the Female Body GOVERNING

Productive Bodies 141
In the 1980s the economic downturn affected the labor force in
its entirety. As Jenson et al. (1988) explain, the expanse of global
capital on the world market shifted the economic structures of advanced
industrialized countries. “The link between mass production and stable
demand collapsed in the face of a process of increasing internalization of
capitalism and interpenetration of domestic economies by one another”
(p. 9). The effects of the ebbs and fl ows within global capital resulted
in a signifi cantly altered labor force. In the face of recession, businesses
responded by downsizing, cutting costs by turning full-time labor into
part-time labor, stagnating wages, and replacing human bodies with new
technologies. Businesses drastically altered their structure by shortening
product production time and increasing fl exibility in response to an
unpredictable global market (see Blackwelder, 1997, p 206; Jenson et
al., 1988, pp. 9–10).
Peter S. Albin and Eileen Appelbaum (1988) explain that in the
unstable 1980s economy, temporary work began to replace both fulltime
and part-time work. Although the proportion of female part-time
laborers had remained constant since the late 1970s, “the part-time
employment of women [became] increasingly involuntary” (p. 148) as
women who had previously had full-time positions were now redirected
to part-time work. Moreover, “involuntary part-time employment of
women, which accounted for 12% of part-time workers in 1970, counted
for 22% by 1986” (p. 148). Although part-time employment paralleled
“the expansion of traditional service industries, the growth of temporary
employment . . . outpaced the American economy as a whole” by the late
1980s (p. 148). In addition, with the intensifi cation of computers and
newly developing rapid communication systems, the labor force altered
as large companies that at one time employed a signifi cant amount of
full-time employees, began maintaining a “core” of full-time employees,
supplemented with temporary laborers (p. 149). These temporary
laborers were disposed of at the whim of the economy, not unlike the
part-time female laborers of the 1950s.
In this precarious and volatile economy, the laborers who possessed
traditional female characteristics were the most likely to survive. In
this new economy, an employable employee needed to be fl exible,
open to change, able to keep up with rapidly altering communication
systems, while navigating the rocky terrain of global capital. Emily
Martin (1994, 1995) articulates that the physical body of the worker, and
the organizational system of the corporation, must both be “fl exible.”
She (1995) writes, “The successful and ideal organization is no longer
a monolithic, hierarchical bureaucracy but a fl eeting, fl uid network of
alliances with great organizational fl exibility” (p. 225). The worker must