Abstract
Global restructuring process aggravated informalization of labour leading to multiple labour subjectivities and exploitations where women are the most affected. The possibility of bringing out gender as a key factor in the conceptualizations of labour and the informal sector in the era of globalization is explored in this paper. One of the main propositions here is that gender, restructuring of the economy and the informal sector are three significant realms where the present debates on labour could focus. Feminization of labour instigates new forms of labour and working conditions. The argument here is that such a new categorization of production and work relations is now integrally linked with the reality of existence and survival. The paradigm shifts in the labour arena—informalization and feminization—give varieties of interpretations to the meaning of labour and economy. Locating gender as a significant element in the labour discourse in a post-structuralist frame is attempted in this paper. This methodology follows exploration of the contradictions and complexities of living gender beyond the analysis of the economic structures. The approach in this paper is not to delink labour from its materialist dynamics, but to locate materialism within the ‘life-worlds’ of the workers.
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Notes
- 1.
Flow line technology; mass production of consumer durable; improved wages for workers; Keynesian forms of demand management; and welfarism.
- 2.
Here, it has to be noted that the changes happened in the production relations and its interlinkages reoriented the world order.
- 3.
MNC-Multinational Company is a company which produces goods or markets its services in many countries through Foreign Direct Investments and controls and manages subsidiaries in a number of countries outside its home base.
- 4.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) explains flexibility in five forms: (a) external numerical flexibility where number of employees adjusted in accordance with employers’ needs; (b) externalization where part of the firm’s work is put out through subcontracting; (c) internal numerical flexibility where working hours and their ‘delivery’ adjusted according to employers’ needs; (d) functional flexibility where workers’ jobs modified according to employers’ needs; and (e) wages flexibility where labour’s reward according to productivity and market conditions (cited in Van Dijik 1995, 223–24).
- 5.
Spatial economy denotes the manner by which capital utilizes particular spaces for differential production and the accumulation of capital and, in the process, transforms these spaces (Mohanty 1997).
- 6.
Marchand uses the term global restructuring to explain the process of globalization that is breaking down an old order and constructing a new one.
- 7.
Using the concept ‘hegemony’ by Gramsci, this term represents the successful claim to men’s authority, by subtle means than direct violence.
- 8.
Enloe explains the complexity of being a domestic worker where a woman is involved in a complex set of issues that includes assumptions about femininity, citizenship and the transformation of a ‘family home’ into a workplace, and all of these are informed by gendered and racialized attitudes (Enloe, quoted in Whitworth 2006).
- 9.
Feminists have pointed out the invisibility of their experiences in social science researches and raised the contradictions between their lived experiences and mainstream social science findings. This is how a strong criticism to positivism was considered as one of the broad-reaching paradigms in social science methodology. Positivists relied on empirical facts to promote the objective reality by denying values in researches. Emile Durkheim (1938/1965) followed positivist traditions.
- 10.
Early debates on domestic labour and other forms of women’s labour well explain these concepts.
- 11.
- 12.
Gherardi uses Derrida’s concept of différance, male and female are not only different from each other but they also constantly defer each other. The difference at the same time separates and unites because it represents the unity of the process of division.
- 13.
Protection provider is used to denote the welfare state.
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George, S. (2019). Globalization, Workspace Transformation and Informal Workers: A Reversal of Gender Roles. In: Shyam Sundar, K. (eds) Perspectives on Neoliberalism, Labour and Globalization in India. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6972-8_12
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