Abstract
This is a study of labour force participation in the context of rapid industrialisation and the growth of wage employment. It is concerned specifically with the absorption of women workers in the urbanising labour market of Kingston, Jamaica, but hinges on a theoretical framework that is arguably appropriate for the analysis of the labour process generally. In that respect, it ought to be stated at the outset that anyone coming fresh to the economic analysis of the labour process should be struck by the underdevelopment of conventional theories, shown most forcefully in the areas of labour supply, the division of labour, and the interaction of workers and jobs. It is those issues which are at the heart of the present analysis, though the conceptual framework is still at a formative stage.
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Notes
M. Nash: “Incentives and rural society and culture in developing nations”, in E. Edwards (ed.): Employment in Developing Nations (New York, Columbia University Press, 1974), p. 207.
M. Sahlins: Stone Age Economics (London, Tavistock Publications, 1974). Sahlins’ conceptualisation is questionable, but his analysis is insightful. See also
A.K. Sen: Employment, Technology and Development (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1975).
A. Kornai: Anti-equilibrium (Amsterdam, North Holland, 1971).
For an analysis of these responses, see G. Standing: Labour Force Participation and Development (Geneva, ILO, 1978), Chapter 5. The notion of “voluntary” unemployment is also considered in some detail in the present study.
This does not mean that urban wage workers should be regarded as part of the politically and economically dominant elite, as Lipton has suggested. M. Lipton: Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias in World Development (London, Temple Smith and Co., 1977).
A. Smith: The Wealth of Nations (New York, Random House, 1937), Book 1, Chapter 8, pp. 66–67.
This process, as it has taken place in the United States, has been elegantly analysed by Braverman. H. Braverman: Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Marglin made the point that specialisation of tasks has been fostered as well as separation of tasks because “without specialisation, the capitalist had no role to play in the production process”. S. Marglin: “What do bosses do?”, in A. Gorz (ed.): The Division of Labour (Hassocks, Harvester Press, 1978), p. 20.
For many, this process was most wickedly but vainly depicted in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. For a useful analysis, see A. Sohn-Rethel: Intellectual and Manual Labour: A Critique of Epistemology (London, Macmillan Press, 1978).
B. Moore: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), p. 383.
E.J. Hobsbawm: “The labour aristocracy in nineteenth century Britain”, in E.J. Hobsbawm: Labouring Man; Studies in the History of Labour (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964).
K. Marx: Capital, Vol. I (New York, International Publishers Co., 1967), pp. 640–2.
G. Standing: “Urban workers and patterns of employment”, in S. Kannappan (ed.): Urban Labour Markets in Developing Areas (Geneva, Institute of International Labour Studies, 1977).
The relationship between incomes, employment, and population growth is complex, but this interpretation seemed to underlie Marx’s analysis. Thus in Volume III of Capital he concluded, “Prosperity would have led to more marriages among labourers and reduced the decimation of offspring. While implying a real increase in population, this does not signify an increase in the actual working population. But it affects the relations of the labourer to capital in the same way as an increase of the number of actually working labourers would have affected them.” K. Marx: Capital, Vol. III (New York, International Publishers Co., 1967), pp. 254–255. It is clear from the context that “prosperity” implied increased employment, and an increase of “actually working labourers” meant an increase in potentially employed, or in the size of the labour force, where that included the unemployed.
R. Firth: Elements of Social Organisation (London, Watts, 1951), p. 142. Mauss’ famous work is in the same vein.
M. Mauss: The Gift (London, Cohen and West, 1954). See also Sahlins, 1974, op. cit., passim.
C. Lévi-Strauss: “The family”, in H.L. Shapiro (ed.): Man, Culture and Society (New York, Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 348.
See, for instance, H. Hartmann: “Capitalism, patriarchy, and job segregation by sex”, in M. Blaxall and B. Reagan (eds.): Women and the Workplace: The Implications of Occupational Segregation (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 137–69.
F. Engels: The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884; New York, Pathfinder Press, 1972 edition), pp. 61, 75.
Again the literature is substantial. See, for example, W. Seccombe: “The housewife and her labour under capitalism”, New Left Review, No. 83, January-February 1974, pp. 3–24;
J. Gardiner: “The role of domestic labour”, New Left Review, No. 89, January-February 1975, pp. 47–58; and
M. Molyneux, “Beyond the domestic labour debate”, New Left Review, No. 116, July-August 1979, pp. 3–28.
For a detailed historical analysis, I. Pinchbeck: Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (London, Routledge and Sons, 1930); see also, J. Humphries: “Class struggle and the persistence of the working class family”, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 1, No. 3, 1977.
J. Merrington: “The sexual division of labour in feudal England”, New Left Review, No. 113–114, January-April 1979, pp. 147–68.
P. Laslett (ed.): Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1972), pp. 34–9.
A. MacFarlane: The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, Blackwell, 1978), and the references cited there.
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© 1981 International Labour Organisation
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Standing, G. (1981). Introduction: The Process of Proletarianisation. In: Unemployment and Female Labour. ILO Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06148-8_1
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