Leah Feutz- Economic Globalization

Leah Feutz- Economic Globalization Blog Post

All of the readings, articles and the video we looked at for our discussion of economic globalization definitely had an affect on how I understand factory work and sweatshops in other countries. I particularly liked Salzinger’s piece for its emphasis on the importance of seeing how locality is an essential part of understanding the reality of these factories. She notes that the maquilas at the three factories she studied all have some basic similarities: the workers are generally unorganized, all the factories are owned by very large, transnational companies and each factory is very large itself, there are quite low wages, many of the workers are in their teens and early twenties and are generally unmarried and childless, there is no compensation for seniority, a high turnover rate of employees, and managers have almost all control in the structuring of the shop floors (552). She discusses the persistence of the “trope of the ‘malleable working woman’ described in the literature” and what continues to be the gendered dichotomy between male and female workers: “patient and malleable women, impatient and uncontrollable men” (Salzinger 1997, 551). Salzinger’s piece points out the “high level of variation between gendered meaning structures across individual workplaces and their links to particular sets of daily practices and struggles” (Salzinger 1997, 550). She asserts how important it is to understand variance in the formation of “gendered categories”, or, in other words, how “localized gendered meanings” are established (Salzinger 1997, 549). While this phenomenon of women in the Third World emerging as “labor force requirements” is happening on a broad scale, Salzinger wants the reader to understand that they are shaped “within the framework of local, managerial subjectivities and strategies, and their final form can only be understood within the context of these immediate structures” (Salzinger 1997, 549). I think this is an essential concept to grasp right off the bat in her piece, because it emphasizes the continued influence of locality in our globalizing world. I feel that this has larger implications for how we should approach addressing the issue of worker’s rights worldwide, and even for any issue that we seek to understand or tackle.

The first factory she describes, “Panoptimex”, is a place where “male supervisors direct objectivized and sexualized young women” (553). She says that over time, it became clearer that there was a significant amount of “work dedicated to the creation of appropriately gendered workers” (554). The plant manager here is “obsessed with the aesthetics of ‘his’ factory…the factory floor is organized for visibility- a panopticon in which everything is marked” (554). In this environment, “workers’ bodies too are marked…lipstick; mascara; eyeliner; rouge; high heels; miniskirts; identity badges…Everything is signaled” (554). Within this panopticon layout, “one flight up the managers sit…From on high, they ‘keep track of the flow of production’…late afternoons the plant manager and his assistant descend” (554). This helps to show how the actual employee stratification is symbolically manifested in many ways within the factory, and how it is being perpetuated and reinforced.  

I found Salzinger’s description of the obvious and blatant focus on “questions appropriate appearance and behavior, rather than on the work itself” to be very interesting (555). She states how “behavior, attitude, demeanor- typically in highly gendered form- is evaluated here. Skill, speed, and quality rarely come up…[the manager’s] approval marks ‘good worker’ and ‘desirable woman’ in a single gesture” (555). Overall, “to come to work is to be seen, to watch, and so to watch and see yourself”’, and the “experience is one of personal power” of gaining the manager’s approval (556). The gendered analysis continues in her description of “the few men who sit on the line [who] are not part of these games. Physically segregated…they move relatively freely” (556). That is, until one of them gets too out of line and the managers come swooping down to put them in their place, and places them among the women. In this way, the hierarchy is maintained. Only the supervisors have the “right to look” at the women…gender and class positions are discursively linked…the male line worker does not count as a man” (557). In general, gendered meanings here are “forged within the context of panoptic labor control strategies” where women are objects of desire and the managers are the ones who can assert that desire. The few male workers, in contrast, do not have this power or privilege, and these distinct “identities are defined by management in the structure of the plant”, and also “reinforced by workers” (557). Thus, the perpetuation of identity formation in this context seems “to echo those crystallized in public discussion about maquilas” (557). 

            The examination of this particular factory is just one way in which she helps to illuminate the ways that locality influence the creation of gendered identities within these factories. At “Anarchomex”, the author notes, “it is numbers that supervisors pore over, not bodies” (559). This is one element of the factory environment that helps to create a different gendered framework than the first factory. While the factory still prizes female workers over men as the “better workers”, they have trouble attracting these women, and so 65% of their employees are male (559). Interestingly, the author writes, “managers comment disparagingly on the willingness of their young male employees to accept Anarchomex jobs…to reframe the work as men’s work would be to define it as underpaid. Faced with the choice between questioning maquila pay practices or the manliness of maquila workers, managers choose to question their subordinates” (560). In this way, the discourse of these managers and the actual implementation of these sentiments are at tension, which ends up “disparaging the great majority of their work force in the process” (560). I find this to be fascinating as a general trend, where one’s attitudes (in this example, in the terms of gendered attitudes) are so strong that they are still perpetuated even if the practical implementation of these values is at odds with what people seem to believe. I also appreciate the author’s discussion of both male and female gender constructs, as this reasserts a larger theme that there are implications for gender formation and assertion on both sides, and not just that “gender” is equated with the female sex. I admire that Salzinger seeks to “further investigate gender’s lived specificity”, because, as she notes, I think that more broad based theories are assumed to be applicable in many different situations. Especially, perhaps, when many Westerners seem to lump together situations in third world countries together, as when explaining the phenomenon of sweatshops in many different countries.

I thought that the John Stossel YouTube clip “Sweatshops” highlighted this trend to some degree. This video describes rules that are supposed to help workers improve their conditions, but instead can “make work disappear”. The news segment was showing how some Americans have been protesting sweatshops, and have captured public attention and helped form public sentiment against sweatshops. These protests are also turning into demands for better wages in America, and some clips highlighted protests at universities like Harvard that wanted higher salaries for employees at the school. Stossel asks if people in the U.S. have a responsibility to the people in poor countries to stop companies from exploiting them, but the people he interviews says it’s a “win-win situation for everyone”, and says that student protestors are “ignorant and clueless”. The video also said that sweatshops that were pressured into stopping hiring adolescent girls in Bangladesh resulted in these young women turning to prostitution instead as a means for making money. “These protests help poor people? Give me a break!”. I think this could be part of that same trend to apply larger narratives, such as anti-sweatshop discourse, to many different places where we perceive that the situation is the same. This fails to help us recognize the important of individual environments and locality that can affect the way that this work is performed and the way it affects people’s lives. I definitely think that this video paints a rosier picture of sweatshops than much of what I have read previously, but this doesn’t mean that we should dismiss factory work off hand as being evil before we examine the facts more closely.

The Kristof New York Times article states that, “But while it shocks Americans to hear it, the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough. Talk to these families in the dump, and a job in a sweatshop is a cherished dream, an escalator out of poverty, the kind of gauzy if probably unrealistic ambition that parents everywhere often have for their children” (Kristof 2009). The Myerson article shares the same sentiment: “'My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are too few” (Myerson 1997). The Wolf article also explains how sweatshops are an opportunity for creating stability in the economic status of many families, and this is echoing many of the same ideas from the other readings and videos for our discussion This makes me wonder how we can seek to consolidate our larger understanding of what we think is moral, fair, or right treatment for workers with what people on the local level actually want. I think Salzinger’s article, which asserts the importance of non-generalization and of analysis on a local level, becomes important here in making sure that we don’t apply larger notions of what worker’s rights should look like on a broad scale, in lieu of taking a closer look at individualized needs. I don’t think that we should stop examining the issue of sweatshops by any means, but I do think that on some level, our application of our sense of morality ceases to be responsible when we ignore what other people want and make the assumption that our opinion is the “right way” forward. This is part of general exercise of privilege, where we not only presuppose that our ideas are always of value and that they should be implemented in trying to enact change in other places, and also that we are somehow enlightened in a way that other people aren’t. I hope that we can discuss more of this issue of how morality plays out in the globalizing world.