Immigrants

Over the last fifteen years, Third World women have been incorporated into the workforce as employees of multinational and national firms on a scale that represents a new phase in the history of women. Two simultaneous trends have contributed to this development: the expansion of export manufacturing industries abroad and the massive increase in immigration into the U.S.

These two trends have rarely been viewed as related. But there are a number of important links. Both immigration and overseas production provide corporations with a low-wage labor force and with a weapon to fight the demands of organized workers in the U.S. Businesses that cannot move overseas and must operate where the demand is, e.g. restaurants and hospitals, can employ immigrants while businesses that are able to move abroad can employ low-wage workers in developing countries. But there is another, more basic connection. The same set of processes that have promoted the location of plants and offices abroad also have generated a large supply of low wage jobs in the U.S. for which immigrant workers are generally hired.

One indication of the connection is that the main immigrant-producing countries have been the same countries receiving high levels of U.S. investment in manufacturing. For example, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) statistics show that South Korea and the Philippines, both countries with heavy U.S. investment in manufacturing, sent 220,000 and 335,000 immigrants to the U.S., respectively, between 1970 and 1979. By contrast, Indonesia, a country that receives little U.S. investment in manufacturing, sent only 6,000 immigrants during those ten years.

But this is a curious phenomenon, for immigrants leave behind economies where, according to United Nations figures, annual employment rates grew by an average of six to seven percent during the 1970s and migrate to developed countries with depressed annual employment growth rates of about .4 percent.

The Uprooting of People

Presuming many people migrate in search of better employment opportunities, how can the high level of emigration from these countries be explained?

The growth of trade and investment and the spread of modern forms of production have disrupted traditional, non-wage forms of work, such as farming and craft making. The expansion of export manufacturing and export agriculture in developing countries, stimulated by foreign investment from industrialized countries, has pushed new segments of the population into regional and long-distance migrations.

With the introduction of commercial agriculture, small farmers are pushed off the land and left without means of subsistence. Many of the men, and often their families, emigrate from rural areas to urban areas in search of paid employment.

In the case of export manufacturing, industries recruit young women from the rural areas for newly-created maquiladora-type jobs. Unemployed wage workers, mostly men, are not hired. This disrupts traditional social and work settings, for the departure of a young woman means the loss of a key worker producing for the household and often for the local market. It also means the loss of potential mates for young men in a situation where mates are partners vital to the traditional way of life. This causes men to emigrate along with some women family members who were not drawn into the export factories.

At the same time, the high turnover rates in the free trade zones and the strong preference for women aged 16 to 23 has contributed to growing unemployment among women. Western cultural influences on zone workers together with the disruption of their traditional role in the household minimize the chance that a laid off woman worker will return to her rural home. Emigration emerges as an option precisely because the Western influence and strong foreign presence create in women workers psychological and other links with the U.S. The fact that these women apply their labor day after day to goods or services geared to the U.S. market is not lost on the workers. Many grow to feel capable of doing the same jobs in the U.S. It is interesting to note that more than half the Asian immigrants over the last decade are women from countries with heavy export manufacturing and other forms of U.S. influence. For example, INS figures show that 81 percent of immigrants from both the Philippines and South Korea were women, the large majority between the ages of 20 and 29.

Hence, the disruptive effects of multinational presence in developing countries can be seen as stimulating emigration of both former female factory workers and women traveling as a dependent of a family group. These join female immigrants in a broad stratum of occupations, from domestics to nurses.

Once in the U.S., Where do Women Migrants Go?

The same set of basic processes that have promoted emigration from several developing countries have also promoted immigration into several booming global cities in the U.S.

The global city has assumed an expanded role in the restructured world economy. While manufacturing activity in the U.S. was once heavily centralized, today manufacturing is widely dispersed throughout the country and the world. Office work is undergoing a similar transformation as telecommunication links allow corporations to send clerical work to lowwage areas in the U.S. and overseas (see box).

This break-up of operations requires elaborate planning, coordination, internal administration, marketing distribution, and access to worldwide political and economic information-all activities organized at company headquarters. Headquarter operations, concentrate in major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and Houston.

This dense concentration of management, control, generate a large number of very high-income jobs. At the same time, however, they also generate a much larger supply of low wage jobs-jobs to maintain, clean, or provide services such as food to these firms, or former middleincome jobs that are deskilled as a result of the introduction of technology. Furthermore, the presence of many high-income professionals in the city generate a vast supply of low wage jobs to service their lifestyles. Residential building attendants, dog walkers, housekeepers for the twocareer family, gourmet food shop and restaurant workers, etc. - all these workers are needed and needed cheaply. Since native low-wage workers are less willing to accept them, immigrants, particularly immigrant women, tend to fill these jobs.

Second, the dynamic growth in these cities as well as the massive supply of immigrant workers have promoted the expansion of "downgraded" manufacturing, especially in cities like New York and Los Angeles. Sweatshops and piecework in garments, footwear, furs, leather, and electronics industries are growing rapidly. Immigrant entrepreneurs start small operations subcontracted by large buyers or firms. For example, many investors now produce garments directly in New York and Los Angeles rather than producing in Taiwan or Hong Kong for export to the U.S. And while overall employment in the New York garment industry is steadily falling, it is growing in Chinatown to the point where shops are spilling over into Queens and Brooklyn.

The data show that immigrant women are heavily employed in these low-level manufacturing jobs. The percentage of immigrant women in manufacturing in New York and in Los Angeles is higher than 1) the percentage of the total U.S. female labor force in manufacturing; 2) the percentage of women in manufacturing in the home countries of these immigrants; and 3) the percentage of these immigrants themselves who were in manufacturing before leaving their home countries.

While low wage and high wage jobs are booming in these cities, there does not seem to be a similar expansion of middleincome jobs. These jobs have dwindled in numbers as new technology has upgraded some former middle income jobs and downgraded others. A pronounced polarization is occurring in the labor force, with predominantly male Americans occupying the upper income ranks and a disproportionate number of minority and immigrant women occupying low income ranks.

Saskia Sassen-Koob is currently a siting professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. This article is based on her forthcoming book: The Foreign Investment Connection: Rethinking Immigration.

Women, Offices, and the New Technology After Third World women assemble parts for computers and word processors, many of these high technology machines end up in offices in industrialized countries. There, women service workers use them. The rapid introduction of "new technology" is transforming office work, long a bastion of female labor. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, computerization is underway or planned for occupations that are now at least 90 percent staffed by women: file clerks, bookkeepers, secretaries, bank tellers, and various finance and insurance jobs. But reports at a recent conference suggest that this trend does not bode well for women: office automation in the U.S. had led to job loss, job stress, decreased, promotion prospects, and exposure to new health hazards. Though high technology does create new jobs, those jobs are in scientific and technical fields for which few women have adequate training. Women who lose their jobs due to office automation are often not retrained. And, as British social researcher Ursula Huws finds, "Women are not only more likely to lose their jobs, they are also more likely to find that the quality of work has deteriorated in the jobs that remain." Support staff work is increasingly reduced to repetitive, less creative processes, such as rapid data typing and print out. As one Boston office worker said of the dehumanizing effect of her work, "I feel like saying to my boss 'What do you think. I am an extension of this machine'?" Office automation also serves to reinforce the sexual division of labor between the predominantly female support staff and the higher-skilled, predominantly male engineers and software programmers. Recent studies conducted at the Technical University of West Berlin indicated that working a computer display screen leads to stress and to visual, musculoskeletal, and nervous system problems. The U.S. National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health has recommended that display screen workers take breaks of 15 minutes for every hour of intense or highly repetitive work. As with factories, advances in telecommunications have made it possible to shift office work away from the main headquarters, vastly redistributing jobs. Companies are now locating parts of their operations in small towns where the cost of living and salaries are lower. Some companies are beginning to ship office work to "electronic cottages" - suburban homes where middle class women, a low-wage, educated labor force, work on home computers. And some banks and corporations are even shipping clerical tasks overseas, particularly to the English-speaking Caribbean, for return via satellite. Women workers in Barbados, for example, perform these tasks for $1.20 per hour, compared with the $7 to $10 per hour a U.S. worker receives for the same task. Women are also organizing internationally. A conference on women and new technology held in Geneva June 19-22 brought together 80 women from Asia, Europe, and North America to present research, exchange ideas, and build international links among women workers. The conference participants resolved, among other things, to establish an international database on the issues of new technology/ Such strategies offer the hope that feminists may be able to creativel7 use new technology to their own advantage. This report was contributed by Anne Posthuma, who works for the Third World Women's Project of the Institute for Policy Studies.