{"id":83,"date":"2011-12-20T14:44:48","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T19:44:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/?p=83"},"modified":"2015-07-23T15:08:41","modified_gmt":"2015-07-23T19:08:41","slug":"in-chains-at-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid-gender-and-sweated-labor-in-global-apparel-production","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/in-chains-at-the-bottom-of-the-pyramid-gender-and-sweated-labor-in-global-apparel-production\/","title":{"rendered":"In Chains at the Bottom of the Pyramid : Gender and Sweated Labor in Global Apparel Production"},"content":{"rendered":"

Published on the blog site This week in Sociology<\/a>
\nOCTOBER 25, 2011<\/strong>
\nRobert J.S. Ross – Clark University<\/p>\n

Sweatshop conditions refer to long hours, low wages and oppressive conditions \u2013 dangerous unhealthy, psychologically abusive or squalid. In the global assembly line that often means a woman worker is doing the job.<\/p>\n

In the apparel industry, as an example, a majority of the production employees are female. These include the very large number of all apparel workers who are sewing machine operators.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 At the bottom of the pyramid of power and money, these workers toil for wages that often cannot support their livelihood \u2013 forcing families to send more workers, including children out into the economy to pool enough money to survive. The social science concept here is that of social reproduction:\u00a0 if a wage does not cover the costs of the workers existence and of the creation of the next generation of workers (children, their education and sustenance, etc) then the employer and industry enjoy a subsidy from unpaid labor of social reproduction.<\/p>\n

Ion much of the global apparel industry, for example, throughout Central America, the minimum wage for apparel workers is less the one-third of what it takes to support a family.\u00a0 Wages in Asia are so much lower than that that jobs are lost in Central America in favor even cheaper labor elsewhere.<\/p>\n

There are an number of factors that allow this situation to continue, including the highly competitive structure of the industry. Hardly any of the brand names in today\u2019s market own their own factories; instead, more or less anonymous contractor factories do the cutting and sewing, and there is an abundance of them. The business is like a bunch of scorpions in a bottle \u2013but the big brands and retailers hold the glass stopper!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Patriarchy and gender roles at the bottom of the pyramid<\/h2>\n

Women who take jobs in sweatshops most usually do so voluntarily \u2013 in the sense that there is rarely physical coercion or threat of violence that recruits them to or keeps them on the job.<\/p>\n

However\u00a0 coerced labor is a frequent if not a common occurrence among migrant workers.\u00a0 For example contract workers recruited in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to work in Jordanian garment factories have their passports taken, are kept under restrictive physical conditions, and in a couple of factories subject to sexual harassment and rape. Chinese migrant workers\u2019 first month\u2019s pay is kept as security on their yearlong contracts making the cost of escape from bad jobs the surrender of a month\u2019s pay. In a notorious case, Chinese owners created clones of Chinese migrant workers\u2019 dorms in the US Commonwealth of the Marianas (Guam) and were eventually found guilty of holding indentured labor.<\/p>\n

In more normal or formally regulated labor markets, traditional cultural and status norms may constrain the nature of women workers\u2019 choices such that they yield up their labor power for less than they might otherwise obtain as more nearly free agents.<\/p>\n

For example, Chinese women in New York\u2019s Chinatown may be instructed by fathers or husbands to accept work only within the neighborhood \u2013 both a protective and a controlling motivation. Restricting the options for work, inevitably, in a market economy, will restrict earning power.<\/p>\n

Given the triple burden of childcare, home-making, and paid work, sweatshops shops may permit practices that make concessions to women\u2019s roles as caretakers. Employers may allow young children to stay with mothers; hours of work may be suspended at mealtimes and resumed at night.<\/p>\n

Another norm among migrants and immigrants – often but not always gender-linked \u2013 is the practice or requirement of seeking jobs with kin. This is related to the broader practice of seeking jobs with co-ethnics or employers from the workers\u2019 home town or province. The literature on ethnic entrepreneurs sometimes praises\u00a0 such employers pointing out their competitive advantage in so-called ethnic niche markets. This becomes less attractive from the point of view at the bottom of the pyramid:\u00a0 they are able to exploit vulnerable and immobile labor as a means of lowering costs in relation to potential competitors. When the potential workers do not speak the language or dialect of the host city or country the advantage of the co-ethnic employer is clear, while the disadvantage of the worker in seeking more nearly advantageous employment is also clear.<\/p>\n

For young and unmarried women, given restricted labor market options, the opportunity to earn cash outside of unpaid household work may be a relatively liberating experience. Expected to labor for fathers or older brothers at home, cash jobs, of even low standards, may be quite appealing. This then is a rich paradox:\u00a0 but it is no more so than the birth of capitalism itself. To become a wage worker \u2013 a \u201cwage slave\u201d as the radical turn of the 20th<\/sup> century union, the IWW once put it\u2014is a step up from serfdom and legally coerced labor. Miserable wages are a step up from \u2013 usually an addition to –unpaid household labor.<\/p>\n

Gender norms and cultural practices facilitate exploitation. These include all those practices of co-ethnicity, and extended family ties that restricting choice for the prospective female employee. The contrast between the availability of cash compared to unpaid household labor may dampen the pain of low pay and long hours. The assignment of some tasks to women \u2013 sewing –and others to men \u2013 cutting and pressing \u2013 recruits for the largest work category those for whom it is customary to pay less. It has become culturally chic to repeat the phrase popularized by Mao Tse-Tong: women hold up half the sky.\u00a0 Even notorious sweatshop-defenders, Nicholas D Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn use the phrase.\u00a0 Perhaps we need a new version:\u00a0 women carry half the pyramid of power and exploitation on their backs. Maybe more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Published on the blog site This week in Sociology OCTOBER 25, 2011 Robert J.S. Ross – Clark University Sweatshop conditions refer to long hours, low wages and oppressive conditions \u2013 dangerous unhealthy, psychologically abusive or squalid. In the global assembly… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":406,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7115],"tags":[7118,7117,7119],"class_list":["post-83","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-published","tag-gender","tag-sociology","tag-sweat-shop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/406"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.clarku.edu\/rjsross\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}