Money Makes Us Relatives

Women's Labor in Urban Turkey

Jenny B. White

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134358083
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia

In the rural immigrant community of Istanbul, poor women spend up to fifty hours a week producing goods for export, yet deny that they actually 'work'. Money Makes Us Relatives asks why Turkish society devalues women's work, concealing its existence while creating a vast pool of cheap labor for the world market. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork among family producers and pieceworkers, and using fascinating case studies throughout, Jenny B. White shows how women's paid work is viewed in terms of kinship relations of reciprocity and obligation - an extension of domestic work for the family, which is culturally valued but poorly compensated. Whilst offering the benefits of social identity and long-term security, women's work also reflects global capitalism's ability to capture local cultural norms, and to use these to lower production costs and create exploitative conditions.
This fully revised second edition includes a new introduction and conclusion, updated references, comparative material on women's labor elsewhere in the world, and brand new material on Islam, globalization, gender and Turkish family life. It is an important contribution to debates about women's participation in late global capitalism.

1

INTRODUCTION

Seher picked up a sweater she was knitting. The little girls picked up some knitting also and suddenly I was surrounded by what seemed like dozens of long silver needles flashing, as in a field of crickets, up and down, up and down. The unison lasted only a few minutes before someone dropped her knitting on the couch and got up, leaving it there. Someone else came along later, found it and knit a few rows. The whole process of knitting seemed random and unconscious, like breathing. In Turkish working-class neighborhoods of the 1980s, the assumption was that any woman could do such handiwork and that the skill therefore was nothing special. In fact, women's identities as family members were constructed from childhood around learning such skills and other forms of labor, as well as duty to their kin.

In the 1980s, such skills and labor considered to be “natural” to women began to be put to use in small, informally organized neighborhood workshops that created products sold to intermediaries for the world market. This was a direct result of Turkey's economic opening in that decade, as it turned its back on more than a half century of economic introspection and embraced an export/import-led economic model. This book examines the impact of this new economy on the urban poor, specifically the residents of a number of squatter areas in and around Turkey's largest city, Istanbul. Led to the city by factory work which by the 1980s had begun to disappear, this population was pulled into the global economy as small-scale subcontractors in a kind of factory without walls. At the bottom of the subcontracting pyramid, women made products in their homes. These products passed into the global market via their husbands, neighbors, and outside merchants and entrepreneurs.

This book looks at such production from two sides. First, it examines how the global capitalist market captures local cultural norms – like the centrality of labor in the social definition of a woman – and uses these norms to lower production costs, creating exploitative conditions. Second, the book examines this process from the point of view of the producers. Why do they not demand higher wages? Indeed, why do they often deny altogether that they are “working,” despite long hours making products for export?

Figure 2 Women knitting at a neighbor's home.

Figure 3 Young girls at an engagement ceremony.

This latter practice particularly intrigued me and led me to conclude that, while at the level of global labor such women are indeed exploited, at the local level, their labor takes part in an altogether different set of meanings that accrue social benefits for them. To take advantage of these locally defined social benefits, a woman must clothe her labor in cultural meanings and negate the naked profit motive implied in “working” for pay. The recognition that eschewing an open desire for profit can be a positive force in a woman's life (in economists’ terms, a “rational” choice) even while it brings in less money, does not negate the equally salient fact that such cultural practices make it possible for global business to earn greater profits by paying producers less than their labor is worth. The women I encountered earned an average of $3 for a full day's work making products that were sold in New York or London at markups of 300 percent or more.

Globalization: bringing the local out of the closet

Globalization refers to a move away from an organized, regulated industrial workforce such as is found historically in Europe and the United States toward an international order that relies on cheap, flexible, often part-time or temporary labor in less industrialized countries around the world. The global geography of production is immediately obvious to anyone reading the labels on clothing that indicate place of manufacture – China, Hong Kong, Dominican Republic, Turkey, Mauritius, Malaysia, the Northern Mariana Islands, and on. The promise of globalization, in the words of a popular song, is that “We are the World.” In terms of the products that clothe, feed and surround us, that indeed has come to pass. The much-touted free flow of information said to characterize globalization, however, has a blind spot. Unless we peruse the small print on labels and can trace products through and to their people and places of origin, we are blind to much of the actual globalizing process. For the most part, the history of our purchases is lost. Commodities, in Marxist terms, are fetishized. That is, once an object becomes a commodity, its long journey from raw material to object on the store shelf and the many processes and hands and lives that served to bring it from one state and one place to another, become invisible. We pluck the commodity from its shelf, whether apple or automobile, and immediately apply our own balm of meaning – the apple is fresh and appetizing, the car stylish or energy efficient. The commodity is a blank slate onto which we write our own preoccupations, wishes, standards. We purchase it and carry it into our eminently localized lives where comments or compliments from family, friends, or dinner guests add social and cultural value.

The global loses itself in the local. The meanings of an object to those whose hands have created it, held it, hurried it on its way to the store shelf dissolve in the magic of marketing. The buyer purchases not only a commodity, but also the right to assign its meaning de integro. Naturally, brand-name marketers try to help the consumer along, branding products as having some desirable “look” or characteristic, perhaps even “authenticity” or, more accurately, as imparting this to the purchaser. But even this branding often becomes mystified as the pair of Levis or Gap jeans or Calvin Klein slacks sidles up next to other commodities in the closet and begins to be just “the pants that go with the linen jacket.” One goal of books like this one is to blow away the mystifying fog and take a closer look at some of the people, processes, and meanings that adhere to a commodity at some earlier stage of its existence, to recapture the local across the globe that went into making the commodities localizing in your closet or on your shelf.

There is a moral dimension to this project that is often overlooked in the scientific explication and/or celebration of globalization. That is simply to know the story of our purchases beyond their peripatetic wanderings across the globe, and thereby take some responsibility for the effect of our choices as local consumers on local producers.

Dreaming globally, dreaming locally

The stories that are lost as products become commodities are not mysteries, nor are they unknown to researchers. They are simply veiled by the same market that reaches into the deepest hinterland for raw materials and labor, then sells the dream of the product – the dream the buyer dreams, not the producer or even the seller – in a shop in New York, or London, or Cape Town. The dreams of producers, like those of consumers, are personal and local, yet bounded in possibility by forces beyond their control, categories of belonging – race, social class, gender, nationality, and what these mean locally – and larger forces that might truly be called global. Among these global forces are historical factors that make the producing state or region beholden in some way to the world market, not seldom the aftereffects of colonialism, international debt, or simply lack of saleable resources other than the labor of its people. Multinational companies are a global force. They not only order production at one end and place the product at the other, but, as they increase in size and reach, increasingly are able to command the terms under which these occur, for instance, pushing aside local concerns for safety and equity. The money that supports global business is mobile and not beholden to the banks or offices of any particular nation. Mobile capital means that employers can subcontract workers anywhere in the world. Globalization also means that workers move to areas of greater job potential, whether to cities in their own nations or to new countries far away. Globalization means the flow of jobs and capital, and of people, ideas, and products. This is not all new. Processes like labor migration and migrants’ identification with more than one community have historical precedents dating back centuries, as does the global transmission of ideas and products. The defining characteristic of what we call globalization is the greater velocity of change and larger scale of interconnections.

Some have suggested that global forces are a juggernaut that increasingly makes the local irrelevant, that globalization is a homogenizing process in which global economic and cultural forces engulf and ultimately denature the local (Ritzer 1993). This view has been challenged by those who point out that, under certain circumstances, local customs and traditions are empowered by their interaction with global forces, protected and legitimated (Miller 1995), or hybridized (Watson 1997). The media plays some role in this, particularly the Internet – not only by increasing the global rate of financial flow that make corporations independent, but also by connecting local interests to a global grid to counter or coopt corporate and state interests. It is not necessarily the case, as some had expected, that the forces of juggernaut globalization are met by “indigenous” resistance to a perceived loss of “authentic” culture or community. While this does motivate some, even in the United States, to rail against market and media as undermining local values, it is also true that local people and indigenous groups use these same market and media to promote their own agendas and visions of authenticity that might, in themselves, be globalized. A powerful example of this is the worldwide network of “indigenous peoples” that can mobilize to support local concerns of any particular indigenous group, whether Yanomami Indians in Brazil or Aborigines in Australia.

This also complicates the assumption that globalization involves a power differential between advanced capitalist and less industrial parts of the world, sometimes expressed as a North/South divide. Instead, we must think of globalization as empowering groups in a variety of places, whether world capitals or remote forests. These groups compete by mobilizing global market- and media-enhanced constituencies based on some common quality and resource. That resource might be financial or it may be a claim to authenticity. Constituencies can be built around common political and financial interests or on race, gender, ethnicity, place of origin, place of residence, social class, or other quality. In other words, globalization is not a globally applicable general concept, but a process that varies in its participants and modus operandi, the effects of which are neither uniform nor predictable.

How did this come about? The trajectory is well known. From the 1970s on, many rural economies were transformed by migration and wage labor as industrialization spread to what was then called the Third World. Seeking to cut labor cost, multinational companies, especially “light industries” involving assembly line production of products like electronics, clothing, and processed food, situated production in low-wage countries. National governments, suffering from high unemployment and lack of capital, competed to attract investment by such companies. The real sea change came in the 1980s as multinationals as well as local corporations began to experiment with new production and sales techniques, such as producing just enough to match demand, rather than stocking inventory in advance of sales, and dividing the production process into subcontracted parts, sometimes continents apart. This was largely possible through innovations in communication and transportation. After all, a Japanese company that produced auto parts to demand had to be kept instantly informed of orders in all of its markets, including Europe and the United States. Although it now might seem as if the Internet has always been with us, in fact, it has been widely available for little more than a decade. Indeed, much of the technology behind the increased intensity of global interaction and intersection of networks, finances, products and ideas, has been widely available only since the 1980s. In many parts of the world, including Turkey, the telephone and deregulated, multi-channel television became ubiquitous only over the past two decades. This has allowed the market, if not necessarily producers, to open new arenas for exploitation and to engage in new economic practices that increase profit by increasing corporate global flexibility. Thus, while globalization is not an entirely new process, its intensity and speed of change – and thus its potential effect on local lives, whether as an exploitative or empowering force – also has intensified. It is this aspect of globalization – its interaction with the local and its ultimate insubstantiality – that interests me, rather than the much-hyped global juggernaut of Coca-Cola culture.

This leads to a set of questions that characterize recent debates about globalization. Given the complexity of motivations and alignments, how can one conceptualize the actors in the globalization process? As local groups or interest blocks competing with global interests? As global categories (women, workers, indigenous peoples) set against multinationals? As local, individual actors on the global stage? What role can one assign to the nation state when multinationals appear to operate irrespective of national boundaries? Are multinationals a necessary part of the globalization equation or can small producers reach into the global economy on their own? What importance should be given to cultural norms as parameters within which the global has access to the local (and how does one define the local, after all)? Does participation in the global economy automatically make one “modern”? And, finally, is this process intrinsically political, even if the participants do not define it as such? While I do not pretend to deal with all of these questions in this volume, the issues do concern the subjects of my study – Turkish women and families engaged in production for the world market. How should women's participation (or that of family or household) in the global economy be understood? In the following chapter (and in the substantially revised conclusion) I will attempt to engage the material of the book with questions of the power of the local in its interaction with global forces, how the local is defined (individual, family, nation) and how it is structured (cultural understandings of labor, gender, community, as well as national policies and ideology), and its political import.

2

WOMEN AND THE GLOBAL WORKFORCE

The economic restructuring that occurred in the 1980s created radical changes in the organization of labor, both in the United States and abroad. In less industrialized countries, this took the form of subcontracting, while in the United States the process drew in white-collar workers in the service sector. What these forms of labor had in common were the insecurity of the work, low wages, and the predominance of women. Home-based work, in particular, tended to be low-skill, part-time, temporary or subcontracted labor, often paid by the piece instead of hourly, with no fringe benefits, promotional opportunities or job security. It attracted women in part because they were able to combine childcare with income earning. The desire of multinationals for a flexible labor market with lower fixed costs was met by developing countries offering cheap, low-skilled labor, much of it female. The globalization of production appeared to be accompanied by the feminization of at least part of the global labor force.

This vertical segmentation of the labor force and the isolation of women as workers that resulted came as a surprise to those who believed that economic development and access to modern technologies would bring progress and profit to the Third World, especially to women. Progress might not be immediately apparent, but was believed to be inevitable. However, already by the 1960s and 1970s observers realized that industrialization based on Western models and technologies was not producing the expected social and economic improvements. They noted increased fragmentation of women workers as women of different social classes or women divided by other social categories, such as race or rural/urban origin, did not benefit equally from modernization and development. The search for blame led critics to fault Western development strategies for ignoring the impacts of racism, colonialism, and differences among women that put their interests at odds with one another. Cultural definitions of the abilities and responsibilities of women and men, particularly family, children, and women's domestic responsibilities, negatively affected women's ability to retain jobs. All of these pressures were exacerbated by continuing poverty and male unemployment.

An often-cited example of globalization's incorporation of women's labor is the multinational industry situated just inside Mexico on the United States border. These assembly plants, called maquiladoras, were established as a development strategy by the joint United States-Mexico Border Industrialization Program (BIP) in 1965. The aim was to relieve unemployment among Mexican agricultural migrant workers settled along the border and to take advantage of the available cheap labor to encourage multinational investment. As multinational subsidiaries, these companies were allowed to be completely foreign-owned, despite laws requiring a controlling domestic partnership for other companies operating in Mexico. Managers could live in the United States and commute across the border. The companies were permitted to import raw materials and equipment duty-free into Mexico as long as their products were exported. Goods reimported into the United States were taxed only minimally. Assembly plants along the border, producing everything from clothing to electronics, grew exponentially, beginning with 12 plants in 1965 to 1,259 by 1987, employing over 300,000 people, mostly women (Fernández-Kelly 1983: 21). Young, single, childless female workers are preferred for a number of reasons. Women are assumed by employers to be more docile, to have better manual dexterity, and are expected to be temporary, expendable workers who will accept the lowest wages and leave upon marriage or childbirth. Fernández-Kelly concludes, however, that, while the higher wage and access to medical care provided by maquila work has been a step up for many poor Mexican women from alternatives like work as maids, it has done little in the way of relieving male unemployment which is the dominant pressure affecting families along the border. While the extra income benefits young women and their families while they are employed, the work is highly volatile and life cycle dependent. Maquilas are quick to lay off workers if demand slackens. Workers are pressured to leave before their right to maternity leave, vacations, and other benefits take effect. Thus, job tenure averages only three years. The women themselves do not see themselves as permanent workers and expect to leave their jobs at marriage or after childbirth so they can take care of the household, experiencing pressure from male family members to do so. Older women or those with children, especially single mothers, when forc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women and the Global Workforce
• Part I The Setting
• Part II The Ideology of Labor
• Part III The Structure of Production
• Notes
• References
• Index