Women's Employment - United Nations Research Institute for Social ...

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Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco militancy and acquiescence given the lack of more attractive employment options (Pearson, 1998). Elson and Pearson (1981), in their path-breaking work on women’s incorporation into export-oriented manufacturing in world market factories, provided a nuanced and insightful analytical framework for distinguishing its impact on gender subordination. They distinguished “three tendencies” in the relation between factory work and the subordination of women which suggested that factory work could either intensify the existing forms of gender subordination, decompose them, or recompose new forms of gender subordination (1981:31). However, as Pearson (1998) herself has recently argued, this analysis left uncontested the idea that women workers’ interactions with capital and patriarchy were somehow structurally determined rather than open to negotiation and reconstitution by women workers themselves. Such structuralist accounts, critics argued, rendered women workers “faceless and voiceless” (Wolf, 1992:9) and attributed much more personality and animation to capital than to the women it exploits (Ong, 1988:84). At a more general level, the oversight highlighted some of the difficulties of integrating an actor-orientation in structuralist analyses. Some of the feminist research that was recording women’s own understandings of their work, and their experiences of engagement with factory management, provided somewhat diverse answers to some of the key questions that Elson and Pearson (1981) had raised. In-depth anthropological studies carried out in the 1970s and 1980s suggested that in the East Asian societies with sizeable ethnic Chinese populations, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, family and kinship systems marked by strong gender and age hierarchies and emphasis on intergenerational obligations were producing a perverse “dutiful daughters” syndrome, whereby parents took their daughters out of school early and pushed them into the labour market, while they channeled their daughters’ earnings into the education of their sons (Greenhalgh, 1985; Kung, 1983; Salaff, 1990). Despite their earnings, opting out of familial residential arrangements was constrained by the expectation that women remain at home until married, by the obligation to “repay” parents and also by public housing policies which were either given only to families according to need criterion (Hong Kong), or organized through tightly supervised dormitories (Taiwan) (Salaff, 1990). Indicative of the extent to which the East Asian family system had dampened the transformatory potential of factory work was the observation that one of the few ways in which these young women gain satisfaction is 14
Introduction by repaying their “debt” (of birth and upbringing) to their families (Lim, 1990). Wolf’s (1992) account of industrialization in rural Java suggested that the young female factory employees there did not seem to submit their needs to the betterment of the family economy in the way that Taiwanese daughters did. Wolf in fact argued that factory work in Java was giving young women the tools with which to “hack and whittle away at parental and patriarchal controls over their lives, at least for a certain period, with longer-term implications such as deciding when and whom to marry” (1992:254). However, the increased field of maneuvering that factory work had offered the Javanese daughters at home was matched by different patriarchal controls in the factory setting that kept these factory women “relatively acquiescent, poorly paid and vastly unprotected in industrial jobs that are often dangerous” (Wolf, 1992:254). The increased voice and agency in the familial sphere did not seem to carry over into the factory: the managers and the work discipline seemed to be much less flexible and much more overwhelming than were parents in their rules and discipline. A similar conclusion emerged from research on garment factory workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh (Kabeer, 1995). Prior to the growth of the garment industry, women’s entry into the public domain in search of employment had previously been associated with dire economic need. The availability of factory work, Kabeer argued, had not altered some of the striking features of gender subordination in this context, such as women’s dependence on male protection (even though it may have reduced their dependence on male provision). Nevertheless, women’s ability to earn a wage (whether their wages disappeared into a common pool, were retained under their own management or handed over to or appropriated by household heads or other senior members) had made a difference in how women were perceived and treated, as well as in their feelings of self-worth. The increased sense of power became even more visible in moments of crisis when the expanded possibilities offered by the strengthening of women’s “fallback position” allowed them to walk out of, or not enter into, relationships which undermined their agency in unacceptable ways (Kabeer, 1995:35). The chapters on Bangladesh in this volume indicate that women there are still largely constrained by societal norms and limitations to depend on marriage for long-term security. The implications of industrial employment for women within the household must be evaluated in this context. Afsar establishes that female factory workers 15
Page 1 and 2: Women’s Employment in the Textile
Page 3 and 4: This United Nations Research Instit
Page 6: Acknowledgements Many people have b
Page 9 and 10: notwithstanding the inertia of the
Page 11 and 12: Carol Miller is a policy analyst on
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Page 15 and 16: Introduction 1 Introduction 1 Shahr
Page 17 and 18: Introduction Table 1: Basic indicat
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Page 21 and 22: Introduction The chapters on Bangla
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Page 33 and 34: Introduction their bargaining power
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Becoming a garment worker 5Becoming
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Becoming a garment worker Cole P. D
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Women’s employment in the textile
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