ABSTRACT

This volume considers how women are shaping the global economic landscape through their labor, activism, and multiple discourses about work. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars, the book offers a gendered examination of work in the global economy and analyses the effects of the 2008 downturn on women’s labor force participation and workplace activism.

The book addresses three key themes: exploitation versus opportunity; women’s agency within the context of changing economic options; and women’s negotiations and renegotiations of unpaid social reproductive labor. This uniquely interdisciplinary and comparative analysis will be crucial reading for anyone with an interest in gender and the post-crisis world.

chapter |12 pages

Introduction

Perspectives on gender and work in the global economy

part I|4 pages

Women’s agency

chapter 1|21 pages

Recognizing the home workplace

Making workers through global labor standards

chapter 2|20 pages

Empowerment revisited

Capitalist development and women workers in China’s reform era

chapter 3|15 pages

Peasant women’s agency in Bolivia during the global recession

The movement of the Confederación Nacional de Mujeres Campesinas Indígenas Originarias y Afrodescendentes de Bolivia–Bartolina Sisa

chapter 4|20 pages

Global women’s work in transition

The case of entrepreneurial Bolivian women in apparel production in São Paulo, 2013–2014

chapter 6|16 pages

From sister to co-worker

New patterns of feminization of labor in Turkey

chapter 7|30 pages

Gender, work, and recession

Two views from the United States

part II|33 pages

Exploitation vs. opportunity

chapter 8|29 pages

Women in the Russian workforce

A retreat from equality?

chapter 9|25 pages

Working poor women in Mexico facing another crisis

Domestic workers, struggling with structural disadvantages, and the 2008 recession

chapter 10|19 pages

Women’s work in Kenya’s Athi River Export Processing Zone

Opportunity or exploitation?

part III|14 pages

Negotiations of social and reproductive labor

chapter 14|16 pages

Change and the status quo in home-based industry in south Tamil Nadu, India

Women beedi workers confront shifts in the organization of labor and capital

chapter 15|20 pages

Mexican and Puerto Rican women in Chicago

A gendered analysis of the 2008 recession

chapter 17|17 pages

Gendered austerity policies

Inequality on the rise in the European Union including Ireland