Women in Auto Components Industry: Toward Contending Discourses

At last, I manage to post one of my reading and I should admit to be not productive last week, in terms of posting nothing. But that doesn't mean that I didn't read anything. It's just that I found the readings I had last week were nothing but ordinary stuffs and were only for the sake of literature review :)

This time I am gonna recap an article by Lineke Stobbe, entitled "The Gendered Reconstruction of the Argentine Auto Components Industry". It is one text in the book entitled "The Gender Question in Globalization", edited by Tine Davids and Francien van Driel. The article examines the phenomenon of increasing share of women's employment during the restructuring taking place in two auto component firms in Argentina. This situation, as Stobbe argues, was in contrast to what was perceived about the auto industry, being a masculinized industry. Interestingly, and therefore, correctly (at least in my opinion), Stobbe approaches this phenomenon by using Gidden's duality of structure. She rejects that women do not do anything in the face of the adverse effects of globalization, manifesting "women as human beings without agency". In this case, men and women examine different rules and resources that enable as well as constrain them in many ways. She also argues that gendered industrial restructuring is the result of structuration at different yet interrelated levels.

Contextualizing the Argentinian experience in the globalized period, Stobbe identifies four main dimensions that shape the gendered effects of restructuring process in auto component firms. The first one is the introduction of lean production that has implication on access to jobs by - and the skils of - women in both firms. By lean production, Stobbe refers to global production and management system. Second, Argentina saw high level of unemployment and the deregulation of labour market that started in 1995. Third, in1995, the country moved toward a more flexible labour market, in which measures were taken to make the contractual conditions flexible. The second as well as the third dimensions, as Stobbe claims, also shape the access to jobs by - and the skills of - women workers. The fourth one is the outdated collective labour agreement that does not taken into account the job category of, say, team leader, introduced in lean production system.

Stobbe also outlines several discourses about women workers in the gender regime of the auto components industry. These discourses, according to Stobbe, are hegemonic, in the sense, that every one (both men and women) accept them as universal truth, as something given. The first one is that women were not suitable for work in the component industry because it was heavy, dirty and technical. The second discourse points to the less availability of women because they have children or will have them in the future. This also implies that women are considered to be expensive labour because of maternity and breastfeeding leaves and absenteeism. The last discourse demonstrates women as a problematic species in the workplace. This might because they compete with each other while men are mates (personally, I actually think the other way around, and I have always been thinking that the discourse actually claims that women are easier to make friends at work than their male counterparts because women are perceived to have less sense of competitiveness than men). The last discourse might also refer to the romantic encounters between male and female employees.

Analysing the first firm, Stobbe reveals the restructuring process, which implied the concentration of the firm to the assembly of car locks. This restructuring resulted in the increasing share of women's employment in the firm. Women were considered better assembly-line workers and better quality controllers because of their better manual and visual competencies. Although with certain limits, women were given access for training and promotion. However, as Stobbe points out, this result was not accepted by everyone. There were challenges. One among these was not successful to reinstate men domination in supervisory positions, while some others succeed to replace a female supervisor with a male colleague. Stobbe argues that the firm saw a feminization of labour force during the restructuring process and the rationale for this is not different from the traditional nimble-fingers-argument. More importantly, however, this increasing female's employment did not lead to the laying off the male colleagues. Even though the firm did not employ workers in temporary basis, it still relied on the outdated collective labour agreement. In sum, although women seemed to be the beneficiaries of the restructuring process, there was nothing much change in the discourse of women workers.

On the second firm, Stobbe found the dominant discourses about women workers in this firm, particularly significant before the restructuring process. The restructuring process started when the new management team, which involved foreign managers, made a revolutionary decision, that is, to replace almost every male supervisor with female team leaders. This was obviously not without confrontation, particularly from the men workers. These women also did not feel confident and were afraid of being disliked or not being respected by their subordinates. The female human resource manager encouraged these women by putting emphasis on their commitment and drive and by labeling them as "agents of change". As a result, some of them were proud to be selected as team leaders and even considered pursuing engineering degree. In this case, Stobbe shows how the restructuring process paved the way for different impacts within women workers in the firm. Moreover, as it was the case with the first firm, the outdated collective labour agreement, which does not take into account the job as team leader, means that the salaries of these women remained the same even though they were promoted as team leader. This is ironic especially because the ex-supervisors (former male supervisor) continued to receive their supervisor's salary, including extra payments mainly based on seniority. Stobbe contends that there was more significant change occurred in the second firm in comparison to that in the first firm. The case of the second firm also provides a good example of the potential result of a confrontation between a new global system of production and an old local system of labour relations.

All in all, Stobbe argues that developments at different interrelated levels shape the access to jobs by - and the skills of - women workers in auto component industry. Rules and resources, such as, discourses about women workers, legal rules, and outdated collective labour agreement, a high level of unemployment, decisions by foreign managers, etc. have influence in possible outcome of the restructuring process, even though they are not in the hand of the individual agency of women workers.

Engendered Efficiency Definition: The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland

This will be my 2nd post in these two days. As productive as it might be, I hope that this will last longer, if not forever, (finger crossed!). Actually, what I will share is not what I read today. It was a piece that I read yesterday. In the coming days, I will also be situated with books in my bag and will have no option but to read them. So, I will have more to share.

I will share Irene van Staveren's text, which is also taken from toward a feminist philosophy of economics. Van Staveren is also a famous scholar within feminist school of thought. The title of the text is "Charlotte Perkins Gilman on efficiency". In this piece, van Staveren introduces Charlotte Perkins Gilman and elaborates Gilman's works in the feminist-contextualized argument. As an American writer, Gilman has written various kind of articles, books and novels. She is also particularly known for her feminist fiction, in which she implicitly challenges the embedded patriarchal values in American society. Van Staveren examines two fictions written by Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper and Herland, and connects it to mainstream definition of efficiency.

Neoclassical reference for efficiency definition lies on the theory developed by Vilfredo Pareto, so-called Pareto efficiency. The basic interpretation of efficiency according to Pareto is if allocation makes someone better off without making the other worse off. According to feminist theorists, this explication is gender bias. Among others are: firstly, unpaid production (which is largely done by women) is not taken into account in the allocation calculation, which ironically shows the waste of human resources; secondly, the interpretation is established based on male stereotype of independent agents, who is perceived as selfish and do not care of others' wellbeing as long as it does not affect them.

Now here comes the two Gilman's fictions. The first one, The Yellow Wallpaper, tells a story of a young couple with a baby renting a house during the summer holidays. The story introduces the wife, who suffers from depression, and the husband, who is a physician. The husband advises his wife to take rest cure and hires a nurse for the baby.  Unfortunately, the rest cure does not help the depressive wife. Instead of doing nothing, she actually wants to do something outside the house. Gilman impresses the reader that keeping the woman inside the house is actually not helping her, instead, making her suffer more. This is the thing that is not understood by the husband. In this way, Gilman attempts to show that not only do women lack of humanness by being excluded from the labour market (shown by the even more depressive the woman is), but also men lack of humanness by being excluded from caring in the home (shown by the rest cure advise of the husband to his wife, despite the fact that he is physician). The story ends with the woman's cruel fate, which begins with her vision at night in the pattern of wallpaper, in which a female figure tries to get out. For van Staveren, the story is a metaphor that shows two things. First, gender division of labour leads to waste of human resources in the labour markte and in the household production. Second, such gender division of labour brings abour adverse effect to women's self realization. According to van Steveren, The Yellow Wallpaper portrays that efficiency (as defined by Pareto) is not a morally neutral concept, that is, a concept that does not only lead to sub-optiman level of production due to waste of human resources, but also loss of humanness.

The second fiction, Herland, illustrates different life for women, an imagined country without men. The story tells three American men discover a country where only women live. Expecting that the country will be undeveloped, the men are surprised to find how highly developed the country is. What is even to their surprise is that competition as well as market does not take in the country. The men are very curious how the country could function without such things. I will below quote the interesting conversations between these men and women of Herland regarding competition:

"No, indeed!" he said hastily. "No one, I mean, man or woman, would work without incentive. Competition is the - the motor power, you see."
"It is not with us," they explained gently, "so it is hard for us to understand. Do you mean, for instance, that with you no mother would work for her children without the stimulus of competition?"

Unlike men's world, marked by work/leisure trade-off, Herland's economy is not constructed as a dichotomy between market and home, but as a well-functioning arrangement of community production. In Herland, there is no individual household production and, therefore, the Herlanders always think in terms of their community and carry out production cooperatively, in which each group of women conduct specialized tasks. The story demonstrates how nonmarket production can be efficient when it is carried out outside individual households and without the separation of gender division of labour between household and market production. In sum, the community-based cooperative production, specialized labor and intrinsically motivated workers, make the trade-off between efficiency of market production and inefficiency of home production become obsolete.