TRANSNATIONAL LATINA/O URBANIZATION

BY STUDENT

Women have been increasingly incorporated into the formal labor force since the mid-20^th century, largely in part due to the loss of the male working population during World War II. American women started working manufacturing jobs during this time to not only provide for their families, but also to provide for their service men and their country. However, after the war ended, suburbanization hit full-force in America, and many women went back to their traditional domestic roles in the private sphere. There were also a large number of women that wished to stay in the public sphere labor force and continued to do, but with much effort and determination on their part, as men were much more sought-after. Only a few decades later, America and other nations around the world experienced an economic crisis in the 1970s.

Manufacturing jobs were lost to overseas and foreign nations. America shifted from a production based economy to a service based economy. The international division of labor also shifted production to developing nations and consumerism to the developed nations. The feminization of labor came into effect and women were increasingly incorporated into what was left of production and manufacturing work here in the U.S. As Kelly and Sassen (1995, pp. 100) discuss in their article Recasting Women in the Global Economy: Internationalization and Changing Definitions of Gender, this resulted in the expansion of “occupations with features generally associated with women’s employment, including temporality, comparatively low wages, and reduced union membership”. The authors also mention that while much of the U.S. manufacturing industry has been outsourced or sent to foreign nations, major cities within the U.S. like New York City and Los Angeles have been able to retain a large labor force in the production of garments and textiles, as well as electronics. This point is particularly relevant because both of these cities have a proportionately large minority population, especially in regards to Latino and/or Hispanic populations. So while these cities, especially New York City, are considered global cities, they do provide opportunities for women of color to gain employment; but the low wage, low-skill employment is not truly allowing for upward economic mobility.

The authors define this moment in time as the redefinition of globalization to include international movements of labor, not just capital, and placed gender at the center of the process that enabled industries to compete both domestically and internationally. Still today, nearly half a century later, women’s employment worldwide is mostly low-skill, labor-intensive, low-pay work. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (2016, pp. 2), “Women are almost half of the workforce. They are the equal, if not main, breadwinners in four out of ten families. They receive more college and graduate degrees than men. Yet, on average, women continue to earn considerably less than men… In 2015, female full-time workers made only 80 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gender wage gap of 20 percent”. Even more striking is that Black women earn 63 percent to a man’s dollar, and Latina and Hispanic women earn 54 percent to a man’s dollar. These numbers alone can explain why multinational corporations look specifically for women, and even more specifically, Latina and Hispanic women as the dominant workforce in manufacturing and production employment.

Source(s):

Kelly, Patricia Fernandez and Sassen, Saskia. Recasting Women in the Global Economy: Internationalization and Changing Definitions of Gender. 1995. Retrieved from: Blackboard.

Hegewisch, Ariane and DuMonthier, Asha. The Gender Wage Gap: 2015, Annual Earnings Differences by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity. September 2016. Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Retrieved from: http://www.iwpr.org/publications/pubs/the-gender-wage-gap-2015-annual-earnings-differences-by-gender-race-and-ethnicity