McCormick+Schmitz Handbook for value chain research on - PACA

no contact with the main contractor. Even if they could locate the contractor, they might
have difficulty bargaining with him, first because they would be speaking as individuals
and second because the lack of education of most homeworkers places them at an
immediate disadvantage. Furthermore, in some places homework is banned, thus putting
its participants outside the law and further reducing their bargaining power.
Homework is common in a number of labour-intensive industries, including clothing and
textiles. Exact numbers are very difficult to find. Homeworkers are usually under
represented in labour statistics because of their invisibility and the clandestine, sometimes
illegal, status of the work itself. Studies in individual countries, however, have shown that
homework is widespread. For example, Prugl (1992 and 1998) found that in Venezuela,
45% of clothing industry workers are homeworkers; in Thailand, the figure is 38%. Prugl
(1998) also found that homeworkers in Chile produced an estimated 60% of all women’s
and children’s clothing and 30% of all men’s clothing in the 1980s.
2. What is a global <strong>value</strong> <strong>chain</strong>?
Traditionally, homeworkers are analysed in their local context. This manual takes a
different starting point. Since, in our view, local conditions are often the result of global
<strong>for</strong>ces, we begin by looking at the place of homework in what have come to be called
“global <strong>value</strong> <strong>chain</strong>s.” The concept of a global <strong>value</strong> <strong>chain</strong> recognises that the production
of goods and services has become ‘globalized’. A shirt, <strong>for</strong> example, may be designed in
New York, cut in India, assembled in Kenya, and sold to a consumer in Los Angeles.
In the past, manufacturing usually happened in one place. Large firms had their design,
production, and marketing functions under one roof, or at least within easy reach of one
another. Firms with multiple plants might locate design and marketing at the head office,
but the manufacturing remained undivided. Each product was made, from start to finish,
in one place. Even the re-emergence of multinational corporations in the 1950s and 1960s
did not change this very much. Firms establishing plants in <strong>for</strong>eign countries undertook
the full range of manufacturing activities in each location.
By the 1970s, however, the picture started to change as multinational enterprises began to
locate labour-intensive activities in developing countries as part of a global restructuring
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