BOOK NOTES
ON WOMEN AND ECONOMICS Feminization of the Labor Force: Paradoxes and
Promises Edited by Jane Jenson, Elisabeth Hagen and Ceallaigh Reddy New
York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 295 pp., $14.95 In the period following
World War II and especially since the 1960s, female participation in the
labor force of Western industrialized countries has increased dramatically.
Feminization of the Labor Force focuses on this development and analyzes
women' s changing role in the labor forces of the United States, Canada,
Britain, France, West Germany, Italy and Sweden. The authors examine the
effects of different national policies on women, presenting statistical
comparisons of women' s labor force participation rates. In most Western
industrialized countries, they conclude, women continue to participate
in the labor force at rates well below men, but their participation rates
are rapidly rising--even through recessionary periods--while men's labor
force participation rates have declined slowly. The increase, however,
has not meant that women take the same jobs and positions as men. For example,
women make up the overwhelming majority of part-time workers. Many women
take such positions because they are unable to find full-time jobs and
throughout the Western industrialized world, women generally continue to
be segregated in a few economic sectors, particularly services and communications.
The picture of women's labor force experience is not uniform, however.
Little part-time work exists in Italy, for example, in large part because
protective legislation provides blanket coverage to part-time as well as
full-time workers. Women in Sweden have generally done better than their
counterparts in other countries because Sweden's strong labor movement
has made women's advancement a priority. Even in Sweden, though, when there
is conflict, women's needs have been subordinated to those of the labor
movement overall. But despite women's increasing labor force participation
rates and certain legislative gains, Feminization of the Labor Force makes
clear that "there is not much to cheer about" for women in the work force.
Conservative governments in many of the countries discussed have gutted
social programs which benefitted women; corporate managers are using new
technologies to tighten their control over the workforce, severely limiting
working women's flexibility; and widespread concern with international
competitiveness is overriding longstanding national concerns with the structural
changes necessary to fully and equally incorporate women into the work
force. Still, the authors argue, the current period is one of great flux,
with potential for the extension of women's rights, even if that potential
is not yet being realized. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[] MULTINATIONAL MONITOR September 1989 VOLUME 10, NUMBER 9, SEPTEMBER
1989 Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International
Division of Labor Maria Mies London: Zed Books, 1986. 251 pp., $12.50 In
Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, Maria Mies offers a theory
on women's status in the world economy. The unequal sexual division of
labor, she argues, originated with a predatory mode of production, as man-the-hunter
subordinated women by violent means. Male control of the means of violence
and coercion has remained at the root of all subsequent modes of production.
"Man-the-hunter is basically a parasite, not a producer," Mies writes.
She contends that without the exploitation of non-wage workers, capitalism
would not work. Mies holds that women currently have a dual role in the
world economy. Women in the Third World are crucial as producers and middle-class
women in the industrialized nations who are not part of the wage labor
force are vital to the economy as consumers. In her conclusion, Mies envisions
a world economy which forswears coercive economic relations and is guided
by the principle of self-sufficiency. Third World countries should pursue
autarkic strategies of development, abandoning export- oriented development
plans. Women in industrialized nations must also create autonomous models
of production, Mies writes. But, as a first step, they should assert themselves
in the consumption process. Participants in a consumer liberation movement
would, for example, refuse to purchase luxury items, items produced by
exploiting Third World workers or goods which reinforce sexist images of
women. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[] MULTINATIONAL MONITOR September 1989 VOLUME 10, NUMBER 9, SEPTEMBER
1989 Sisterhood & Solidarity: Feminism and Labor in Modern Times. Diane
Balser Boston: South End Press, 1987. 247 pp., $9.00 Sisterhood &Solidarity
is more than just a history of women in the labor movement. According to
Diane Balser, the focus of the book "is the attainment of economic power
and its relationship to political power." In recent years, more attention
has been paid to women's economic status but the emphasis has been primarily
on their economic plight rather than their potential economic power, Balser
writes. Women's segregation in the wage- labor force (in clerical positions
and in service industries) offers a unique opportunity to organize women
as workers and enable them to realize their potential economic power. In
Sisterhood and Solidarity, Balser discusses the different ways in which
women have been organized around gender and work and offers concrete conclusions
about which methods have been successful in the past and what strategies
are needed for the future. Underlying tensions and open conflict have traditionally
characterized the relationship between women's organizations and the labor
movement in the United States. The conflict, a result of both the anti-union
elitism of many women's organizations and the sexism of many unions, has
undermined the unionization of working women. Women workers remain significantly
less organized than their male counterparts. To explore the possibilities
for resolving the differences between women's groups and labor unions,
Balser traces the history of three working women's organizations. The Working
Women's Association of 1868 was founded by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth
Cady Stanton. Frustrated by an antagonistic, male-dominated labor movement,
the Association quickly abandoned its focus on working women and subsequently
lost its effectiveness. Union WAGE (Union Women's Alliance to Gain Equality),
a California organization, was formed in 1971. Successful in extending
protective legislation designed for women to male workers as well, Union
WAGE disbanded in 1982, the victim of underfinancing and internal fighting.
The Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), with 18,000 members as of 1986,
stands as the largest organization of working women in the history of the
United States. Made up of women unionists (it is closed to unorganized
women), CLUW has been successful in raising feminist issues within the
labor movement and in fomenting an alliance between labor and the women's
movement. As an association rather than a union, however, it is not able
to organize working women into unions. Balser concludes that unionizing
women is the key to the attainment of political and economic power for
women, but she does not believe that the women's movement should be subsumed
by organized labor. She writes that it is only by maintaining "a parallel,
independent women's base that [feminist and working women's organizations]
will keep the feminist vision clear and will provide the external pressure
necessary to motivate labor's organizing of unorganized women." ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[] MULTINATIONAL MONITOR September 1989 VOLUME 10, NUMBER 9, SEPTEMBER
1989 Women, Men, and the International Division of Labor, Edited by June
Nash & Maria Patricia Fernandez-Kelly Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1983. 463 pp., $14.95 Since the mid-1960s, Third World countries
have increasingly concentrated on export-oriented development strategies
and on exporting manufactured goods rather than primary commodities such
as agricultural products and unrefined minerals. This collection of essays
traces the rise of the globally-integrated manufacturing process by presenting
case studies of local work experiences and examining global manufacturing
operations on a broader, conceptual level. The book pays special attention
to the electronics industry, which it identifies as particularly dependent
on overseas production, Mexican maquiladoras (areas designated to house
low wage assembly plants for foreign companies) and patterns of labor migration.
The authors are mostly academicians whose research deals with gender-related
inequalities in the labor force. Their essays address dilemmas which the
global manufacturing process poses for women in particular. For example,
for many Third World women, jobs with multinational companies may be economically
the best employment opportunities available. The book's largely anthropological
perspective focuses on women's home experience as an important component
of their work situations. By insisting that family relations must be incorporated
into an understanding of discrimination, the authors show the contradiction
facing women. While many are forced to enter the wage-labor force to provide
for their families, the ideology of men serving as a family's breadwinner
functions to justify underpaying women. Each essay also offers some perspective
on the ways that changes in the international division of labor are affecting
workers, particularly women, in industrialized countries and the Third
World. The studies highlight the inequalities and imbalances that have
grown more acute as a result of the new international division of labor
and they expose the role corporations have played in constructing, supporting
and encouraging such changes. -Compiled by Robert Weissman .