Women in Comparative Societies

Global Cities and Survival Networks

By Saskia Sassen

Chpt. in Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the Global Economy. Ehrenreich and Hochschild, eds.

“the dominant narrative of globalization concerns itself with the upper circuits of capital, not the lower ones, and with the hypermobility of capital rather than with capital that is bound to place”

What does this mean?

Capital bound to place

i.e., place matters!

London, NY, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo

Also consider Switzerland, the Silicon Valley, the Seattle area, the Bay area, SoCal

She also mentions export processing zones (EPZs) (257)

The high-end jobs are there; as these expand, so does the demand for low-end jobs

The service sector expands at both ends

High-paying, high-tech – financial services, communications and information technologies, medical specialists and researchers

Mid-range – administration/mid-level managment, IT support, nursing

Low-paying – clerical, reception, cleaning services, food and beverage services

Consider also the hypermobility of labor as competing narrative (Brunell)

Sassen: “Third World economies on the periphery of the global system struggle against debt and poverty, they increasingly build survival circuits on the backs of women – whether these be trafficked low-wage workers and prostitutes or migrant workers sending remittances back home” (255).

“entrepreneurs” i.e., smugglers, traffickers, investors, businessmen see opportunity in world’s women

“women, so often discounted as valueless economic actors, are crucial to building new economies and expanding existing ones” (250)

“the very technological infrastructure and transnationalism that characterize global industries also enable other types of actors to expand on to the global stage, whether these be money launderers or people traffickers.”

*** “It seems, then, that in order to understand the extraction from the Third World of services that used to define women’s domestic role in the First, we must depart from the mainstream view of globalization.”

The geography behind globalization

A web of connections from “the high-income gentrified urban neighborhoods of the transnational professional class to the work lives of the foreign nannies and maids in those same neighborhoods” (257)

New supply of labor courtesy of globalization!

So although demand for this labor increased, wages didn’t go up.

If anything, they went down due to this increase in (global) supply

Cities key: singleton professionals and dual-career couples prefer urban to suburban residence – why?

Return of family life to urban centers

Urban professionals want it all: satisfying work, social life, children, dogs “whether or not they have the time to care for them”

Kelly Services

What happened to the “Kelly girl?”

Concierge Services

For the women: potential for autonomy and empowerment

Opportunities, changing hierarchies

Some women gain greater personal autonomy

Changing work regimes

Deindustrialization

Post-industrial economy

Most stressed need for highly educated workers

Yet, what also increased was demand for low-wage, low-skill jobs requiring little education (260)

Politics in the industrial era

Urban proletarians earned political clout through political organizing

What happens now that working class is diffuse, invisible, often immigrant???

Loss of political voice/power

Hard to organize, but some try

SEIU

Domestic workers’ movements

Co-conspirators: women in search of work, illegal traffickers and the governments of the home countries

“the counter geographies of globalization…deeply imbricated with some of globalization’s major constitutive dynamics”: global markets, transnational and translocal networks, communication technology that can escape surveillance, cross-border money flows and markets (264)

“they belong to the shadow economy, but they also make use of the regular economy’s institutional infrastructure” (264)

The IMF and the role of “structural adjustment policies”

Pressures to earn hard currency create need for workers to go abroad

SAPs reduce services, growth in-country

Sending country example

The Philippines Overseas Employment Agency

Facilitates emigration of Filipinas to US, Mid East, Japan

Since 1982

Filipinas send home $1 bln per year!!! (271)

Receiving countries examples

US passed the Immigration nursing Relief Act of 1989

1980s Japan legislation to allow the import of “entertainment workers”

1998 – global remittances topped $70 bln