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

then men’s. Usually they’re excluded from all but the very lowest-paying jobs, and therefore havelittle choice but to become dependent on husbands or fathers.In Papua New Guinea, however, the proliferation of urban and peri-urban markets has been agood thing for women, giving them more control over household production and income. Someargue that this places more stress on traditional relations, but there is more indication that thedepressed combined household income is the greater contributor to domestic violence. It is notthe way women are working in the factory setting that places stress on kinship relations, but theprice of working there, in terms of household income and time, that threatens to erode the socialfabric. For as long as these young women work at the factory, they remain dependant on familyresources, on their husbands, fathers and brothers. As we’ve seen from some of the reports, theymay even turn to selling sex for extra income. But the unmarried women seem to consider theirwage as largely their own spending money, no doubt because it is so negligible. This alienatesthem from the expected role of young adults in traditional society, who actively contribute tocustomary and household expenses. Young women workers may be helping their families, to besure, but they’re also buying clothes and sundries that their new roles require. All this enrichesthe novelty and secondhand clothing businesses, and not the system of customary and householdobligations that requires lump sum payments. No doubt it is the women in the marketplace whoare now feeling the greater stress of making school, medical and compensation payments forthese households.Contemporary industrialization with its heavy reliance on small-scale production and kinshipdiffers sharply from the original industrial transformation of the West. In the Industrial Revlution,factories grew larger and larger and social relations became more impersonal. Some of thatimpersonality and factory growth has been exaggerated by social science models which focusedon those aspects of industrialization and ignored the persistence of kin relations and other"traditional" behaviors. However, although recent historical research has documented thecontinued presence of family and ethnic ties, petty commodity production, and homework notunlike that described in the case studies here, there was a clear and significant decline in suchpatterns.It was in the first industrial revolution that "the dispersed organization of labor gave way to thedevelopment of a new form of productive enterprise, the factory" (Wolf 1982:274). Under oneroof all types and phases of work were brought together and concentrated. Contemporaryindustrialization exhibits an opposite pattern, where processes and labour pools are widelydispersed around the globe. It is this new mobility of capital that, in some opinions, has led to theweakened state of labour. This is certainly true in the First World, where capitalism has morefreedom and labour less control. But labour is not just Western anymore, and great blocks ofworkers in the developing world now constitute potentially significant political and social powerbases. Workers on the SST production line are part of a family of SST employees operating inseveral countries (Taiwan, the US and PNG, at least) even if they remain ‘mystified’ andscattered and psychologically far drom an ‘imagined community’ (in the sense of BenedictAnderson [1991]) of educated union members. But it is precisely because they remain unaware ofthis, and exist in a local political context where they enjoy no labour protections, that PNG can bedescribed as an attractive environment for international investment. It’s always good to get inbefore a country’s established firm labour laws. Even better when the economic and political eliteare one and the same. So much the easier.But the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement in the western world has begun to closesome of these social loopholes. It begins with Eruopean companies affirming that corporate169