Introduction

Introduction: Changing Social Change

1–5
Contours of Paid and © CSD 2020
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Unpaid Work of Women DOI: 10.1177/0049085719901049
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Vibhuti Patel1

It gives me a great sense of fulfilment that our collective effort has resulted in this
Special Number of Social Change on Women’s World of Work––Paid and Unpaid
(March 2020).
Overarching concerns with respect to workforce participation of women in the
21st century have been changing labour processes, labour/employment relations,
labour standards in different sectors of the economy and the current discourse is
on implications of Industry 4.0 on ‘Future of Work’, platform-based employment
and feminisation of a care economy. Only a minuscule proportion of women in the
world economy is in the organised sector with relatively better standards of social
security and social protection. The rest face back-breaking, long hours of dead-
end work without any chances of upward social and economic mobility, mostly in
a precarious working situation.
There is south in the North and north in the South. Thus, it is not only in
Africa, Latin America and Asia that women workers face inhuman work condition
and below subsistence wages, but non-white women in the workforce in the
industrialised world also face the same predicament as the footloose precariat
in the informal economy. The world capitalism has found coloured women as
‘the last colony’ (Mies, Bennholdt-Thomsen, & von Werlhof, 1988) for capitalist
accumulation. In poverty groups, self-employed women end up self-exploiting as
the returns for their hard work are deplorably low.
Even in sunrise industries such as information technology, business
process outsourcing, knowledge process outsourcing, medical transcription and
transliteration, most women are recruited in the lowest rung of the hierarchy as

1
Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute of Social
Sciences, Naoroji Campus, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Corresponding author
Vibhuti Patel, Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, School of Development Studies, Tata Institute
of Social Sciences, Naoroji Campus, Deonar Farm Road, Mumbai, Maharashtra 400008, India.
Email vibhuti.np@gmail.com
2 / Vibhuti Patel Social Change

data entry operators without any chances of promotion. A couple of women as

CEOs in the financial sector or Fortune 500 companies are showcased as symbols
of empowerment of women, but a large majority of professionally qualified
women are stuck in the middle- to lower-level cadre in the corporate sector.
The presence of women in boardrooms across the industries worldwide is also
negligible. Apparently they are better placed but are not in a level playing field
due to patriarchal biases.
The segmentation factor market and product market does not allow self-
employed women and women entrepreneurs’ to upscale their ventures.
Globalisation has accentuated inequality and poverty and has had a massive
influence on the urban, rural and dalit/tribal poor women as paid, underpaid and
unpaid workers of the economy (Patel, 2009). As homemakers, poor women have
shouldered a disproportionately huge, in fact, a triple burden of globalisation
due to the commercialisation of daily survival needs such as drinking water,
degradation of environment and erosion of public health services (Ravi Kumar
& Sharma, 2003) and cash-controlled privatised education by corporate-driven
globalisation (Ambani & Birla, 2000). Expensive transport, dismantling of the
Public Distribution System that provided grains, cooking fuel, cloth material,
soap, and so on have made lives of millions of workers, especially working class
women and their children, pauperised and malnourished.
Neoliberal stabilisation policies that drastically reduce state contribution
to the social sector and enhance only its regulatory and surveillance role have
reduced chances of quality education, nutritious diet and healthy growth of poor
people’s children. Laissez-faire in the labour market promoted through new
labour codes have wiped out historical gains of the working class in terms of
living wages, collective bargaining, labour standards and occupational safety.
There has been a drastic increase in the migration as well as trafficking of women
and children to fuel the informal sector. Macro-economic policy of structural
adjustment programmes marked by the 4Ds, namely, devaluation, deregulation,
deflation and denationalisation, have accentuated human miseries and escalated
economic inequalities that have rendered poor women to be ‘the last colony’
(Mies, 1988). Mass unemployment, food price volatility due to liberalisation of
agriculture, galloping inflation, privatisation of education and healthcare affect
the common masses especially women, children and elderly the most. Agrarian
distress has forced rural men to migrate to urban centres, and there is widespread
feminisation of subsistence agriculture in Asian countries. Industry 4.0 marked
by the introduction of robots and Artificial Intelligence has accentuated the
process of declining work participation of women in South Asia over the last
five years. New labour codes have drastically curtailed workers’ rights and given
total freedom to employers to exploit the 90 per cent workers who work in the
unorganised sector on contracts or in home-based production without any concern
for living wages and occupational health and safety (Mohanty, 2019).
This Special Number of Social Change on Women’s World of Work: Paid and
Unpaid is envisaged in this historical context. The articles in this Special Number
deliberate upon the issues and experiences of women, across the organised and
unorganised sector, to excavate the contour that women are striving to create as their
 Introduction: Changing Contours of Paid and Unpaid / 3

own in the contemporary world and to identify the varied forms of strategies and
tactics evolved by women to meet the challenges thrown up by neoliberal ecosystem.
The field research based article by Kiran Desai, ‘Liberation and Exploitation:
Case Study of Women Workers in Unorganised Sector of Surat City’ profiles the
conditions and status of women workers engaged in unorganised sector activities
in an urban centre. Being hailed as a business hub and economic capital of Gujarat
state, Surat city is known for small- and medium-scale industries (SMSIs) of
weaving, dying-printing, embroidery and diamond.
A historically contextualised article, ‘Conceptualising Work in the Swedish
Gender Equality Debate’ by Linda Lane and Birgitta Jordansson traces the gender
equality discourse from the 1960s to the present while at every stage interrogating
how equality was problematised and what solutions were offered. Their analyses
show that the emergence of gender equality dislocated other inequalities in such
a manner that other forms of structural discrimination and differentiation were
either marginalised or valorised depending on the equality problem to be solved.
Chitra Sinha, in her article titled, ‘Women and Work in Bahrain: Closing the
Gender Gap?’ analyses employment trends in the Bahrain financial sector and
supplements this with qualitative assessment of the existing legal framework,
gender perceptions in society and work environments in the industry.
‘Negotiated Agency amidst Overlapping Vulnerabilities of Women Migrant
Workers in South Asia’ by Ananya Chakraborty explores the similarities and
differences between migration and labour market experiences of women migrants
in South Asia showing how migration for employment can contribute towards
agency formation but at the same time can increase vulnerability by bringing
about a reduction in well-being, security and dignity in the absence of secure
policies that address challenges of women migrants in the region.
An exploratory research based article titled, ‘Women Migrants in Western
Australia: Case Studies of Resilience and Empowerment’ jointly authored by Jaya
Dantas, Penelope Strauss, Ros Cameron and Claire Rogers is underpinned by
theoretical frameworks of resilience and empowerment of women brings to the fore
uncontested importance of education, the desire to be empowered, the capacity to be
resilient and adaptive and the importance of giving back to the community.
‘The Blurred Boundaries of Migration: Transnational Flows of Women Domestic
Workers from Kerala to UAE’ by Bindhulakshmi Pattadath is based on an
ethnographic fieldwork she conducted among the returned migrants in a coastal
village in Kerala. Gendered articulations of migration and labour mobility bring
the question of women’s agency and multiple shades of feminisation of migration
in the forefront. Focussing on both the private and public spheres which women
negotiated during their trajectories of migrant labour, an attempt is made to
understand the gendered political economy of migrant domestic work and its
impact within the community, family and in the everyday lives of women.
Meera Velayudhan’s article, ‘Labour Story: Informalisation and New Forms of
Labour Mobilisation in Kerala’ examines the neoliberal sweatshops, characterised
by informalisation of labour, vulnerability, lack of labour security and stable work
based identity, low wages, lack of basic facilities, lack of individual and collective
4 / Vibhuti Patel Social Change

rights and show the importance of social movements that voice the concerns of
fragmented labour.
‘Who Cares about Healthcare Workers? Care Extractivism and Care Struggles
in Germany and India’ by Christa Wichterich deploys the concept of care
extractivism to explore strategies and mechanisms that pursue the persistent low
social and monetary acknowledgement of healthcare work in Germany and India.
In her article titled ‘Working women in rural India: A catalogue of voluntarism
in Policy’, Aardra Surendran critically evaluates the concept of rural women’s
work evident in the trajectory of development policy in India with a special focus
on technology provisions for working women in the countryside. It argues that
the feature of self-initiated or voluntary participation in development for women
is not a feature restricted to the period of structural adjustment. Its antecedents lie
within the earliest conceptions of national development and women’s role within
it, which is consistently characterised by a reliance on voluntarism on the part of
unspecified community actors.
Sathyasree Goswami’s Review Essay of a volume co-edited by Beth English,
Mary E. Frederickson and Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama, Global Women’s Work-
Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy, conveys that the
effects of global economic downturn on women’s workforce participation can
be understood in different regional contexts across the globe where women’s
agency, negotiation and opportunity that come with exploitation from not just the
workplace but also the family. Change in the nature of work for women due to
global economic recession and shifting macro-economy has seen women working
hard to sustain what has been achieved in the past through collective action.
The book reviews include six recently published books on women and work:
Sukti Dasgupta and Sher Singh Verick (Eds), Transformation of Women at Work
in Asia: An Unfinished Development Agenda reviewed by Geeta Balakrishnan;
Samita Sen and Nilanjana Sengupta, Domestic Days Women, Work and Politics
in Contemporary Kolkata reviewed by Ceena Paul; Ritu Devan, Radha Sehgal,
Aruna Kanchi, and Swat Raju, Visible Work Invisible Workers the Sub-Economies
of Unpaid Work and Paid Work Action Research on Women’s Unpaid Labour
reviewed by Nandita Mondal; Jacqueline Goodman (Ed.), Global Perspectives on
Gender and Work Readings and Interpretations reviewed by Nilima Srivastava;
Annita Ranjan, MGNREGA and Women Empowerment reviewed by K. P. Soma;
Pamela Philipose and Aditi Bishnoi (Eds.), Women’s Employment—Work in
Progress reviewed by Damyanty Sridharan.
We hope that this Special Issue profiling women’s work with a gender lens will
have ripple effects in the multiple discourses by women’s studies, gender studies,
labour studies and development studies and contribute towards evidence-based
policy interventions.

References

Ambani, M., & Birla, K. (2000). A policy framework for reforms in education. Report
submitted to the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry, 2000. Retrieved from
http://www.nic.in/pmcouncil/reports/education.
 Introduction: Changing Contours of Paid and Unpaid / 5

Mies, M. (1988). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international
division of labour. London: Zed Books.
Mies, M., Bennholdt-Thomsen, V., & von Werlhof, C. (1988). Women: The last colony.
New York: Zed Books.
Mohanty, P. (2019). 5 contentious issues holding up India’s labour law reforms. Business
Today, Delhi, 11 July. Retrieved from https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-
politics/labour-law-reforms-india-contentious-issues-lok-sabha-trade-unions/story/
363160.html
Patel, V. (2009). Discourse on women and empowerment. Delhi: The Women Press.
Ravi Kumar, T., & Sharma, V. (2003). Downsizing higher education––an emergent crisis.
Economic & Political Weekly, XXXVIII(7), 603.