The Myth Of The Male Breadwinner

Women And Industrialization In The Caribbean

Helen I Safa

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429972386
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

First Published in 2018. This book examines the debate about the effects of paid employment on women through studies of women industrial workers in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. It focuses on following areas of women's lives: wages and working conditions; the family, life cycle, and household composition.

1
Gender and Industrialization in the Caribbean Basin

Juana Santana works in the free trade zone of La Romana in the Dominican Republic and sustains her family of three children on her weekly salary of DR$57 (in 1986 about U.S.$20), which must cover household costs including food, rent, the baby-sitter, and her own expenses such as transportation and lunch. Her husband earns some money driving a taxi (público) owned by his family, but like many of the men living with the women workers in the free trade zones, he does not have a stable job. With three children to support, her husband's unstable income, and the high cost of living, Juana knows she has to continue working. She notes: "Anyway, I have to work, either in the zone or in a private home [as a domestic], anyway, because I, I cannot be dependent on my husband. Because what he earns is not enough, to help my family and to help me here at home."

Juana's situation is typical of what many women workers in the free trade zones face—low wages, poor working conditions, lack of inexpensive and adequate child care, limited job alternatives, partners who offer limited assistance or none at all, and an increasingly high cost of living. She also expresses women's increasing consciousness that they need to work and can no longer depend on a male breadwinner. The concept of the male breadwinner is becoming a myth as women worldwide become increasingly important contributors to the household economy.

The myth of the male breadwinner reflects many changes that have taken place as a result of the new international division of labor that started in the 1960s. Increased international competition from Japan and other newly industrializing countries (NICs) in Asia—such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore—and the high cost of labor in advanced industrial countries such as the United States led to the relocation of parts of many manufacturing processes to cheaper wage areas overseas, particularly in labor-intensive industries such as garments and electronics (Safa 1981). The search for cheap labor intensified in the 1980s as a result of the debt incurred by developing countries to foreign banks and multilateral lending institutions such as the World Bank. In order to pay off this debt and reduce their growing balance of payments deficit, developing countries encouraged exports and restricted imports. The redistributive welfare state was sharply curtailed both in advanced industrial and in developing countries as public services were reduced and privatized, placing additional burdens on households already suffering from lowered wages, rising inflation, and unemployment. The need for additional income forced growing numbers of women into the labor force, especially married women who were commonly assumed to be supplementary wage earners. From 1950 to 1980, the size of the female labor force in Latin America and the Caribbean increased threefold, with participation rates for women growing from 18 to 26 percent, a rate even faster than that for men and including all age groups (Safa 1992: 71–72). This increase reflected both a growth in the supply of women workers due to higher educational levels, lower fertility, and heavy rural-urban migration and an increasing demand for women in the growing service and export-processing sectors. From 1980 to 1988, women's share in the Latin American and Caribbean labor force as a whole rose from 33 percent to 38 percent (ECLAC 1992: 59), reflecting the continued higher rates of increase for women than for men.

Standing (1989) demonstrates that this pattern of "global feminization" of labor with increased female and declining male labor force participation is not confined to Latin America and the Caribbean but is found in many developing as well as advanced industrial countries where international competition, labor deregulation, and structural adjustment measures have weakened workers' bargaining power. Labor market deregulation cheapens wages by explicitly abandoning formal labor regulations or by simply weakening their implementation, as in the case of informal agreements between the state and multinational corporations to prohibit unionization in export-processing zones. Deregulation is manifest in a global shift from full-time wage and salary workers with fixed wages and fringe benefits to unprotected casual or temporary workers employed in export processing, subcontracting, and home work in the informal sector, all of which favor female employment. Women workers are preferred in export processing because they are cheaper to employ, less likely to unionize, and have greater patience for the tedious, monotonous work characteristic of assembly operations. Lim (1990: 105) estimates that in the mid-1980s there were approximately 1.5 million women directly employed in export manufacturing in developing countries, between a third and half of them in wholly or partly foreign-owned enterprises. Such enterprises include not only multinationals from the United States and other industrialized countries but also firms from other newly industrializing countries such as South Korea or Hong Kong. Most of these women are employed in Asia, with an increasing percentage in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 1983, Asia accounted for 55 percent of the world's employment in export processing, while Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America represented 31 percent (Wilson 1992: 10). In 1993, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) estimated that there were a half million workers in export manufacturing in Mexico and 320,000 more in the Caribbean and Central America, the majority in apparel and related trades (Justice 1993: 8).

Export-led industrialization actually represents the third stage in the international division of labor, which began in Latin America and the Caribbean in the colonial period with the export of primary products such as minerals and agricultural commodities such as sugar and coffee in exchange for manufactured goods from the United States and western Europe. To overcome this dependency and unequal exchange, Latin America embarked in the period following World War II on an ambitious program of import substitution industrialization, which was designed to promote national industries' providing consumer goods to their domestic markets. Import substitution industrialization was successful in promoting economic growth but ran into increasing difficulty, both because of the small size of the domestic markets and the low level of technology. These problems became more acute as import substitution tried to expand from labor-intensive industries such as food processing and textile manufacturing into capital-intensive industries, which required higher levels of technology and machinery that still had to be imported from abroad. In addition, national industries protected by high tariffs often tended to maintain inefficient productive processes, resulting in more costly and lower-quality consumer goods than those produced in more advanced industrial countries.

The debt crisis of the 1980s in Latin America and the Caribbean brought on by the increasing price of oil, deteriorating terms of trade with the United States and other advanced industrial countries, and spiraling interest rates caused a severe balance of payments deficit, which had to be reduced through exports. The need to export led to a shift in development strategies away from import substitution industrialization toward export manufacturing as a means toward industrialization and economic growth. But import substitution industrialization and export processing had very different implications for workers in developing countries. Import substitution required the development of an internal market through an increase in the purchasing power of workers, which favored wage increases, the strengthening of labor, and the development of the redistributive state. The market for export-led industrialization is external and demands the maximum reduction of production costs, principally wages, to compete effectively on the international level. Foreign investment is given priority over national industry and the domestic market shrank considerably in the 1980s as lower wages, inflation, and unemployment reduced purchasing power. As import substitution industrialization became more capital intensive, it also favored skilled male workers over unskilled females, but export processing employs more women, particularly in labor-intensive industries such as garment and electronics. The shift from import substitution industrialization to export-led industrialization thus contributed to a gender recomposition of the labor force, which weakened the dominance of the male breadwinner.

Studies of women workers in the export-processing industry provoked an intense debate over its impact on women's status, some arguing that it integrates women into the development process and others insisting that it exploits women as a source of cheap labor (Tiano 1986, Lim 1990, Fernandez-Kelly 1983). Recently, this debate has become less dichotomous, particularly as studies have gone beyond the labor process to examine the impact of wage labor on gender relations in the household. Paid employment has long been viewed as one way of breaking down women's isolation and dependence on men. Paid employment is expected to give women greater economic autonomy, to increase their authority in the household, and to develop their consciousness of gender and class subordination. However, there are many obstacles to achieving such goals, including the segregation of women into poorly paid, unstable jobs (such as export processing), their double burden of wage work and domestic labor, and a gender ideology that continues to portray women as "supplementary" workers, even when they are becoming increasingly important economic contributors to the household economy.

This book will compare the impact of paid industrial employment on women workers in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic, three co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Gender and Industrialization in the Caribbean Basin
• 2 The Male Breadwinner and Women's Wage Labor
• 3 Women Workers and the Rise and Decline of Puerto Rico's Operation Bootstrap
• 4 The Dominican Republic: Export Manufacturing and the Economic Crisis
• 5 Cuba: Revolution and Gender Inequality
• 6 Conclusion: Economic Restructuring and Gender Subordination
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index