Globalization, Migration, and Women across the World WOM 101

Globalization, Migration, and
Women across the World
WOM 101
Economic Globalization
• Growing trend of a world economy dominated by
transnational corporations impacts women
• Economic globalization: the integration and rapid
interaction of economies through production,
trade, and financial transactions by banks and
multinational corporations, with an increased
role for the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, as well as the World Trade
Organization
Cultural Globalization
• The transnational migration of people,
information and consumer culture
Critiques of Globalization
• Benefits are not distributed equally across nations
• More affluent northern governments provide subsidies to their
farmers so that they can afford to sell their products for less in the
global market
• Farmers from southern countries where subsidies are unavailable
are unable to compete and become poorer
• Northern governments also frequently impose tariffs and import
limits on goods from other countries. This keeps cheaper goods out
of the home market and protects the profits of corporations in the
home country
• Liberalized trade agreements eroded workers’ rights and
unionization.
• Environmental sustainability is compromised when poor countries,
desperate for a piece of the global economic pie, let transnational
corporations exploit or pollute their national resources
Effects of Globalization on Women
• Mixed effects on women’s employment:
associated with increases in women’s paid
employment but those jobs created are typically
low-paid factory work or domestic work
• Economic shifts that come with globalization
come may create additional layers of paid and
unpaid labor and force women to migrate to
other countries for work.
Outsourcing
• "Outsourcing" involves transferring or sharing management control
and/or decision-making of a business function to an outside supplier,
which involves a degree of two-way information exchange,
coordination and trust between the outsourcer and its client. Such a
relationship between economic entities is qualitatively different from
traditional relationships between buyer and seller of services in that
the involved economic entities in an "outsourcing" relationship
dynamically integrate and share management control of the labor
process rather than enter in contracting relationships where both
entities remain separate in the coordination of the production of
goods and services. Business segments typically outsourced
include information technology, human resources, facilities and real
estate management, and accounting. Many companies also
outsource customer support and call center functions, manufacturing
and engineering. Consequently, a debate has ensued concerning
the benefits and costs of the practice as well as how to categorize it
as a phenomenon.
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
• Outsourcing of “Electronic labor” a recent phenomenon
• Employ women to do clerical work in offshore “Electronic
sweatshops,” mostly in the Caribbean
• “Infomatics” industry” include telemarketing but are
mostly data-entry jobs for banks, insurance companies,
a and airlines
• For instance, at one Barbados infomatics location, 100
women sit clustered at computer stations and daily enter
300,000 ticket stubs for one airline’s 2000 daily flights.
One floor below, an equal number of women enter
medical insurance claims data from one of the largest
US insurance companies
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
• Transnational/multinational corporation or enterprise that manages
production establishments or delivers services in at least two
countries. Very large multinationals have budgets that exceed those
of many countries. Multinational corporations can have a powerful
influence in international relations and local economies.
Multinational corporations play an important role in globalization;
some argue that a new form of MNC is evolving in response to
globalization—e.g. the 'globally integrated enterprise'.
• Knowledge-intensive aspects of the production process often remain
in western countries but labor-intensive activities are subcontracted
to factories in developing countries where cheap female labor is
abundant
• US was first to relocate/“outsource” (: to procure (as some goods or
services needed by a business or organization) under contract with
an outside supplier <decided to outsource some back-office
operations>)
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
• Free Trade Zones/Export Processing Zones—
established in many third world/developing
countries to attract transnational factories. In
these zones, companies are generally exempt
from labor, health, and safety, and environmental
laws and pay few if any taxes. More than 60
countries have established FTZ’s.
• In Honduras alone, there are eleven FTZ’s with
200 factories employing 100,000 people
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
• Women constitute over 80% of the workers in EPZs in
Mexico, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and the Philippines,
and more than 70\% in South Korea and Guatemala—
they are the preferred labor supply because they can be
hired for lower pay and under less desirable working
conditions.
• Sweatshops: businesses that violate wage, child labor,
and safety standards.
• Many factories in EPZ’s are little more than sweatshops.
workers are unlikely to complain because they need the
work despite the conditions
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
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Maquiladoras: factories in Mexico’s border towns. Another example of women in the
transnational corporate factory
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2000 multinational corporations employ over a half million workers, 2/3 of them women, who
get paid between $3.75 and $4.50 a day.
In El Salvador, women employees of the Taiwanese maquilador Mandarin work shifts of
12021 hours during which they are seldom allowed bathroom breaks. They are paid 10 cents
per shirt which are later sold for $20.00 each. The company makes clothes for J. Crew, Eddie
Bauer, and the Gap
Bangladesh: women sewing clothing at Disney’s contract plans are paid 5 cents for every
17.99 Winnie the Pooh shirt they assemble
In Vietnam, 90% of Nike’s workers are females between the ages of 15 and 28. Nike’s labor
for a pair of basketball shoes (which retail for 150.00) costs 1.60
Contrary to popular belief, these wages are generally insufficient to escape poverty.
For example, sweatshop workers in Nicaragua average from $55.00 to $75.00 a
month when the average family needs $165.00 per month to make ends meet
In Indonesia, the government estimates that the minimum wage there is equal to just
67% of what is required to meet minimum physical needs
In Vietnam, a living wage is estimated to be $3.00 a day, but Nike workers make
$1.60 a day
Transnational (or multinational)
corporations
• Women in the transnational factory typically
have little choice other than to accept these
conditions
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From rural areas and unaware of rights
Young
Fear of losing jobs
Work with forged birth certificates
Alternatives are grim (NE Thailand where poverty is
so bad that parents sometimes sell their daughter into
sex slavery or as cheap labor)
Globalization and migration
• Globalization makes economic survival difficult
in some countries, leading poor women to
migrate to more affluent countries where there is
a strong demand for low-wage workers
• They service the upper-income and corporate
beneficiaries of globalization. They typically send
anywhere from half to nearly all of what they
earn home to their families
• Governments in some countries such as Sri
Lanka and the Philippines encourage women to
migrate because the money sent home
contributes to the economy
Types of Work
• Reflective of traditional gender roles
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Janitors
Maids
Nannies
Sex workers
Nurses and home health workers
Sometimes brides to American and European men
seeking traditional marriages
– Language, cultural barriers, and economic
desperation interfere with migrant working women
asserting their rights as women and workers,
especially for undocumented workers
Domestic Service
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Movement of educated women in northern countries into the workforce
Gender role changes and rise in female-headed households contribute
Advertising creates a consumer culture that requires 2 incomes to sustain
Research shows that women’s entry into the workforce has barely impacted
the amount of childcare and household labor performed by men
Domestic work is neither socially nor intellectually fulfilling but is chosen for
economic reasons
– Clean up dirt and mess of others, provide love and care to the children of others
while their own children are cared for by family members in another country
– Quietly do whatever they are asked no matter how gross
– Work long, physically demanding hours in other people’s homes where they must
act invisible
– Feelings of isolation and loneliness are common
– Subject to abuse
Mail Order Brides
• Women in poor economic circumstances who are marketed as
brides to men in advanced capitalist countries. They use commercial
organizations to arrange introductions and broker marriages with
foreign men
• Substitutes for women in industrialized countries who resist
conventional forms for marriage
• By the 1990s, mail order bride agencies market women from
Philippines, India, Thailand, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Primarily
they marry men in the US, Japan, Europe, and Australia
• The industry promotes stereotypes and exploitative relationships in
both sides: to brides, they emphasize the wealth of foreign
husbands and to husbands, the emphasize the obedience and
subservience of foreign women
• No firm statistics exist, but immigration officials estimate 200
international matchmaking services, arranging 4000-6000 marriages
each year
Sexual Tourism
• Sex work connected to tourism
• Effect of globalization
• Arises out of a globalized economy that makes
sex work one of the only ways for women to
earn a living wage
• Governments that need the money from
international tourism are willing to encourage, or
at least ignore sexual tourism
• First world men that eroticize dark-skinned
native bodies buy sex in developing countries for
cut-rate prices
Sexual Tourism
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Sex tourists come primarily from Australia, Canada, France, German, Japan, Kuwait,
New Zealand, Norway, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, the UK, the US
Destinations are Brazil, Cambodia, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, India,
Indonesia, Hungary, Kenya, Morocco, the Philippines, and Thailand
Some workers in the sex industry choose their work as a survival strategy and an
economic advantage strategy, perceiving sex work as a possible stepping stone to
marriage to a foreigner and migration to a better life in another country
Sex work pays better than work as a domestic or in a factory in an EPZ (export
processing zone)
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Example: in the DR, occupations available to women other than sex work yield less than
1000 pesos a month, whereas one sexual encounter with a foreign client yields 500 pesos
Majority of sex workers are forced by economics and often single motherhood into
prostitution—however, it is not others. For example, more than 50,000 Dominican
sex workers have traveled to Western Europe, the Middle East, and Asia to work in
the sex industry, knew they would be doing sex work, and choose it to support their
families.
Sex Trafficking Industry and Debt
Bondage
• Contrast sexual tourism with Sex Trafficking
Industry, defined by the UN Protocol to Prevent,
Suppress, and Punish Trafficking in Persons:
“the recruitment, transportation, transfer,
harbouring, or receipt of persons by means of
threat or use of force or other forms of coercion,
of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse
of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the
giving or receiving of payments or benefits to
achieve the consent of a person having control
over another person, for the purpose of
exploitation”
Sex Trafficking Industry
• Typically an agent uses the offer of work to entice poor
women to illegally immigrate to other countries. They are
told they will work as maids, waitresses, or entertainers.
Sometimes they are lured through false marriage offers.
Upon arrival, the agent or “fiancé” sells them to a brothel
or club.
• Poverty stricken parents in rural Thailand, Burma, or
Laos may even sell their daughters to brothel brokers or
agents, in most cases believing they will find legitimate
work but sometimes understanding the work will be as a
prostitute
– Thailand is one of the worst offenders, specializing in sexual
tourism. Generates approximately 10 billion dollars a year
Sex Trafficking Industry and Debt Bondage
• Women in forced prostitution can rarely escape the life (Human
Rights Watch)
• Uneducated, underpaid, or unpaid, in an unfamiliar land who do not
know how to return home
• Almost all are controlled through debt bondage. They must first
repay with interest the money given to their families at the time of
recruitment. This debt mounts as they are charged for food, shelter,
a nd clothing. Should they try to leave the brothel without paying,
they are likely to experience physical punishment by the brothel
owner or police. They are threatened with harm to their parents or
with being arrested as illegal immigrants. Lack of familiarity with the
local language or dialect puts them at a further disadvantage.
Because trafficked women are often illegal, law enforcement
agencies respond to them as lawbreakers rather than as victims.
Sex Trafficking
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Women trafficked into prostitution are exposed to significant health risks
– Rapes and beatings used to enforce complain ace
– Multiple daily clients and occasional sadistic clients inflict more pain
– In brothels, women are exposited to STD’s such as AIDS as they are not allowed
to negotiate the terms of sex and are force to have sex with as many as 20
clients per day. Although condoms may be available to clients, the client has the
choice of whether or not to use them.
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The UN estimates that as many of 4 million people are trafficked every year,
half of them children.
– For example, Brazil has a thriving sex tourism business that includes an
estimated 500,000 girls under the age of 14. In the US, women and children are
trafficked from Latin America and the US state Department estimates that every
year, 50,000 to 75,000 children are trafficked into the US
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Prosecution is difficult because international organized crime networks are
increasingly involved in the trafficking of women.
It is challenging because it involves large numbers of victims, language
barriers, multiple investigating agencies, overseas investigating, and severe
sexual and physical trauma of victims and witnesses
Positive Effects of Globalization
• Global/transnational feminism
• Greater availability of paid work for women does provide
benefits for women in developing country; they cite
ability to earn an independent income, ability to save for
marriage or education, help support their families,
opportunity to delay marriage and childbearing and to
exercise personal choice in marriage partner, opportunity
to enjoy some personal freedom, companionship of other
women
• One study of Mexican women working in the tourist
industry in Puerto Vallarta suggests that the ability to
earn an independent income reduces the pressure on
women to marry
Benefits
• Other studies of Third World women indicates
that a women’s absolute and relative income is
tied to increases in self-esteem and confidence,
greater leverage in fertility decisions, and
greater leverage in household economic and
domestic decisions
• On one hand, globalization has increased the
autonomy of some women and increased their
economic power, but it is more likely if her
income comprises a significant portion of the
family income and if she has control over how it
is spent
Benefits?
• On the other hand, difficult work
conditions, low pay, low job security, and
sacrifices such as relocation to another
country as mail-order brie, housekeeper,
or nanny.
Some Resources
• Sweatshop Watch:
http://www.sweatshopwatch.org
• Global Alliance Against Trafficking in
Women:
http://www.thai.net/gaatw/membership_ter
ms.htm