The public spheres of unprotected workers

Global Society

Volumn 19, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 131-154

  Davies, Matt ^a  

^a BEHREND COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE; LABOR RELATIONS; WORKING CONDITIONS;

EID: 17444378282     PISSN: 13600826     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13600820500044845     Document Type: Article

References (97)

1. Jeffrey Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker. Vol. 2, Power and Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987),
2. and "Power, Production and the Unprotected Worker: Rationalities, World Views and Global Change", paper read at International Studies Association 42nd Annual Convention, Chicago, IL, USA, February 20-24, 2001.
3. Nilüfer Cagatay, "Gender and Poverty." In United Nations Development Programme, Working Paper Series, 1998.
4. Alain Marcoux, The Feminization of Poverty: Facts, Hypotheses and the Art of Advocacy, Sustainable Development Department, Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations, 1997 (accessed 25 February 2002), available .
5. Isabella Bakker, "Neoliberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction: Social Provisioning and Shifting Gender Orders", in Isabella Bakker and Stephen Gill (eds), Power, Production and Social Reproduction (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 66-82.
6. André C. Drainville, Contesting Globalization: Space and Place in the World Economy (London and New York: Routledge, RIPE Series in Global Political Economy, 2004), pp. 32-33.
7. Dimitris Stevis uses a similar terminology, 'phantoms', to refer to social entities with neither voice nor choice, nor anyone to speak on their behalf. At certain points in history, women and slaves were such entities. The difference is that for Stevis, such entities are worldly and can conceivably gain subjectivity or agency, while Drainville's 'ghosts' are only the product of the wishful thinking or 'cosmopolitan condescension' of theorists. See Dimitris Stevis, 'Agents, Subjects, Objects, or Phantoms? Labor, the Environment, and Liberal Institutionalization', The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 581 (2002), pp. 91-105.
8. The literature on global civil society is too extensive to be usefully summarised here. For important critiques of the concept and debates over the notion, see Mustapha Kamal Pasha and David L. Blaney, "Elusive Paradise: The Promise and Peril of Global Civil Society", Alternatives, Vol. 23, No. 3 (1998), pp. 417-450;
9. and Louise Amoore and Paul Langley, "Ambiguities of Global Civil Society", Review of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2004), pp. 89-110.
10. Alejandro Colás, International Civil Society (London: Polity Press, 2002).
11. See also his "The Promises of International Civil Society", Global Society, Vol. 11, No. 3 (1997), pp. 261-278.
12. See, e.g., Catherine Eschle, Global Democracy, Social Movements, and Feminism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2001), pp. 36-37.
13. Valentine M Moghadam, "Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in an Era of Globalization", International Sociology Vol 15, No. 1 (2000), pp. 57-85.
14. Eschle, op. cit., pp. 206-208.
15. The notion of an international public sphere has developed in relation not only to Habermas's work, but also has built on David Held's thinking about cosmopolitan democracy and James Bohman's work on deliberative democracy and public spheres. For an overview from an International Relations perspective, see Marc Lynch, "The Dialogue of Civilisations and International Public Spheres", Millennium Vol. 29, No. 2 (2000), pp. 307-330.
16. See Molly Cochran, "A Democratic Critique of Cosmopolitan Democracy: Pragmatism from the Bottom-Up", European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 8, No. 4 (2002), pp. 517-548.
17. See Pheng Cheah, "Posit(ion)ing Human Rights in the Current Global Conjuncture", Public Culture Vol. 9, No. 2 (1997), pp. 233-266.
18. See Matt Davies, "Problems in Conceiving and Realizing International Public Spheres", paper read at 2001 Hong Kong International Studies Conference, July 2001, Hong Kong.
19. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 1.
20. Harrod's book was written as the second of four proposed volumes on power and production, conceived and written by Harrod and Robert Cox. Cox's book, Production, Power, and World Order (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), was the first volume and is now widely acknowledged as an important contribution to IR theory. The books are nevertheless independent of each other, and there is a difference in emphasis between the two. Cox puts production at the centre of his analysis, presumably in part because he is concerned with the critique of the prevailing reified conception of power in international relations theory Harrod, in contrast, puts power at the centre of his analysis, again presumably because the prevailing conceptions of relations of production reify the social forms. However, the differences should not be exaggerated: Cox and Harrod both see power as rooted in the social relations of production.
21. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 8.
22. Ibid., pp. 20-21.
23. Ibid., p. 304.
24. Ibid., p. 9.
25. Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere", in Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelabub (eds), Communication and Class Struggle 1: Capitalism, Imperialism (New York and Bagnolet, France: International General/IMMRC, 1979), p. 199.
26. Ibid., p. 199.
27. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, Vol. 85, Theory and History of Literature (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 1-2, emphasis original.
28. Ibid., p. xlvi, emphasis original.
29. Joan B. Landes, "The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration", in Feminism, the Public and the Private (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
30. Habermas acknowledged the importance of the distinctiveness of a plebian public sphere, for example, in his essay "Further Reflections on the Public Sphere", in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). The now extensive literature on the plebian public has highlighted the formation of publics different from the bourgeois public;
31. see especially E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964)
32. and his "The Patricians and the Plebs", in Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1993),
33. as well as Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
34. Compare also the work of the Subaltern Studies Group collected in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988),
35. but see also Aijaz Ahmad's withering critique of the Subaltern Studies approach in his "Postcolonial Theory and the Post-Condition", in Leo Panitch. (ed.), Ruthless Criticism of All That Exists, Social Register 1997 (London: Merlin, 1997), pp. 358-381.
36. Negt and Kluge, op. cit., p. 2.
37. For a more detailed elaboration of this idea, see Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy", in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, especially pp. 128-132.
38. World Bank, World Development Report 1995: Workers in an Integrating World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).
39. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 120.
40. Ibid., pp. 140-141.
41. These three forms are not forms of social relations of unprotected workers. Bipartism refers to the form of power relation in production in which worker organisations form a countervailing power to that of the employers; tripartism emerges when the state intervenes in a bipartite relation. Enterprise corporatism refers to the capacity of large organisations, not only corporations but also the civil service or the military, for example, to reduce internal power relations to an established and unchallenged hierarchy through securing loyalty with organisation linked benefits, such as life-time employment. See Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, pp. 16-17.
42. Cox, Production, Power, and World Order, p. 283.
43. Chile's labour laws have been reformed under civilian governments, but as Patrick Barrett points out, workers have only enjoyed marginal improvements and the labour movement as a whole remains weak and disorganised. Indeed, during the first ten years of civilian rule (1989-1998), the rate of unionisation in the workforce declined. Employers continue to have a fairly free hand to dismiss workers. Certain measures were passed improving workers' rights in individual labour contracts and requiring special contracts for certain categories of employees-notably household employees. Patrick S. Barrett, "Labour Policy, Labour-Business Relations and the Transition to Democracy in Chile", Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 33 (2001), p. 568.
44. See also Marcus Taylor, "Labor Reform and the Contradictions of 'Growth with Equity' in Postdictatorship Chile", Latin American Perspectives Vol. 31, No. 4 (2004), pp. 76-93.
45. "Each of these different circumstances and different forms of social relations of production produces different material conditions and different levels and types of consciousness, but they all have a common element; in each the woman in question is basically unprotected against the power of employers, customers, controllers of markets, husbands, or family. No organization, state agency, or group of individuals intervenes effectively on her behalf to protect her from even the harshest and most arbitrary exercises of power. She has little chance of altering the conditions of work within any of the patterns of power relations although she may, as has been shown, move from one to another and acquire some positive change in material benefits." Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 125.
46. See especially Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Relations (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).
47. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 291.
48. See for example Isabella Bakker, Unpaid Work and Macroeconomics: New Discussions, New Tools for Action (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 1998),
49. and Diane Elson, "The Economic, the Political and the Domestic: Businesses, the State, and Households in the Organization of Production", New Political Economy Vol. 3, No. 2 (1998), pp. 189-208.
50. Wilma A. Dunaway, "The Double Register of History: Situating the Forgotten Woman and her Household in Capitalist Commodity Chains", Journal of World-Systems Research Vol. 2, No. 1 (2001), pp. 2-29.
51. Rosa N. Geldstein, "Gender Bias and Family Distress: The Privatization Experience in Argentina", Journal of International Affairs Vol. 50, No. 2 (1997), pp. 545-572.
52. See Bakker, "Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction";
53. Mercedes González de la Rocha, "Private Adjustments: Household Responses to the Erosion of Work", in SEPED Conference Paper Series (2000);
54. and Lilia Montali, "Família e Trabalho Na Reestruturação Produtiva: ausência de políticas de emprego e deterioração da condições de vida", Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais Vol. 15, No.42 (2000), pp. 55-71.
55. While unemployment has affected both men and women in Brazil, male unemployment has increased due to a reduction in the number of jobs, while female unemployment has increased due to an increase in the supply of women workers looking for work (Brandão and Montangner, cited in Montali, op. cit., p. 63.
56. Montali, op. cit., p. 67.
57. Cox, op. cit., p. 50.
58. Alda Britto da Motta and Inaiá Maria Moreira de Carvalho, "Pauperization and Women's Participation in Social Movements in Brazil", in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and G.F. Dalla Costa (eds.), Paying the Price: Women and the Politics of International Economic Strategy (London: Zed Books, 1993), pp. 76-77.
59. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, pp. 20-21.
60. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 1 (London: Verso, 1991).
61. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 296.
62. Bakker, "Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction", p. 1.
63. Henri Lefebvre, The Survival of Capitalism: Reproduction of the Social Relations of Production (London: Allison and Busby, 1976) p. 49.
64. Montali, "Família e Trabalho", p. 67.
65. Julie Light, "Engendering Change: The Long, Slow Road to Organizing Women Maquiladora Workers", CorpWatch (1999). available from ;
66. and also see Leslie Salzinger, "Making Fantasies Real: Producing Women and Men on the Maquila Shop Floor", NACLA: Report on the Americas Vol. 34, No. 5 (2001), pp. 13-19.
67. Kimberly A. Chang and L.M.H. Ling identify the "regime of labor intimacy" with the "more explicitly sexualized, racialized, and class-based" dimension of global restructuring that "concentrates on low-wage, low-skilled [sic] menial service provided by mostly female migrant workers".
68. See Kimberly A. Chang and L.M.H. Ling, "Globalization and its Intimate Other: Filipina Domestic Workers in Hong Kong", in M.H. Marchand and A.S. Runyan (eds), Gender and Global Restructuring: Sightings, Sites and Resistances (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). p. 27. Leslie Salzinger also identifies intimate forms of surveillance in maquiladoras where, she argues, the femininity so sought after by employers in these industries is itself produced.
69. Salzinger, op. cit.
70. Alda Britto da Motta, "Doing Housework for Pay: Political Struggles and the Legal Rights of Domestic Workers in Brazil", in Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Giovanna F. Dalla Costa (eds), Women, Development, and Labor of Reproduction (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press 1999).
71. Elsa M. Chaney and Mary Garcia Castro (eds), Muchachas No More: Household Workers in Latin America and the Caribbean, Women in the Political Economy (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989).
72. Bridget Anderson, Doing the Dirty Work? The Global Politics of Domestic Labour (London and New York: Zed Books, 2000).
73. Harrod, Power, Production, and the Unprotected Worker, p. 245.
74. Amnesty International, "Intolerable Killings: Ten Years of Abductions and Murders in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua" (2004), available .
75. At the same time, it should be noted that the crimes remain unsolved; we cannot conclude that they have been committed by men who find themselves in these unprotected work relations, nor even that in this border region that all these crimes were necessarily committed by Mexican men.
76. The rape and murder of the women of Juárez are discussed in Debbie Nathan, "Death Comes to the Maquilas: A Border Story", The Nation 13/20 January 1997, pp. 18-22
77. and in Salzinger, op. cit.;
78. see also Charles Bowden, Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (New York: Aperture Foundation, 1998).
79. Britto da Motta, op. cit., pp. 125-126.
80. Britto da Motta and Moreira de Carvalho, op. cit.
81. Cox, op. cit., p. 50.
82. Habermas, op. cit., p.198.
83. See Julie Light, op. cit.,
84. and also see Leslie Salzinger, op. cit.
85. Chaney and Garcia Castro, op. cit., p. 3.
86. See, for example, the testimonials in Part V of ibid.
87. Brigitte Young, "The 'Mistress' and the 'Maid' in the Globalized Economy", in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Working Classes, Global Realities: Socialist Register 2001 (London: Merlin Press), pp. 315-327;
88. Barbara Ehrenreich, "Maid to Order", in Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild (eds), Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), pp. 85-103.
89. Ehrenreich, op. cit., pp. 93-94.
90. Ibid., pp. 90-91.
91. Louise Amoore, "International Political Economy and the 'Contested Firm'", New Political Economy Vol. 5, No. 2 (2000), pp. 183-204.
92. Mitchell Bernard, "Post-Fordism and Global Restructuring", in R. Stubbs and G. R.D. Underhill (eds), Political Economy and the Changing Global Order (Don Mills, ON: Oxford University Press, 2000).
93. Isabella Bakker, "Neo-liberal Governance and the Reprivatization of Social Reproduction", op. cit.
94. George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici argue that strategies that deny access to means of subsistence are instances of primitive accumulation, which each sees as a political response to politically and economically driven accumulation crises. See George Caffentzis, "The Fundamental Implications of the Debt Crisis for Social Reproduction in Africa", in Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa, Paying the Price;
95. and Silvia Federici, "Economic Crisis and Demographic Policy in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Case of Nigeria", in Dalla Costa and Dalla Costa, Paying the Price.
96. Stephen Gill, "New Constitutionalism, Democratisation and Global Political Economy", Pacifica Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1998), pp. 23-38.
97. Montali, op. cit., p. 67.