendered nature of these authority arrangements, as well as the failure by authorities and NGOs to consider social differentiation, structure and affect the possibilities of women miners to organize and create better social conditions for workers in ASGM sites.
Conclusion
The articles in this collection go beyond the earlier work on the connections between globalization, gender and labour. The contributing authors find that there is no direct (linear) relationship between men’s and women’s participation in the labour market, gender equality and (women’s) empowerment. Although this collection does not pretend to exhaustively address the distinct complex realities of the connections between gender, labour and globalization, the articles deal with some shared concerns and their articulations in the Global South. As such they reflect a new ‘generation’ of studies that use a critical intersectional analysis to unpack the complex lived realities of women and men in the context of the relocation of global industrial production and resource extraction. Increased women’s labour participation rates, especially in feminized economic sectors, have not necessarily resulted in more gender equality or women’s empowerment. The precariousness of their jobs and an
increasingly hostile (anti-labour organizing) environment have contributed to this situation. Yet, as the articles also show, women workers have engaged in different forms of organization and resistance, as well as accommodating strategies at the household level.
In sum, while marginalized groups have found new opportunities to work in labour markets generated by globalization, their experiences have not necessarily been positive. Yet, precarious employment and related regulatory frameworks have also been a source for new forms of resistance that have emerged in the Global South. As the contributions to this collection demonstrate, these complex realities demand critical analyses that capture such multi-scalar and multi-dimensional transformations.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marianne H. Marchand
Marianne H. Marchand holds a chair in International Relations at the Department of International Relations and Political Science, Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico. She has widely published from an intersectional feminist, postcolonial perspective on issues related to gender, globalization, development, social movements and migration. Her most recent work is on the ‘worlding’ of cities in the Global South and the implications in terms of spatial and relational inequalities and exclusions.
Edmé Domínguez R.
Edmé Domínguez R.. is Associate Professor in Peace and Development Studies and a lecturer in Latin American Studies, Gender studies and Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg. She has several publications on the issues of Soviet foreign policy towards Latin America and since the 1990s on the social and gender implications of NAFTA for Mexico, on gender issues related to citizenship, political participation, labour, transnational activism and free trade agreements particularly in the case of Mexico, El Salvador and Bolivia.
Notes
1. See for instance: Afshar and Barrientos, Women, Globalization, and Fragmentation in the Developing World; Marchand and Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring; Amrita Basu et al., “Globalization and Gender (special issue),”; Benería, Gender, Development and Globalization.
2. Lind, “Querying globalization”.
3. O’Brien and Williams, Global Political Economy.
4. See, for instance, Benería and Feldman, Unequal Burden; Benería, Gender, Development; Deere and León, Rural Women and State Policy; and de la O and Pacheco’s contribution in this collection.
5. Standing, “Global Feminization”.
6. Ibid.
7. Cornwall, “Women’s Empowerment,”; Kabeer, “Economic Pathways to Women’s Empowerment”.
8. Standing, “Global Feminization,”; and Marchand and Runyan, Gender and Global Restructuring.
9. De la O and Pacheco, “Globalization and Gender Segregation in Latin American Labour Markets”.
10. Ibid., 1.
11. Ibid., 13.
12. Domínguez and Quintero, “The Fight for Improved Labour Standards,”; and Fajardo-Fernández et al., “Intersectionality Applied to the Study of Global Economy”.
13. Fajardo-Fernández et al., “Intersectionality Applied to the Study of Global Economy,” 9.
14. Domínguez and Quintero, “The Fight for Improved Labour Standards”.
15. Fajardo-Fernández et al., “Intersectionality Applied to the Study of Global Economy”.
16. Molyneux, ”Mobilization without Emancipation?”; and Moser, Gender Planning and Development.
17. Domínguez and Quintero, “The Fight for Improved Labour Standards,” 11.
18. Fajardo-Fernández et al., “Intersectionality Applied to the Study of Global Economy,” 5.
19. Rutherford and Buss, “Gendered Governance and Socio-Economic Differentiation”.
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