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

Women’s employment in the textile manufacturing sectors of Bangladesh and Morocco
faced with some difficulty. Women learn to fear authority, which is
often constructed as male authority — that of the father, husband or
older brother. This situation is reproduced within the factory and is
maintained and manipulated by the bosses in the production process.
The characteristic feature of the management style in all three
types of factories is authoritarian. Indeed, human resources
“management” emphasizes its controlling rather than its training role
in the textile industry. In the garment and knitwear sectors, the
hierarchy is organized so that women work directly under supervisors,
who exercise their authority in a different way to the factory heads.
The supervisors consist of the head of the workshop, who is usually a
man, and the heads of the assembly lines, who can be men or women.
The supervisors have the most direct authority over the women
workers: through them the factory heads issue their orders to the
labour force. It is the same situation in the carpet sector, except that it
is the maalma who has the authority over the weavers. But she in turn,
together with the weavers, has to submit to the authority of the
workshop head.
The relationship between workers and their immediate
supervisors tends to be a primarily coercive one, which is seen as the
only way of ensuring maximum production. The interviews with
factory heads suggest that management models where worker
responsibility is enhanced (e.g. “responsibilization”) were deemed
inappropriate for Morocco textile factories.
There must be authority, but it should not be abused as people are
sensitive. You have to handle them properly. As we say, give them a
slap with a velvet glove. Too much authority doesn’t work, no
authority and trying to make them responsible doesn’t work either.
(Head of a garment factory)
While the supervisors exercise direct authority, it is the head of
the firm who plays the role of arbiter when tensions explode between
the women workers and the heads of the workshops or of the assembly
lines. This sometimes improves the image of the factory owner among
the women workers and diminishes that of the workshop heads.
Generally, the authority of the factory head seems to be legitimate in
the eyes of the women workers, whatever the sector. This legitimacy
stems from the fact that he is the owner of the factory (moul sharika or
moul al maamal) and is usually relatively well educated. The spatial
distance from the workers also lends to the legitimacy of the factory
head: his distance inspires fear and respect.
In all sectors the authority of the workshop head, as opposed to
that of the factory head, is not readily accepted by the women workers
84