Fishy business. The Social Impact of SST.pdf - Act Now!

The longer these women work at the factory to gain ‘work experience’ (as every missionary,volunteer and/or administrator has suggested throughout their lives), the poorer they willbecome, and thus the more likely they are to resort to selling sex.The Provincial Planner is talking about shifting Wewak town to Angorm, relocating the MurikLakes people,. Establishing an International airport, and an international wharf at the MurikLakes, and extending the highway from Madang on to the Sepik River. What are these plans?Are they fabulous or real?In a 1973 speech on the Eight Aims, Somare said (1975:110):Equality has always been important in Papua New Guinea societies. We have had our bigmen and even chiefs in some societies. But we have never had the great contrast betweenrich and poor that you see in so-called modern societies. If we were poor, at least we wereall poor together. And the big man did not forget his obligations to those less well off.Every man or woman could count on their family to provide for them. It is this spirit ofsharing and equality that we must work to preserve, even as we try to gain some of thebenefits of modern technology.In one sense, SST represents an important site of PNG’s labour transformation, from a use valueto exchange value system. But exchange values have long been a part of PNG society, and whilethey have implicated social relations and traditional use values, nowehere is the context asthorouigh as that of a factory, where workers must forsake their whole day (and all traditionalsocial activities) to ear wage labor. In this case, the factory also makes no pretense of a socialquid pro quo in the provision of real benefits like transportation, a viable wage, or managementtraining. The factory operates as a self-sufficient entity, the quintessential Western individual,rather like the early colonial administrator, whose investment in this ‘savage’ land could never beconstrued as personal.One of the most important characteristics of contemporary industrialization is the increasingstress on export production. Given the pressure by global lending institutions like the IMF andWorld Bank on replacing imports with export production, we will no doubt see processingfactories being established more and more frequently in the developing world. In a recent study ofindustrialization in Korea, Seung-kyung Kim (Rothstein and Blim 1992:207-238) WomenWorkers and the Labor Movement in South Korea) describes how in order to promote exportproduction, the South Korean government increased state involvement, first in the creation ofexport processing zones and then in labor control. These are realistic options for PNG. Elsewhere,as for example in India, governments have adopted the strategy of encouring non resident citizensto re-invest in their home country (Ibid: 238-246).Contrary to the old modernization thesis, which predicted an erosion of kin ties with the spread ofindustrialization, such ties continue to be important in the developing world, and have beenreshaping the nature of industrialization, especially in Asia (see Mahbubani 1998).But the picture is complicated by gender. Industrialization almost never favors women, and infact tends to reify patriarchal herarchies that already exist or that arrive, like a Trojan Horse, inthe factory itself. There are no precedents in customary society for the way the women on theloining line at SST are treated by supervisors, or treated in general—as a corps of assemblyworkers. Whether they are entering the market as wage laborers or as unpaid labor in householdenterprises, women rarely have the options men do, and their access to cash is almost always less168