Book review of Women Workers and Globalization: Emergent Contradictions in India, by Indrani Mazumdar, Stree, Kolkata, for Centre for Women’s Development Studies, Delhi, 2007. xxiv + 349 pages.
The bulk of this book consists of four sectoral studies of women workers in Delhi and its satellite townships of Noida and Gurgaon, through a combination of structured questionnaires and individual and group discussions conducted in 2002-2004.
The first study, of the garment export industry, notes the dramatic
transfer of employment from higher to lower-wage countries in the 1980s and
1990s, and the growth of international subcontracting chains with retailers and
brand-name companies at the top and low-cost suppliers in Third
World countries at the bottom. In 2005, the phase-out of the
Multi-Fibre Arrangement resulted in even more competition within the sector,
and downward pressure on employment conditions. In a sector where in India, unlike
most countries, women’s employment has been relatively low, women’s share in
registered factory employment increased from 55% in 1994-95 to 65% in 1999-2000,
but the share of women subsidiary status workers – i.e., those employed on a
casual basis – rose even more, to 99% in 2004. Casualization of women’s
employment, wage discrimination, long working hours, compulsory overtime and
flouting of labour laws were widespread.
The second study is of the electronics manufacturing industry, earlier regarded as the leading example of feminization, although in India, automation subsequently led to a reduction in the proportion of women workers. Following the slashing of import controls in 1991, the share of the public and small-scale sectors in employment declined, while the share of the large-scale private sector increased, catering mainly to the growing domestic market. While women’s share of employment in the industry increased from 17% in 1999-2000 to 24% in 2004, the total number of jobs declined by 47% in this period; in the organized sector, women’s employment fell from 29% to 24% between 1999-2000 and 2002-2004. The majority of women were found to be young and unmarried or separated. An interesting finding was that the women were not necessarily happy about their unmarried status, but many felt trapped because their parental families were dependent on their wages; only in some of the older formal sector units had unions been able to win rights that enabled women to continue in service after marriage, but even there, recruitment of women had virtually stopped.
The third study is of women in
home-based work. The concepts of the ‘informal sector’ and ‘informal economy’
are discussed, as well as the neoliberal promotion of this unregulated sector
because of its extreme flexibility, at the cost of extreme insecurity for the workers
employed in it. Using the report of the National Commission on Self-Employed
Women, Shramshakti (1988), the author
makes the important distinction between piece-rated and own-account home-based
workers, on the grounds that ‘the nature of legislative protection that is
needed for these two categories of workers is not the same. The piece-rated
workers need better rates of wages, better implementation of labour laws; on
the other hand, the own account workers need remedies that generally lie beyond
the scope of labour laws’ (p.180). Yet in documents subsequently produced by
the Minstry of Labour, the distinction was deliberately blurred, creating the
impression that all or most home-based workers are self-employed, and denying
the protection of labour laws to piece-rated workers. The result was that the
average monthly income from home-based work was less than 22% of the minimum
wage, and in 65% of the cases, this was the work of more than one person, often
including minor girls. The importance of implementing the Shramshakti recommendations is obvious.
The fourth study is of the ICT sector, which has been expanding with the increasing weight of services in the economy, and is integral to globalization. The survey results are preceded by a discussion of women in white-collar employment in historical perspective. The women surveyed for this study were working in call centres, a new sector that has created employment opportunities for women. The profile of these women contrasted strikingly with that of the home-based workers: young, unmarried, educated (most of them were graduates), English-speaking, middle-class, and earning more – sometimes considerably more – than minimum wages. Yet they, too, had problems at work, including insecure employment and lack of promotional opportunities. Constant monitoring, intensification of work, and extended night shifts took a toll on their health.
These informative studies are
framed by the first chapter, entitled ‘Emergent Contradictions: Overview on Globalization,’
and the Conclusion. Chapter One describes the formation of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, and
the neoliberal policies they have enforced in Third World countries in the name
of ‘structural adjustment’, including liberalization of international trade and
capital flows, cutting of government expenditure on employment creation and
welfare, privatization of state concerns, and an attack on state protections
for labour. India
embarked upon this process in 1991. It argues that ‘the operations of
globalized finance have anchored a process of expanding manufacturing incomes
in the developed countries with adverse effects on developing-country primary
commodity producers, acclerated the centralization of capital on a worldwide
scale and deindustrialization within backward economies,’ (p.32) among other
things.
While the critique of neoliberalism is justified, it is hard to see how this picture corresponds to the globalized world economy in the early 21st century, especially if countries like India are included among the ‘backward economies’. Indrani Mazumdar admits that some sections of Indian business were in favour of economic liberalization, but describes this as their being ‘inclined...towards collaboration with metropolitan capital as a junior partner’ (p.13). The more likely explanation – that just like ‘metropolitan capital’ they made use of state protection for their infant industries, but were then ready to throw away this ladder when they reached maturity – is not considered.
Given the scenario described by the
author, one could not imagine a company like Tata taking over iconic global
brands like Tetley, Corus, Jaguar and Land Rover, or state-owned Gulf companies
seizing the opportunity created by high oil prices and falling US share prices
to buy up assets in the US and Europe. These developments correspond to Lenin’s
definition of ‘export of capital’, except that the flow is in the opposite direction to what he described
in Imperialism. If this is what it
means to be a ‘junior partner’ to metropolitan capital, what exactly is
entailed in being an equal partner? If manufacturing incomes in the developed
countries are expanding, how is it that the US national debt is growing exponentially,
and one of the key complaints of US workers has been that their jobs are being
exported to countries like Mexico,
China
and India,
while they themselves suffer massive job losses? Why would several prominent
analysts describe the US
as going through a process of deindustrialization? These phenomena are integral
elements of today’s globalized world economy, yet they are inconceivable within
the framework elaborated by the author.
There are other glaring lacunae. Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are a vital element of globalization, yet the only mention they find in this chapter is in a footnote. The massive growth of financial markets is correctly noted, yet there is no mention of new institutional investors like pension funds, whose assets amounted to 57.1% of GDP in the US and over 87% of GDP in the Netherlands at the end of 1995. The WTO is universally recognized as the hallmark of globalization, yet there are only three references to it in this chapter, and even these are inaccurate. The first refers to ‘continued and large state subsidies to agriculture in the developed countries, while developing countries have been forced to withdraw their own subsidies under the World Trade Organization (WTO) regime’ (p.20). You would never guess from this sentence that the WTO Cancun talks in 2003 collapsed because there was no agreement on this issue, that developing countries have continued to insist that trade-distorting agricultural subsidies in the developed countries should be abolished while developing countries should retain measures to support poor farmers and ensure food security, or that the WTO upheld a complaint by Brazil and West African cotton-growing countries that US subsidies to its cotton growers were illegal under WTO rules. The other two references to the WTO (pp. 25, 26) argue that the WTO regime has seen a resurgence of old colonial patterns in which developing countries export agricultural products while suffering deindustrialization as imports from the developed world displace local manufactures and employment. As we saw earlier, exactly the opposite is taking place: so much so that two leading underdevelopment theorists, Giovanni Arrighi and Andre Gunder Frank, argued in the 1990s that there had been a reorientation of the world economy, with its centre of gravity shifting to the East.
All these changes are so central to
the definition of globalization that it is evident that this chapter does not
contain even an empirical description of globalization, much less an analysis
of it. The liberalization of international trade and capital flows is a
characteristic of both globalization and neoliberalism, but globalization
includes many additional features, as enumerated above. Similarly, some
features of neoliberalism, such as privatization of public services and
opposition to protective labour legislation, are not necessary to a definition
of globalization. The title of this book is therefore misleading, because it is
really about neoliberalism and women workers.
The sections on labour, on the other hand, are an accurate description of the declining weight of the organised sector, preponderance of informal employment, and attack on protective labour legislation (pp.14-19). The author correctly points out that far from a ‘feminization’ of the labour force, in the sense of increased employment opportunities for women, India has seen an expulsion of women workers from formal employment (pp.33-36), while the promotion of micro-enterprise as the solution to unemployment has gone together with the promotion of a divisive politics of formal versus informal sector workers (p.39-42).
However, there is a difficulty here
due to a lack of historical background: all these problems, with the exception
of the vicious attack on labour legislation from 1998 to 2004, date back to
long before economic liberalization. A sharply segmented labour market was
inherited from colonialism, and most labour laws excluded the unorganized
sector even after Independence.
The industrial policy of the Janata Party in 1977 and Congress in 1980 promoted
small-scale industry without bringing it under the protection of labour laws,
leading to a massive transfer of jobs from the organized to the unorganized
sector, first in the textile industry and then in other industries. This had
nothing to do with globalization: the Indian market was still heavily
protected. Lakhs of jobs were lost in the organized sector not because they
were going to developed countries or being displaced by imports, but because
they were being shifted to unprotected workers in the unorganized sector or
backward areas in India.
The displacement of women workers from the organized sector took place even earlier. In the textile industry it went back to the 1930s, when the Delhi Agreement of 1935 between the Ahmedabad millowners and Textile Labour Association specified that married women whose husbands were employed in the mills would be retrenched. Women in mines were similarly affected. From the 1960s onward, women in modern industries like pharmaceuticals as well as clerical jobs were likewise often replaced by men when they retired. The main reason for this discrimination against women seems to be that they had become less flexible and more expensive than men due to protective legislation, and trade unions did not fight against it.
If the presuppositions of the argument are flawed, its conclusion – that the solution to the problem is to reverse globalization – is necessarily wrong too. ICT has revolutionized capitalism, and the anti-globalizers cannot undo this revolution any more than the Luddites could undo the industrial revolution. Fortunately, the problems of the women workers surveyed in these four studies can be tackled without rolling back the wheel of history in this way.
(This review was published in Economic and Political Weekly, Vol.43, No.23, 7 June 2008.)