Social Change

Based on an empirical study, this article narrates the condition and status of women workers engaged in the unorganised sector in Surat. The city, considered Gujarat’s economic hub and business capital, is known for its small- and medium-scale industries (SMSIs) especially those connected with weaving, dying-printing, embroidery and diamonds. A number of non-industrial, informal sector livelihood activities, known as the fringe sub-sector, are integrated with the city’s main industrial activities. Studies reveal that a high number of migrant workers from all over India eke their livelihood from this wide spectrum of economic activities combining both these sub-sectors in which women constitute a significant proportion of this workforce. The article firstly describes their demographic profile as well as their working conditions. It also takes into account not only their contribution in terms of an economic income but also outlines their impact in the social sphere. The article argues that though the work milieu of the unorganised sector is as exploitative and oppressive for women workers as it is for men, to a certain extent there is an element of liberation for women in their social existence.

Sweden’s proven ability to enact family-friendly policies to support its gender equality ambitions has made it an exemplar of gender equality to emulate among developing countries. The aim of this article is to demonstrate that while Swedish gender equality has become an important part of Swedish identity, paradoxically, the foundations upon which this identity was built has gradually been eroded––Sweden has shifted from a welfare state with collective solutions and inclusiveness towards one of neoliberal governmental rationalities where individual autonomy and freedom of choice are seen as means of achieving gender equality. This new direction has implications for how gender equality policy is formulated. Using Bacchi’s ‘What is the problem approach?’ this article traces the Swedish gender equality discourse from the 1960s to the present while at every stage interrogating how equality was problematised and what solutions were offered.

The present article attempts to throw light on the social, cultural, institutional and economic influences on workforce participation of Bahraini women. It focusses on employment trends in the Bahrain financial sector, the cultural context of work, existing legal framework and work environment. Available empirical evidence suggests that while universities put great emphasis on financial education and a significant proportion of Bahraini women work in the financial sector, their career progression is distinctly slower than that of men due to a variety of socio-cultural constraints, perception bias, job requirements and policy choices. The article underscores the need for an enhanced understanding of opportunities and challenges faced by women in Bahrain’s financial sector. Using bank-level public disclosures and government statistics, the article analyses opportunities and constraints of women’s work participation in the financial sector. It also emphasises the need to monitor the trends in female representation in the formal workforce through quantitative and qualitative analysis.

Marriage, family reunification, forced labour and trafficking are some of the most widely attributed causes of women’s migration within South Asia. This paper contributes to a small but growing literature about women’s migration within South Asia for employment amidst social, cultural and policy level barriers that hinder women’s mobility choices. It examines the experiences of 45 migrant women from economically poorer backgrounds comprising both cross-border, undocumented migrants from Nepal and Bangladesh and internal migrants from India working in informal jobs within India. This paper also explores similarities and differences between migration and labour market experiences of women migrants in South Asia showing how migration for employment can contribute towards agency formation but at the same time increase vulnerability by bringing about a reduction in well-being, security and dignity in the absence of secure policies that address challenges of women migrants in the region.

This article presents findings from an exploratory research using descriptive case studies of 12 migrant women in Western Australia. The purposive sample represents the government, academia, the private sector, community, civil society and not-for-profit organisations and is ranged in age from the late 20s to the 70s. Underpinned by theoretical frameworks of resilience and empowerment, women have shared their personal case narratives, and five case studies are presented in this paper. Our findings resonate with the vital and uncontested importance of education, the desire to be empowered, the capacity to be resilient and adaptive and the importance of giving back to the community. Key recommendations include the need for migrant women’s continued access to avenues of empowerment and furthering education. The provision of adaptive structures builds resilience and grows strong communities where women feel empowered. We propose that women migrants, through alliances and collaboration, cross borders of learning and work towards generating change and transformation.

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the lives of women domestic workers who have migrated from Kerala to the United Arab Emirates, this article attempts to examine the broad institutional framework within which transnational migration is negotiated. The article focusses on the negotiating practices women adopt while moving between different legal systems within the institutional framework that defines their nature of migration. This article analyses the life-story narratives of women domestic workers and tries to understand the construction of their particular gendered subject positions within the transnational activities. The purpose is to move beyond the binary logic of legal and illegal migration to understand the grey areas of transnational migration. Is it possible to move beyond the state when state and non-state activities are not clearly demarcated and not mutually exclusive? How do we study the non-state activities which contribute to the construction of particular gendered subjects along with the state’s own production of gendered subjects and citizenship?

Historically, in the context of Kerala, through mobilisation, electoral and mass struggles and a broad-based alliance of poor peasants, agricultural labour and workers were forged into a political constituency. This paper locates new forms of women workers’ struggles in the post-1990 context which saw a shift in the politics of labour and in the language of class and since the People’s Planning Campaign for democratic decentralisation in Kerala, when agency moved away from trade unions to a plurality of organisations serving a range of objectives but linked with local governance. There was a shift away from exclusive collective bargaining by workers to collective social activity, for example, Kudumbashree, Ayalkootam (neighbourhood groups), public works, MNREGA forums and other forms of associational activities. Identities shifted beyond that of workers to citizens, involving a range of rights with the neighbourhood and the local as an axis. This paper focusses on women labour particularly in the context of the trajectory of development and labour in Kerala and the wider canvas in which labour movements developed post the 1980s in India.

This paper suggests the concept of care extractivism to explore strategies and mechanisms which pursue the persistent low social and monetary acknowledgement of healthcare work in Germany and India. Recently, caretakers and nurses in both countries went on strike, pointing to a crisis situation in social reproduction and various forms of care extraction. In Germany, care for the elderly and nursing in hospitals are marked by strategies of familialisation and voluntarisation, of standardisation and digital surveillance and by transnationalisation through the import of migrant workers. In India’s rural health provision, voluntarism subsidises welfarism; in private and public hospitals, hierarchisation and contractualisation of employment deepen care extraction. Stereotypes of nursing as natural female, caste norms and various stigmata reinforce the low valuation of care work. In both countries, neoliberal policies merge with patriarchal structures of social reproduction, intensify care extraction and create a cheap care work force which however is no longer docile.

This paper seeks to evaluate the conception of rural women’s work evident in the trajectory of development policy in India. It argues that the feature of self-initiated or voluntary participation in development for women is not restricted to the period of structural adjustment. Its antecedents lie within earlier conceptions of national development and women’s role within it which is consistently characterised by a reliance on voluntarism on the part of unspecified community actors. Thus, while the shifting of the onus of women’s development from community voluntarism to small group voluntarism is an important feature of the contemporary period, it does, at another level, extend the trajectory of state policy that has failed to take central responsibility for working women in rural India. Parallel to the shifts in the conception of the rural woman as a receptacle of policy to a consumer of development initiatives through the post-Independence decades is thus the persistence of a half-baked notion of the rural working woman.

The Social Change Indicators series in this special issue presents state-level data on labour force participation rate, unemployment rate, status of employment and sectoral distribution.

Beth English, Mary E. Frederickson, & Olga Sanmiguel-Valderrama (Eds.), Global Women’s Work––Perspectives on Gender and Work in the Global Economy. New York: Routledge, 2018, p.422. Price: $160, ISBN Number: 978-1-138-03658-1.

Sukti Dasgupta and Sher Singh Verick (Eds.). Transformation of Women at Work in Asia: An Unfinished Development Agenda. New Delhi: SAGE Publications India, 2016, pp. 312, ₹995, ISBN 9789385985058 (Hardcover).

Samita Sen and Nilanjana Sengupta, Domestic Days Women, Work and Politics in Contemporary Kolkata. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 311, ₹995, ISBN 0-19-946116-3

Ritu Dewan, Radha Sehgal, Aruna Kanchi and Swat Raju, Invisible Work, Invisible Workers: The Sub-Economies of Unpaid Work and Paid Work Action Research on Women’s Unpaid Labour. Delhi, UN WOMEN and ActionAid, 203 pp.

Jacqueline Goodman (Ed.), Global Perspectives on Gender and Work Readings and Interpretations. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers Inc, 2012, p. 606. ₹1,495. ISBN: 978-0-7425-5613-3 (Hardcover).

Annita Ranjan, MGNREGA and Women Empowerment. Delhi, Ocean Books Pvt Ltd, 2016, 152 pp., ₹269, ISBN 9788184303780 (Paperback).

Pamela Philipose and Aditi Bishnoi (Eds.), Women’s Employment—Work in Progress. Delhi: Friedrich Ebert Stiftung India, Paperback, 2013, pp. IX +200. ISBN: 81-7440-070-2.