Anakena Paddon

22/2/2012

Economic Globalization

            Watching the documentary “Maquilapolis” set us up to be looking at the issue of factory work and sweatshops under a different lens, by presenting us with the Mexican promotoras in charge of passing on their knowledge of worker’s rights and spreading awareness about their living conditions to the masses in order to bring about change and social justice. While there was certainly a long way to go yet, it was interesting to see some form of empowerment in that community.

            These readings have continued to spin what I thought I understood about sweatshops – now I don’t really know which way is up or who has the right to determine the benefactor effects of sweatshops on Third World populations.

            Nicholas Kristof talks about sweatshops in Cambodia, where, supposedly, for most people they are a step up from a poverty-ridden life in that factories offer at least a salary, as opposed to the “Dante-like vision of hell” of the festering garbage mounds where young children and families live, trying to survive by selling old cans and bottles, risking their lives daily. At first I was very surprised by Kristof’s declaration that “the central challenge in the poorest countries is not that sweatshops exploit too many people, but that they don’t exploit enough”. While I understand the logic that he presents – it’s a case of the lesser of two evils – I am somewhat befuddled as to why he still uses the term ‘exploit’. Why would we want to /should we need to exploit more people? Shouldn’t we instead be working at finding solutions to end the need for cheap human labor?

            Discussing this scenario is somewhat naïve and idealistic. As the promotoras in “Maquilapolis” stated, whenever there is word of cheaper labor, the factories move. So when will we run out of places that offer cheaper and cheaper human labor? When will living conditions internationally be high enough that we no longer need to exploit people, as Kristof suggests in his article? Towards the end of his piece, he states that the “best way to help people in the poorest countries isn’t to campaign against sweatshops but to promote manufacturing there” – is this a realistic solution? Indeed, if poorer countries built their own manufacturing industries, they could be developing themselves from bottom-up…if only those pesky college students weren’t protesting against sweatshops and boycotting major TNC’s. But can we blame them? Or are we fighting the wrong injustice? Are sweatshops not the evil we should be opposing?

            Kristof argues that sweatshops are “only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty”. So perhaps college students like the one from the youtube video, who are idealists, who are trying to see their vision of an ideal world become a reality are attacking the wrong evil after all. Perhaps the fundamental mix-up occurs at a political level. But then we get into such intricate power plays, not just within a nation, but between hierarchized nations that it gets difficult to untangle the mess of injustices. So whom do we fight? And do we know why we have to fight them?

            One of the speakers in the youtube video stated that he hoped “people would think with their brain instead of their hearts”, in order to realize that sweatshops were more of a stepping stone towards better wages than the horrid nightmares people painted them out to be. When discussing teenage girls being exploited (which he put in quotes, doubting the truth of that statement), he highlighted that it was much better than turning to a life of prostitution. But why can’t it be that the living conditions are safe and livable enough that prostitution not be their only back-up plan?

            The NYT article, interviewing Jeffrey Sachs among other people seems to also support this argument that there are not enough sweatshops providing work to women. His argument is that they did allow countries such as Honk Kong to emerge as powers, and that basic subsistence wages are better than none. Then how do they transition from barely-getting-by-wages to wages that can be saved up and used for entrepreneurship and development?

            Diane Wolf’s article on women workers in Java, Indonesia presents the “complex economic relationships between factories, female workers, and their rural families in Java”. Among her extensive research, the first point that caught my eye was how careful she was to get across the point that there is no common blanket experience of globalization, not internationally, not even locally. “Class position, ethnic background, culture, and country’s position within the world market” all affect how the women will react and be able to survive in their globalized world.

            This article’s complexity, for me, arose from all these differing experiences of globalization. On the one hand, we hear of parents who complain that their daughters do nothing but spend money all day; on another hand, some families need the salary of these women to help support their families. I found the different experiences between commuters and locals to be interesting, because it really highlighted the different lived experiences of economic globalization and how it affects the age, family life and revenue of each individual.

            Interestingly, Wolf went into social explanations of why women’s salaries are so low, even relative to men working in similarly low-skilled positions – and it has everything to do with “traditional gender hierarchies”. Families in Java are dependent on the male in the family, so if a woman were to earn more than the man, then that gendered patriarchal control would become irrelevant. Here again the power plays are entirely dependent on gender roles and their enforcement by a patriarchal society.

            This issue of gender power returns in Salzinger’s article “From High Heels to Swathed Bodies: Gendered Meanings under Production in Mexico’s Export-Processing Industry”. She analyzes various different plants and the gender roles that are enforced either by the workers themselves or the management as they reproduce or contradict external gender roles.

            Part of the explanation of the gender roles lies in the fact that men are generally ostracized from factory positions, as companies seek to hire women, often perceived to be “meek, docile and dependable” workers, who do not get bored easily and who are willing to put in many hours a day in order to sustain a family. This view of women is itself very biased, socially constructed, but also self-perpetuated as women fit themselves into this mold in order to get hired and be able to work in the maquiladoras.

            I found the difference between Panoptimex and Anarchomex to be very interesting. Panoptimex highlighted the way the men in the factory, managers and those responsible for stations asserted their masculinity through flirtation games with the female workers, who in turn felt they had to play the game, dress up, wear make-up, take breaks in their work days etc. This allows them to later buy favors from plant managers (such as tardy passes, excuses for absences, etc) but does that mean that the company discriminates in their hiring process? Do they only hire attractive, young women?

            Contrary to this was the case study of Anarchomex, which was managed by an American, with a weak level of Spanish, setting himself already at a disadvantage with his workers, which perhaps explains why he distanced himself physically from them as well. In this factory, there are also major double-standards at work, as women are supposed to graciously receive the favors and flirtations of men, without making the first move, or refusing them (for there would be risk of social exclusion).