Women Workers Organizing in the Free Trade Zones: Collective Action and Community

Abstract

As a labour regulation regime that is anti-union by design, the Free Trade Zones (FTZs) highlight the new geographic flexibility of capital, reconstituting class formations and the self-organization of workers. The women workers’ struggles in the FTZs demands a re-examination of organized worker struggles within world market factories. In resisting both capital and patriarchy, the struggles of organized women workers highlight their subordinate position in both paid and unpaid labour. Not only are women workers restrained by the employers and the state, they also face a hostile local and national community embedded in patriarchy. Nevertheless, women workers in these FTZ factories continue to organize and resist, transforming both work and local communities. Amidst a range of collective strategies, there are women workers’ organizations experimenting with a new orientation towards collective action. By linking their workplace with the women’s struggles outside, this strategic orientation reveals how class struggles in the FTZs are shaped by the social construction of gender in a particular place and space. From a gendered class perspective, women workers’ self-organization and alliances with activist organizations are significant factors revitalizing collective action within the workplace, which in turn elaborates notions of community and nation.