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

Gender and employment in Moroccan textile industries
punishments; output and quality; and perceptions of gender
differences in the production process.
In terms of production methods, it is worth noting that the
garment and knitwear factories are based mainly on a Taylorian
system, whereas the carpets factories are semi-artisanal (Belghazi and
Bourqia, 1997). Especially in the latter case, there is a tendency to rely
on a small corps of regular, semi-skilled or skilled workers, with the
majority of workers being unskilled, causal labourers, who work either
in the factory or in their own homes (Belghazi and Bourqia, 1997).
While a number of the factories are direct exporters, there are
several, especially in the garment sector, that receive sub-contracts
from foreign firms. Where factories are engaged in sub-contracting
arrangements, they are likely to prefer a flexible labour force able to
respond to orders as they are received, which may explain the use of
causal labour observed in this survey.
Table 2:
Distribution of the sample according to the position of the
employees
Male
Female
Workers 24 176
Head of team 1 4
Supervisor* 0 14
Head of workshop 2 0
Total 27 194
*The supervisor (contrôleur) is the person who supervises and controls the
quality of the items by a a team.
This distribution shows that the major difference between men
and women in terms of position they hold in the hierarchy of the
factory is the position of head of workshop (chef d’atelier) which in
most cases observed were men. Because this position implies the
implementation of rules of discipline and the use of authority, the
heads of factories believe it must be handled by men.
Because of the sensitivity of the issue of causal labourers for the
heads of the factories (who were informed by the research team about
the content the questionnaire), this question was not asked directly.
However, we have taken registration in social security as an indicator
of being casual or regular, because when an employee becomes regular
he or she is registered by the head of the factory in social security.
This fact thus provides information on the percentage of regular and
casual employees.
65