ABSTRACT
During the 1980s new structures in the organisation of production and new global patterns of investment appeared. These have had significant consequences upon the lives of poor women in the Third World and in the First. The employers’ drive for flexibility which new technology makes feasible has intensified pressure upon the working conditions of women. Women, significant in the emerging labour forces, are vulnerable both as unskilled cheap labour and because they tend to be marginal to existing forms of trade unionism. Structural changes in patterns of work and investment makes mobilisation through existing trade union models difficult, either because workers are in small units or because multinational capital, helped by governments who need investment, is able to prevent organisation.
