Working Women & Transnational Transgressions

Ultimately, the book challenges arguments that multinational corporate-led development increases economic opportunities for women and frees them from patriarchal constraints of the household and local community. While multinationals do sometimes create new work opportunities for women, these jobs do not provide women with the means for long-term empowerment.

Multinationals are attracted to countries with low operating costs, where the bargaining power and earning potential of laborers is restricted. In order to minimize wages and the threat of unionization, many of these corporations bring costs down further by subcontracting work to informal factories or home-based laborers. It is usually women who labor in unregulated factories or at home-based production.

The essays argue that informal labor does not enhance the position of women economically or socially. Women are paid up to 50 percent less than male counterparts and are usually expected to remit their wages to their husbands or families. Corporations justify paying women below-subsistence wages by claiming that they are only secondary wage earners, adding to the primary income earned by the men of the household . That rationalization is buttressed, the essays show, by many women all over the world who define themselves as secondary wage earners, even if their husbands or fathers are unemployed and theirs is the sole family income.

In an essay on the garment industry in Greece, Joanna Hadjicostandi disputes claims about the empowering potential of home-based production work. She finds that the picture of a home-based laborer with the autonomy to acquire resources and maintain control over her profits while staying at home and caring for her children is a rarely realized ideal. Home-based laborers usually have to bear much of the infrastructure costs for their work, including machines and electricity. The work isolates them from other workers and demands a tremendous amount of their time. Many women reported having to work 10 to 14 hours a day in order to make a living from their labor.

The inflexibility of the traditional family structure also limits women's ability to achieve a measure of autonomy. Home-based work is often considered by the husband to be just an extension of other home duties, so the additional responsibilities taken on by the woman do not change the household division of labor. For the most part, women do not control their earnings, and their wages are again considered supplemental to those of their husbands.

Women workers in many of the countries studied are also constrained from realizing economic and social independence by the state. Larry S. Carney and Charlotte O'Kelley report that opportunities for women in Japan are restricted by forced early retirement, limited education and training and a legal system that does not enforce (newly enacted) laws against discrimination. Jean Pyle shows that the Irish government, responding to constitutional mandates that ensure women's primary roles as wives and mothers, seeks to attract multinational corporations to Ireland that agree to hire a predominately male work force.

While none of the women studied were involved in unions or any other formal organizations to improve their socio-economic position, they did engage in various, more subtle means of resistance to their employers. Resistance among women workers in California's Silicon Valley offers a striking example.

Karen Hossfeld found that the division of labor within California's microelectronic-based industry is dramatically skewed according to gender and race: the lower the skill and pay of the job, the higher the percentage of Third World women employed. Management justifies this segregation by resorting to "traditional popular stereotypes about the presumed lack of status and limited abilities of women, minorities, and immigrants."

Women workers, however, use these stereotypes to their own advantage: playing off male managers' misconceptions about "female troubles," workers take several "hormone breaks" a day; when members of the same language group were forbidden to sit together in order to keep them from talking and presumably to speed up work, Chinese women laborers told the supervisor that if they were not "chaperoned" by other Chinese women, their families would not permit them to work; for a short period of time, one woman was able to avoid working with chemicals that made her sick by claiming that they would ruin a manicure for her sister's wedding; many women admit to feigning a language barrier in order to avoid taking instructions.

Hossfeld argues, however, that these tactics are double-edged. In "using the prejudices of the powerful to the advantage of the weak," they "play up feminine frailty [to] achieve short-term individual goals at the risk of reinforcing damaging stereotypes about women, including the stereotype that women workers are not as productive as men." Most of these women are too concerned with their daily struggle to make ends meet and to care for their families to worry about the long term implications of their resistance strategy: "For women and minority workers, the need for short-term gains and benefits and for long-term equal treatment is a constant contradiction," Hossfeld concludes.

Women Workers and Global Restructuring is both a useful introductory overview of different ways women are brought into the industrial sector and a substantive addition to a growing body of research and analysis on the effect of the global economy on the lives of women laboring to serve multinational corporate interests.