Homeworking Women

A Gender Justice Perspective

Annie Delaney, Rosaria Burchielli, Shelley Marshall, Jane Tate

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429772023
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Homework; work that is categorised as informal employment, performed in the home, mainly for subcontractors and mostly undertaken by women. The inequities and injustices inherent in homework conditions maintain women's weak bargaining position, preventing them from making any improvements to their lives via their work. The best way to tackle these issues is not to abolish, but to bring equality and justice to homework.

This book contributes a gender justice framework to analyse and confront the issues and problems of homework. The authors propose four justice dimensions – recognition, representation, rights and redistribution – to examine and analyse homework. This framework also takes into account the structures and processes of capitalism and the patriarchy, and the relations of domination that are widely held to be the major factors that determine homework injustice. The authors discuss strategies and approaches that have worked for homeworkers, highlighting why they worked and the features that were beneficial for them.

Homeworking Women will be of interest to individuals and organisations working with or for the collective benefit of homeworkers, academics and students interested in feminism, labour regulation, informal work, supply chains and social and political justice.

1

Understanding homework and homeworkers

Introduction

Homework, involving millions of women around the world, is widely understood to be a highly precarious form of work, with sub-minimum pay-rates and working conditions. The labour and economic contributions of homeworkers are unacknowledged; their working conditions are uncertain, unregulated and largely unorganised, and their social positions and futures are unprotected and insecure (HWW, 2003; 2004; Burchielli, Buttigieg, and Delaney, 2008). Through the use of homework in urban and rural locations, suppliers to national and multinational corporations reduce their overheads and economic risks by transferring the pressures of prices and tight deadlines imposed by lead firms onto the most vulnerable workers at the bottom of supply chains (Mezzadri, 2016). In this way, homework represents one of the worst examples of labour rights violations and gender exploitation through a form of work that has persisted, practically unchanged, over the past two centuries (Allen and Wolkowitz, 1987; Barrientos, 2013; Delaney, Burchielli and Connor, 2015; Toffanin, 2016).

A prior condition for gender justice, and for any achievements in equality and equity, relates to an understanding about specific instances of gender injustice, and the idiosyncratic inequalities that shape it. Thus, a gender justice proposal must first uncover, describe and ultimately recognise the nature and scope of a particular injustice. The aim of this chapter is to begin to recognise homework, to define and discuss its particular characteristics and conditions, and to foreground related labour issues, such as protections, regulation, and rights. In this chapter, we answer fundamental questions about homework: examining what homework is and where it occurs, who does it and why, and the critical notions and global dynamics that sustain it. Understanding homework requires an awareness of intersectionality, accounting for the various interrelated factors that have and continue to shape homework. We see homework as an economic activity and as a form of labour and production performed predominantly by women. This leads us to examine the links between women, home and work, to understand the gender divisions of labour, and other social constructions, such as notions of home and work, that facilitate the existence of homework. This analysis explains why women undertake homework and why it is undervalued and unprotected/unregulated but does not explain the positioning of homework in global supply chains. A more complete analysis is rendered by looking at homework from a broader perspective: understanding its location in the informal economy and how homework is used by capitalism, thus drawing out the links between capitalism and the surplus value created by paid work at home.

In simple terms, homework is paid work performed at home, largely undertaken by women. As homework occurs in all parts of the world, in global north and south economies, there are many jobs performed as homework, across all industries: from electronics to embroidery, footballs to food, clothing to cigarettes, giving the impression of varieties of homework. This, however, is a fallacy. We shall argue in this chapter, and throughout this book, that there are key common features that characterise homework: the gender of homeworkers, the home as workplace; the work and employment conditions of homework; its invisibility and its use by capitalism. In fact, as others have argued, in order to make sense of homework, it is useful to focus on these common features and to draw out the relationships between them (Allen and Wolkowitz, 1987; Rowbotham, 1998).

Beginning with homework and homeworkers, we paint a picture of the various defining characteristics of this work and the women who do it. Our data sources include primary data collected by the researchers and activists who are the authors of this book. Other data was collected by the homeworker NGO, Homeworkers Worldwide (HWW), with which the authors have had a longstanding collaboration. We also report on secondary data published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) and from international literature within various disciplines.

In the first half of the chapter, we focus on homework as women’s work, discussing the over-representation of women in homework alongside the range of work done as homework in different parts of the world. We analyse work and employment conditions based on the home as workplace, including precarious supply of work, extended working hours, low pay-rates, occupational health and safety concerns and lack of protection and rights. We examine why women work at home and establish that the gender of homeworkers and the home as workplace are key features of homework, subsequently arguing that societal constructions of gender and the home underpin and help to explain homeworkers’ invisibility as workers. In relation to homework, the term invisibility refers to the non-recognition of the ‘work’ in homework, with grave implications for the rights of homeworkers, and is reflected in their poor working conditions, such as irregular work and low incomes, lack of adequate representation (through viable unions) and lack of labour rights.

Later in the chapter, we discuss homework in the context of informal work and employment, to further explain the lack of employment standards and protections inherent in homework. Informal work is often manual and labour intensive, while informal employment is neither registered nor regulated by the powers of the state. We analyse homework in relation to capital, discussing the integration of homework as a method of capitalist production systems. We argue that since industrialisation, homework has created surplus value for capital in different historical contexts and that the benefits to capital far outweigh the sub-minimum incomes that barely compensate homeworkers. Finally, we look at formal definitions of homework, in the context of institutional recognition of homework including the ILO’s Convention 177 on homework. Within this discussion, we engage with the complex question of own-account homeworkers – a category that is often misinterpreted and yet is pivotal to policy-making.

While this chapter aims to focus strictly on recognition, to understand the current non-recognition of homework as defined in our gender justice framework, our analysis suggests that recognition is linked to the dimensions of representation and rights. We conclude that repositioning homework, so that it is accurately and properly recognised, as per our justice framework, requires combining recognition strategies with representation and rights, and will require an enormous struggle from civil society in general. Homework has, for centuries, been a key method within capitalist production systems and continues to be highly profitable under neoliberalism, thus capital will not easily relinquish this source of great profit.

Homeworkers: who and where?

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), homework is paid work performed at home, and women constitute the ‘vast majority’ in homework around the world (ILO, 2013: 46). As an example, the International Homeworker Mapping Program (IHMP), conducted by Homeworkers Worldwide, found women doing homework in Asia, Europe and Latin America, in a variety of different jobs (HWW, 2004). These data suggest that homeworkers are women between the ages of 14–80 years, the majority aged between 30–40 years, and mostly married with children. Education levels are generally low with many women having low literacy rates (HWW, 2004).

Homework is found in widely different parts of the world and its specific characteristics are linked to the nature of the local economy. Around the world, homeworkers carry out different types of work, with significant numbers working within manufacturing and trade (ILO, 2013). The international homeworkers mapping project found that in Chile, women living in the capital were hand-sewing parts of expensive shoes destined for local and international markets. In the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the town of Nova Friburgo was full of small, home-based workshops, many of which put out work to women homeworkers, sewing underwear for national sale. In China, women in small villages sewed tablecloths with Christmas designs, for export to the USA; others strung together pearls, a valuable export commodity. In Bulgaria, Turkey, the UK and Australia, women were sewing fashion garments for national and international markets. In Thailand, women assembled garments and artificial flowers in rural and urban areas (HWW, 2004). Other studies have found women stitching leather footballs in Pakistan (PILER, 2009) and assembling electronic circuitry in the UK (HWW, 2004). Most work these women undertake is similar to factory work, except that their workplaces are their homes. Also known as dependent or subcontracted homeworkers (ILO, 2013), some of the characteristics of this type of work are piece-rate payments determined by an employer, with no worker control over deadlines, designs, products, and raw materials. Moreover, income is generally far below minimum wages, or average earnings for equivalent work.

Other homeworkers sew, knit, crochet, assemble, cook, paint, embroider, and weave for local markets, selling to neighbours and friends. They design their own products, buy raw materials and find markets wherever they can. In some places, this work is traditional handcraft work that women have learned from their mothers and grandmothers. In Bulgaria, women do traditional embroidery. In Chile and Bolivia, women raise alpaca and llamas, then spin and weave the wool into shawls and scarves. In Thailand, many village women weave silk and cotton. In other, rural areas, women collect natural products from the mountains, countryside and coast, which they then process at home. In Jharkhand, formerly South Bihar, women make leaf-plates, used all over India, from leaves they collect from the forest. In remote rural areas of Ghana, women collect Shea nuts and make Shea butter for sale at local markets, from where it is often exported to the USA and Europe for use in the cosmetics industry (HWW, 2003). Some of the characteristics of this type of work are: limited access to raw materials; limited or no access to markets and credit; inadequate and precarious incomes. While these workers are often differentiated as self-employed or independent, they are mostly living and working at subsistence level, especially if they live in rural areas, under various types of dependencies. We discuss the dependent/own-account distinctions and related issues later in this chapter.

Homeworkers are not a homogenous group: they perform many different jobs from vastly different locations. However, the gender of homeworkers, seen in the predominance of women in homework, and the home as the workplace, are principal features that characterise this work. Homeworkers also share similar working conditions and employment standards as discussed later in this chapter.

Work and employment conditions

For homeworkers, a supply of work is not guaranteed. For women who are dependent on a subcontractor, the supply of work is subject to the variables affecting the subcontractor, such as loss of supply contracts and price changes. For dependent homeworkers, work may be seasonal and could suddenly disappear. Own-account workers have similar challenges as demand for their products is subject to the many fluctuations that affect demand. Some have not enough work while others have so much that they are affected by tight deadlines leading to long hours of work. In all cases, precarious work leads to insecure incomes.

The spread of working hours extends throughout the day. For some, the average working day is ten hours, but it is not unusual for homeworkers to work longer hours, at times around the clock, without sleep to complete orders, as reported in the garment industry in Argentina (Burchielli et al., 2014; Burchielli and Delaney, 2016), and other industries around the world. In any case, it is common for the paid work and the unpaid domestic work to occur in tandem, so that women are constantly working, paid or unpaid, for up to 16 hours per day.

I get up at 5’clock in the morning, clean the house, even the outside of the house too. There is a water problem in our area, we won’t get water every day, so we have to go walk and get 10 pots every day. Then I clean, make breakfast and lunch for the children, then send them off to school. I do the rest of the housework, then send off my husband. Then I sit for this work. Between lunch hour and sitting together with other women workers, by 4 o’clock the children will come and then I will do some snacks and things for the children. Then my husband comes, I cook the dinner, then do more stitching work. I will sleep at 11 to 11.30 at night.

(Homeworker Chennai, India 2012)

At home you are never paid enough. With the excuse that I was at home, I always worked in bits and pieces and so I would be up until midnight in order to get the job done. I would get up at seven in the morning. At 8 o’clock my children would go to school. I worked two hours in the morning and then in the afternoon from two until six, then I would make dinner and after dinner, I would work from nine until midnight or 1 o’clock. The interruptions were many and varied.

(Italian footwear Homeworker: 1990s, cited in Toffanin, 2016: 187)

Homeworkers earn very low rates for their work. For example, homeworkers in the footwear industry in Tamil Nadu, India, reported earning 4–6 INR per shoe (approximately 4–6 cents, $US), with daily earnings in the order of 50 INR ($US 0.75), or approximately one-third of the minimum wage in that industry (Delaney et al., 2015). Systematic underpayment, compared with industry standards, is typical in homework and has been widely reported (Allen and Wolkowitz, 1987; HWW, 2004; Delaney et al., 2015). Even in the case of self-employed (own-account) homeworkers, who may sell their work directly, earnings are so irregular that the income barely meets costs of production let alone basic needs. Income patching (finding different, additional sources of income via different jobs) is commonplace especially in rural areas, where seasonal work needs to be supplemented and is subsidised at other times. Earnings are often as little as one-fifth to one-third of minimum wages in each country and homeworkers often report not being able to make ends meet.

In terms of occupational health and safety (OHS), most homeworkers report some type of health condition as a result of their work (HWW, 2004). Common problems include backache, headaches, asthma, poor eyesight, toxic effects of chemicals, pesticides and dyes, and general lethargy or poor health. In some extreme cases, there are reports of loss of limbs, miscarriages, deafness, electrocution, poisoning and respiratory problems. Where homeworkers have done the same work over an extended time period, there are examples of repetitive strain injuries (from sewing for long hours) or skin problems (prolonged exposure to raw materials treated with chemicals). As homework is informal, illness linked to occupation is unlikely to be acknowledged compared to other workers. While in some countries, such as the UK or Argentina, free health provision exists, in others either it does not exist, or else services are inadequate, as in most parts of India.

Other, work-related problems include having to supply their own materials at their own cost (HWW, 2004; Burchielli et al., 2008), social isolation brought about by working alone at home (Burchielli et al. 2014) and bullying from intermediaries, including sexual harassment (Delaney et al., 2015); see Example 1.1 below. As homeworkers often have no access to labour benefits or social support mechanisms such as sickness benefits, medical costs associated with work injuries are likely to fall on the homeworker, where they might be ignored, or bring related hardship such as debt. Although sometimes assisted by other family members, women are disadvantaged by homework as they are underpaid, frequently working long hours, often providing their own materials, in unsafe workplaces (Delaney et al., 2015).

Homeworkers are unprotected by institutional mechanisms such as labour unions or labour regulation, which perpetuates poor working conditions relating to working hours and pay rates (Çagatay, 2003) – more about this in Chapters 5 and 6. In addition to the various types of work-related disadvantages, women homeworkers are also socially disadvantaged by homework, which keeps them isolated in their homes. Moreover, the nature of production in the home is conducive to child labour (Delaney, Burchielli and Tate, 2017). Poor working conditions, low income or earnings, irregular work and poverty often lead to children’s occasional or full-time involvement in homework. Dependent, low paid, piece-work coupled with tight deadlines often requires family members to help with the work. Lack of income and work opportunities for rural and own-account work can contribute to children ‘helping’ the family generate cash income. One consequence of women working for long hours is that young girls end up shouldering the childcare and other responsibilities while the mother works. This perpetuates a gendered cycle of disadvantage for female family members.

Despite the fact that homeworkers are not all the same, by and large, they are women, who work from home, and who share similar working conditions. Irregular work, l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Introduction: homework and gender justice
• 1. Understanding homework and homeworkers
• 2. The invisibilisation of homework
• 3. Extension of labour regulation to homeworkers
• 4. Corporate social responsibility: improving homeworkers’ recognition?
• 5. The logic of the supply chain: barriers and strategies for homeworker representation
• 6. Homeworkers organising: transnational to local
• 7. Making change: a gender justice perspective
• Index