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

Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco
against the potential for relative freedom from subordination
outside it.
The free mobility of capital, the downward spiral of labour
conditions, and political decisions by states and employers to eschew
responsibility for workers’ well-being are clearly important concerns
for large numbers of men and women. But political responses and
the search for coalescing strategies will most probably be shaped at
the juncture of three sets of issues: 1) despite being problematic, there
is a need to maintain these jobs, and very few women would like to
see their jobs disappear, 2) the high-wage/high-tech road may be an
option available to only a few countries and may be open to a limited
number of men (and even fewer women), 3) the agenda for social and
gender-equitable development needs to be widened to include the
conditions for social reproduction that can effectively subsidize the
social wage — this is an area that needs to be explored creatively
from a gender perspective. The political processes to drive this agenda
include national and international acts of solidarity, but in either
context the extent to which the interests of women workers can be
genuinely represented will depend critically on their politicized
presence in those movements.
Elson (1996) makes the important point that the observed
processes associated with global feminization are not intrinsically
interlinked: the flexibility of production made possible by
technological changes does not have to be associated with the erosion
of workers’ rights made possible by the unfettered mobility of capital,
or with political decisions by states and employers to eschew
responsibility for workers’ well-being. She also makes the critical
observation, from a gender perspective, that male norms of full-time
employment may not necessarily be the desirable norm to which all
workers do and should aspire. Similarly, the message that may be
drawn from women’s experiences with trade unions at the national
level is that the obvious workers’ priorities may be, in fact, implicit
male priorities.
Furthermore, as Battacharya and Rahman argue, even where
access to wage employment is of immediate advantage to women,
there is a need to look beyond such short-term advantages to longerterm
strategic gender interests. These will include continued access
to employment and enhanced gender equity in the labour market.
Access to employment will entail first, that these manufacturing
sectors remain competitive in world markets, and second, that women
not be displaced by men in the restructuring process. Continued
competitiveness will require increased productivity through
28