Women Workers: Is Equality Enough?

Feminist Legal Studies , 2014

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the ‘‘commodification’’ of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist understandings of social reproduction.

Review of International Studies, 2007

The International Labour Organisation’s Declaration of Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work of 1998 formalised an approach to global labour issues known as the Core Labour Standards (CLS). The CLS have privileged a specific set of labour standards as possessing the kinds of universalistic qualities associated with ideas of ‘human rights’; the abolition of forced and child labour, equality of opportunity, and trade union rights. But what does this ‘human rights’ approach mean from the point of view of those women workers who dominate employment in some of the most globalised, and insecure, industries in the world? In this article, I make the case for critical feminist engagement with the gender-blind, and neoliberal-compatible, approach to economic rights as set out in the CLS. Not least, this article raises wider concerns about the insufficiency of approaches to economic rights that are designed to work within the (gendered) structures of a neoliberal economic development paradigm. It is suggested that the CLS have endorsed a voluntarist approach to labour standards that views the promotion and regulation of human rights by global corporations as unproblematic. The article challenges this perspective, drawing upon the work of number of feminist scholars working in the area of women’s employment and corporate codes of conduct. These feminist writings have specifically avoided the language of human rights; thus questions need to be asked concerning the possibilities and the limitations that the CLS opens up for women’s human rights activism.

2020

Drawing on feminist labour law and political economy literature, I argue that it is crucial to interrogate the personal and territorial scope of labour. After discussing the ''commodification'' of care, global care chains, and body work, I claim that the territorial scope of labour law must be expanded beyond that nation state to include transnational processes. I use the idea of social reproduction both to illustrate and to examine some of the recurring regulatory dilemmas that plague labour markets. I argue that unpaid care and domestic work performed in the household, typically by women, troubles the personal scope of labour law. I use the example of this specific type of personal service relation to illustrate my claim that the jurisdiction of labour law is historical and contingent, rather than conceptual and universal. I conclude by identifying some of the implications of redrawing the territorial and personal scope of labour law in light of feminist unders...

2019

The report highlights key gender gaps and obstacles to decent work for women. It explores the structural barriers, including unpaid care work, that shape the nature and extent of women’s engagement in paid employment, and examines how laws, policies and practices in certain countries have addressed them. The report also outlines the measures that can and should be taken to seize the opportunities presented by the changing world of work.

This course looks at how the social construction of gender interacts with work, labour markets and unions. We will ask how the gendered division of labour shapes different groups' experiences of paid and unpaid work; how gender interacts with other sites of oppression and privilege such as class and racialization in labour markets; the relationship between gender, public policy, and work; and how neoliberal restructuring and globalization are producing new gendered inequalities. Throughout the semester we will examine how individual women, feminist unionists and the labour movement engage with, politicize, promote and resist these issues.

Ethics, Law and Society, 2009

2009

Feminists Law, 2014

This note draws on previously published work which has reflected on the (dis)continuities between two different types of feminist engagement with the state and the wage society (Alessandrini, 2011, 2013). The aim is to raise questions the network, with its focus on gendering labour law, might consider worth pursuing as part of its future research agenda. Even though I am not a labour lawyer, I have an interest in labour theory and this comes from a particular tradition, that of feminist autonomists who have critically interrogated Marx's labour theory of value, that is, the theory according to which labour is the source of value in capitalist economies, by paying specific attention to the role of social reproduction. 1 I draw on this tradition for two interconnected reasons: first because I think it offers important resources for thinking about the links between gender, labour and value in today's post-Fordist economies, exactly at a time when these links appear to have become more tenuous; secondly because it provides the opportunity to think about the sort of arrangements that might be able to affect these links, thereby shifting current value-making processes.

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race Religion Gender and Class, 2009

* Several significant changes in statute and case law have occurred since the initial preparation of this article. Every effort has been made to incorporate pertinent updating material, although in depth treatment of 2008 and 2009 developments here is not possible. ** Professor of Law, University of Maryland School of Law. I wish to express my thanks to Professor Margaret Johnson for her leading role in organizing the symposium; to the Women's

The International Marxist-Humanist, 2023

Summary: This is a review of Clara Zetkin: The Women’s and Women Workers’ Question of our Time [https://www.rosapublishing.co.uk/zetkin-women/], translated and introduced by Ben Lewis, which contains a translation of a work by a foremost figure in the European socialist women’s movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. — Editors.

Feminists Law, 2014

This special section of feminists@law is the outcome of a workshop, called 'Gendering Labour Law', held at Kent Law School on June 20 and 21, 2013. The workshop marked the first collaborative effort of participants in the nascent Gender Labour Law Research Network (GLLRN), which is being launched simultaneously with the publication of this collection. The GLLRN, the workshop and this special section emerge from a collaboration between Emily Grabham and Judy Fudge, supported by the Leverhulme Trust and Kent Law School, which is designed to cultivate feminist and critical labour law scholarship and research.

The theme of the autumn conference, held at Birkbeck College on 26 November 1988, was 'Sexual division in the family and in the workplace', and the four papers that follow were part of the programme. Additionally we are glad to include a report of the conference on 'Mass culture and the working class, 1914-1970', held in Paris on 14-15 October 1988.(Eds.)

Gender, Work & Organization, 2020

No conflict of interest to be declared. No funding. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Journal of Social Issues, 2004

February 6, 2018 marked a century of women’s suffrage for which the first generation of women’s rights activists fought relentlessly making great personal sacrifices in the face of tremendous patriarchal resistance. Though the suffragist movement began with striving for adult franchise for women as a fundamental right as a citizen; it snowballed into struggle for rights of the women as paid and unpaid workers. During the last century, in spite of sustained collective actions in several parts of the North and the South, discrimination against women in the world of work still persists due to caste/race/ethnicity/sexuality/gender based segmentation in the labour market and non-recognition of unpaid care economy.