Abstract
A recent article in the Spanish daily, El Pais (August 9, 2011) addresses strategies adopted by Latin American immigrants during the current European economic crisis to maintain their transnational families. The article features the story of one migrant who was returning family members to Ecuador where the costs of social reproduction are lower than in Spain, since her steady job at the Madrid airport contrasts with her husband’s unpredictable work in construction. It surprised me that a woman was casually represented as the paradigmatic migrant worker at the nexus of global divisions of labor and family survival strategies. This story is indicative of the major change in the transnational character and global gender distribution of paid labor that is the current context for Making Feminist Politics.
This book tracks the decline of the white, working-class “family wage” ideal (male breadwinner with dependent wife) in the United States, Britain, and Australia, with all its implications: the assumption that women work only for pin money; the invisibility, stigmatization, and depressed wages of women who support themselves and their families; and unions’ hostility to women workers viewed as a threat to male wages. This book centers on what has happened since the fateful convergence of women’s dramatic increase in the paid labor force worldwide and the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1960s combined with the subsequent globalization of the economy, that undercut the sufficiency of local and nationally based labor, feminist, and other social movement organizing. Drawing productively on social movements theories, the authors examine the discursive strategies and campaigns that feminists in the labor movement have used to create, not simply take advantage of political opportunities, and foster alliances within and beyond labor to articulate historically new issues of women workers, most notably sexual harassment. Franzway and Fonow, an Australian and a US American, feminist scholars with strong labor ties, are savvy, intelligent guides to the history of feminist activism within unions, particularly in the (declining) manufacturing sectors.
While their tone is upbeat and optimistic, the story they tell is sobering. They discuss the explosion of women’s participation in paid work and the growth in women’s union membership unaccompanied by access to positions of power in the labor movement; the disappearance of more innovative strategies in the pursuit of pay equity, such as “comparable worth,” while significant gender pay inequities remain among the most resilient features of worldwide labor markets; and the weakening of the traditional labor movement under full-scale neoliberal attack that has ironically coincided with, or created the opening for, women’s expanded participation in union power structures. This, they argue, occurs along with no reduction in rates of domestic violence or shifts in the gender distribution of housework; the reframing of the right to child care as a necessity for working women rather than a social right of citizenship and means of transforming gender divisions of labor; the loss of the socialist feminist critique of familialism, of the “anti social family” that meshes so well with neoliberalism’s “withering away of the welfare state” and insistent privatization of the demands of social reproduction; the pervasive rhetoric of support for “working families” [the slogan they claim that brought the Australian Labor Party to national power in 2007] that assumes that men and women have equal relationships to family responsibilities, and that completely bypasses (as do Franzway and Fonow) the fact that many “working families” include low-paid domestic and child care workers.
The strength of this book is perhaps also its main weakness. Franzway and Fonow tell the story of feminist activists in the labor movements (primarily in United States, Britain, and Australia) of the past 25 years, who forged creative strategies in the face of social discrimination and unions’ indifference or hostility. They bring us to the current moment when the institutional frameworks they address (labor unions, the United Nations, the International Labor Organization) are increasingly not the principal sites of innovative organizing of women workers, and when “transnational” alliance building now means the organization of local workforces, such as domestic workers in major U.S. and other global cities.
The issues the labor feminists Franzway and Fonow discuss added to the agendas of feminism and labor organizing—the value of domestic work, including housework and child care, and sexual harassment at the workplace—are now key building blocks in organizing “excluded workers.” Yet, domestic and home care workers and hotel maids (principally migrant women and other women of color) are present only on the margins of their story. While Franzway and Fonow have traced the dismantling of the white, working-class norm of the male breadwinner/family wage, they have not taken up the challenge for feminist theorizing and politics of the international division and consolidated racialization of reproductive and service work, represented in part by that migrant mother in Spain supporting her transnational family through a series of jobs, intermittently, as a hairdresser, hotel maid, and household domestic worker.