 First of all we have to try and understand what is work and it's not as easy as it sounds. Usually you think of it as any economic activity that involves the production or distribution of goods and services. The activities around motherhood, they're usually seen as non-economic. But think about it, breastfeeding for example, it is something that you can outsource and in fact through history in different societies breastfeeding has been outsourced. There have been wet nurses. When that is done it's an economic activity. The woman who does the breastfeeding instead of the mother is actually providing a service and is paid for it. So it's an economic service. Now you can even think of surrogate motherhood which is a new phenomenon but it's also growing. When you hire someone to bear a child for you, that's an economic activity. And yet a woman who will do this for her own child is not seen as doing anything economic. It's characterised as not in the labour force. It's work when you get paid for it but if you're doing it for your own child, your own family, then it's not work. George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, said that if he married his housekeeper national income would fall because he would have been paying the housekeeper but then once he married her he doesn't have to pay her anymore. It's only in 2013 when the International Conference of Labour Statisticians they decided that they would have to expand the notion of work and this was subsequently accepted by the ILO, the International Labour Organization. So now it's classified as any activity performed by persons of any sex or age to produce goods or provide services for use by others or for own use. That means that employment is a subset of work. Employment is work that you do for pay or profit. It is whatever you get remunerated for. And that's dramatically significant in terms of how you look at what work is and it also should alter our concept of labour supply. You know it's quite interesting that a lot of our economics textbooks and a lot of our standard growth theories take the labour supply as given as one of those exogenous variables, outside variable that comes in and impacts the economy. But that's completely false. In fact, labour supply has never been something external to the economy. It's been completely driven by the demand for labour even with a given population. It's not fixed. If you think about it, capitalism has always altered the supply of labour. Through migration of slaves, of indentured labour in the 19th century of other migrants in the 20th century and onwards it has brought children into the labour force. Think of Dickens and Oliver Twist and all of that. It has always adjusted the supply of labour depending on its needs. But the most marked example of this is women. Women have been the biggest reserve army of labour, if you like. The biggest available group that can be mobilized to enter the labour force when they're needed and then thrown back out when they're not needed. Think of the United States during the Second World War when a lot of men went out to fight the war and there was a shortage of workers. And it was also a shortage because the economy was expanding. The wartime effort, more munitions, other kinds of expenditure. So you were really what they call full employment. There was this tightness of labour supply. And so what happened? More and more women were brought into the labour force. There was a massive increase in women who were actively encouraged to do jobs that they would previously not have been considered for. War is over and of course the US didn't lose so many people in the war. So they all come back home and then the women are thrown back into housework. They're thrown back into becoming milk and cookies moms. You're not going off to school without a hot breakfast inside you. It was a very rapid movement of women into the labour force and then reducing their role later on. Despite the fact that women are always workers, whether they're recognised or not and despite the fact that they have been very, very critical as paid workers even in certain phases of industrialisation, accumulation and all of that, it's a real uphill struggle to get women recognised generically as workers. Trade unions have been dominantly male preserves. It's hard to get a lot of male trade unions even today to even be willing to bring in women and certainly to bring in women's issues onto their platform and this is true actually across advanced and developing countries. A lot of public policy, it's still based on what has been called the male breadwinner model. It means that regulation of working hours is a very crucial thing, not just for men because nobody likes to work for very long in a day but because women have that double burden. So when women are working, the regulation of working hours is absolutely crucial and the possibility of flexibility in working hours is also very important because let's face it, the gender construction of societies means that women are still the ones responsible for dealing with all the household and care responsibilities. But of course all of this is very difficult when you don't even have formal work arrangements. Most women are informal workers and most informal workers are women. In a large part of the global workforce, the conditions of work of very, very significant group of workers, the women workers and especially the informal women workers, simply not recognised, simply not taken into consideration when either looking at the success or failure of a particular strategy or looking at public policy. You have to look at the quality of the jobs. You have to look at whether those jobs are adequately recognised, whether they have minimal protections that other jobs get, what kind of remuneration they're getting, what wages are they getting and you have to look at the conditions that facilitate women joining their workforce because if you don't take into account all of these things, just the fact of paid work need not actually improve women's material conditions. Let's see how this whole phenomenon of women's engagement in paid work has evolved over time. It's quite interesting when you think about it, there have been these phases in particular economies when there are significant increases in women's workforce participation. Sometimes these are smooth and sometimes these occur with a kind of cyclical form. Different societies, different economies have shown completely different trajectories of women's workforce participation which depend on the specific kind of capitalist accumulation processes that have emerged in those societies. Some accumulation strategies have actually relied on this fact that labour markets are segmented by gender and that you can get women for much cheaper rates than you can get men and particularly you will find that this has been true of what is called export-oriented industrialisation. So when you think about, let's say, Japan in the late 19th, early 20th century significant increase in textile factories relying on young women workers. Subsequently the big expansion is in East Asia, in South Korea, Taiwan, China, a bunch of other East Asian industrialisers later on, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand where you had major reliance on women workers in export-oriented manufacturing. At one point it was estimated that up to three-quarters of the workers employed in these export-oriented manufacturing companies were women and in these societies it actually meant sometimes a doubling of the union's workforce participation within a space of 20 years, less than a generation, you had a massive increase. So remember I told you how capitalism just draws in labour supply when it wants of particular kinds. And here they drew on the supply of young women. Now it's very interesting this thing about young women because that reflected the particular needs of that type of production. So what were the needs of that production? Well first of all it was you wanted to be cheap and flexible. You wanted the ability to hire and fire and you wanted to be very cheap because you were doing it for export so you wanted to undercut other producers. You wanted to be competitive in the global market which meant you wanted your wage costs to be kept minimum. Then remember these are activities with high burnout because a lot of them especially the electronics industries garments not so much but definitely electronics they require very fine detailed work which can often be not just ergonomically disastrous but also affect your eyesight. Young women are ideal for this. Think about it. You can hire them when they are relatively young 18 or so and employ them for the period until they get married or choose to have children. In other words you can use the life cycle when they're anyway going to be exhausted and burnt out you can say well now it's time for you to get married and have kids your younger sister can come and take this job. More or less. Women definitely have a lower reservation wage as I've mentioned already. All of these export oriented manufacturing countries the gender wage gap was huge. In Korea women were getting 50% of the male wage so much cheaper yes. And then of course they're known to be more docile and less likely to unionise. They were seen as very amenable to the kinds of discipline required for this particular type of factory work and of course very rarely they demand permanent contracts. Most of the time these young women will either be contributing to the family's income or they will be saving up for their own future. So it's not the same as men who say well I'm responsible for this family wife and children and I have to have enough and I have to have a permanent job and I have to see that income increasing over time. They didn't even have those expectations mostly. As the technology proceeds and as you get more and more automated techniques more and more mechanisation in fact the women get thrown out of the jobs. Whenever it's mechanised the men get the jobs not because the women are always less educated but just because of the gender construction of societies. And so what we found is that there was a phase when export-oriented industrialisation relied dramatically on the increasing involvement of young women. There was a study done in Metro Manila for example in the Philippines where it was found that something like 95% of the workers were women under 35. Imagine all under 35. So there was a clear way in which you just used the labour of young women to get this flexibility and this cheapness that enabled you to enter all of these export markets. It's fine when you just have a few and you have some factories that are relying on this and you can use all of these special features of young women but as more and more and more young women get drawn into it then they actually start having more of a political voice as well. And so you get demands for better conditions, for greater safety, for higher wages and so two things happen. One is that you shift as I mentioned to more and more automated and mechanised kinds of techniques which rely on fewer workers and those workers are male. There's work by Stephanie Saguino and Elisa Branstad that is actually identifying how women have been rationed out of more desirable manufacturing jobs. Even in a situation where they're still cheaper than men but you can find even cheaper women in other locations. So for example you shift from Malaysia to Indonesia and Vietnam from Thailand to Cambodia, Myanmar, Bangladesh and so on. You find that in some of these countries, yes there has been an increase in women's workforce participation but then that whole phase didn't last long enough to create genuine improvements in the conditions of women and sometimes they were associated with so much of the double burden that it's hard to say they were necessarily better off. As women are ejected out of those factory oriented jobs which were not great to begin with, then they're forced into even more fragile work, peace rate work or self employment. So you find that there's a significant increase in subcontracting. It means that women are doing things by the amount that they can produce in a day and so that creates huge capacities for self exploitation. All the risks of the production are on the women who are working there because you know if the orders are less then they are the ones who have to suffer with the fallen income. It's not an employer who has to deal with it. Increasingly now when you think of the garments that everyone buys in the developed world that are made in Bangladesh or Morocco or Cambodia or Guatemala or somewhere and I know that a lot of that work is being contributed by women at the very very bottom of the income scale working in pretty terrible conditions doing kinds of work that are extremely unpaid and this value chain extends all the way down to the very bottom. In the outskirts of Delhi there are these slum settlements and I have seen women dipping shoelaces into dye for Nike shoes. I have seen women sewing sequins onto what will become Benetton T-shirts. I've seen all kinds of absolutely basic activity which ends up being a branded item in a department store somewhere in an advanced country and these women get paid, you can't even call it a pittance. It's something like a hundred rupees for ten items which is like a dollar fifty for work that would take you maybe fifteen hours. Now how can this happen? In an economy that is growing at between seven to ten percent then it was growing at five to seven percent now of course it's declining but even before the decline it was a growing economy and everybody saw it as an economy that was emerging and booming and all of those things yet women's work, recognised work were collapsing. So when you probe a little bit more deeply into it and of course the surveys that people have done find that there is a lot of women's work which is simply not recognised as economic activity even when the men do it it's recognised as economic activity. This was true even earlier. Devaki Jain the Indian Economist and Malini Chand way back in the 1970s they were just gone and studied the work that women do and they found that all kinds of things weeding, cutting grass, threshing carrying produced items to one place to another all of these were simply not recognised as economic activity. They're doing all the things that men do but they're just not called workers so that's one basic part the blindness of statistical systems to the work that women do but there's another process that's going on in India some women are employed in textile and B.D. factories, B.D. is like an Indian cigarette it's basically a rolled cigarette leaf and those are very very basic conditions you are sitting and rolling these leaves continuously. That's one of the forms but that's a tiny part of the increase in manufacturing employment. A lot of it is actually this home based peace rate work. It's work where a contractor will come and give you some raw material and you will have to do something to it you'll have to process it in some way it could be that you'll have to cut pieces of cloth to a particular design it could be that you have to sew buttons onto something or sew zippers onto something else or as I mentioned sew sequins onto Benetton t-shirts just think of it you know the contractor will come and give you a hundred pieces and say do them all by today doing that hundred pieces will require 15 hours of work so if you want the payment for the hundred pieces you will do 15 hours of work you know desperately stay away get your kids to come and help you that's very common and then when the contractor comes back to collect the work they say well okay you've done the hundred but you know only 80 of them are really good so I'm only going to pay you for 80 I'll take all of them but you only get paid for 80 because the others are not up to our quality standards then when the market is down when nobody is buying then the contractor says well today I don't need any or today you can only do 20 and I will pay you for only 20 so all of the risks of production you know the collapse in demand and all of that are born by you and then of course there's the whole issue of safety it could be something that involves a lot of chemical fumes it could be something that involves a potential threat in terms of how you're using electricity or you could cut yourself there are all kinds of things that can happen all of those issues of safety at work are your problem you have to make sure you are safe so you see how this piece rate work is a massive increase in exploitation and it has become one of the preferred options of global value chains because they have mechanized a very large part and the part that is no longer or not really available for automation in the same way that part you can rely on this kind of work which is extremely convenient because it has passed on all the risks and all the costs to the actual workers themselves but the final thing that has happened in India and that's really quite significant it turns out that our sample surveys actually ask women about what they do and they have these codes that define different activities now these are all codes that are classified as not in the labour force so they're not available for work according to the statistical system code 92 is where you are doing what they call household duties it's a lovely quaint Indian term household duties is the whole range of care work cooking cleaning looking after the old the young the sick you know the entire range of care activities then there's code 93 and that's when you do household duties plus you do some extended care activities and some other activities such as collecting fuel collecting water kitchen gardening poultry raising tutoring children sewing and tailoring for the family making baskets making other products that will be used at home public activities and all these activities that women do are from women who are not in the labour force the big increase in women the share of women over the past two decades has been in this code 93 in women who are doing household work and all these other activities this bringing water 40% of the women who are involved in this code 93 said that that was the primary activity they had to do and other surveys have found that it's taking longer to collect this water because you have to walk longer to get to the water source you have to wait for longer at that water source and then you have to make more trips in agriculture when it's mostly manual and this you will find across the developing world a lot of women are involved when jobs become automated when they become mechanized then it's almost inevitable that men will get them and yet when you think about it mechanized jobs are easier to perform manual construction is both difficult and dangerous and yet when it was largely manual and not mechanized you would find many women involved in this carrying heavy things on their heads climbing up scaffolding doing all kinds of related work not mechanized and you have hydraulic machines and lifters and excavators and you have hard hats and gloves and protection it's all men there's no physical reason why it should only be men but it ends up being men all of this helps us to understand what's going on today in the current crisis because you know the Covid-19 pandemic has had all kinds of terrible impacts across the world but one of the big impacts it's had is on employment and you would think at one level that women workers would be relatively less affected because after all they are involved in the care economy in a very big way and ideally the care sector should have got more public investment and more of social appreciation unfortunately doesn't happen on the other hand the women who are in a lot of these other production like GVCs there's recent research that says that you know they're really under threat in a way it's almost as if they're damned if they work and they're damned if they don't because at the lower end of these GVCs they have often been forced to come back and continue to work even in very unprotected conditions without adequate distancing without adequate care for their physical safety or preventing them from infection and all of that but also in these GVCs the ones in factories are mostly involved in the sort of routine repetitive tasks which are very amenable to automation and one of the things the pandemic has done is accelerated this tendency to automation because employers are increasingly wary of the risks of having humans in production the less humans you can have the better right so that they don't get sick and they don't infect others and so on we're finding that even in advanced economies formal employment is coming down and there's a disproportionate job loss of women during this pandemic which is accompanied by increasing unemployment rates including of young women and including more educated women this crisis and the crisis of care that is ensued with schools closed with daycares closed with families being unable to find ways to care for children and for others while they have to work this is really going to make it hard for millions of women and other caregivers to fully participate in the labour market it's interesting that the tendencies that I had highlighted earlier are actually accentuated and even worsened by the current pandemic now all of this plays out in many other kinds of ways in terms of how women are involved in the labour markets and the different pressures they face in labour markets in terms of the wage rates in terms of the working conditions in terms of their ability to improve their conditions over time and even to be upwardly mobile so we're going to be looking at that in the next lecture