Health, Women's Work, and Industrialization - Center for Gender in ...

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shapes the job opportunities available. The extent to which industries are
regulated in terms of working conditions will clearly impact worker
well-bei ng. The degree to whi ch 1 abor organi zati ons are controll ed will
i ndi cate how vari ed the channel s are to express job di scontent. In these
and other ways, the state shapes the labor process as well as ideology and
reproduction.
The state also plays an important mediating role in providing the
conditions necessary for capital accumulation, for production of labor
power, and for reproduction of labor. The policies, incentives, and
regul ati ons are refl ected on the shop floor, in the dai ly experi ences of
workers, as well as in their lives outside the factory. Yet, capital
accumulation also alters class formation and conversion, income
distribution, and social relations (including labor market relations). The
state must continually mediate between the global rationalities of TNCs, the
necessities of local accumulation, and demands by labor. The state, then,
is both an agent of accumul ati on as well as an agent of soci al control. Its
role is to foster development, however dependent.
That women work in labor-intensive factories in LDCs today is evident in
the resulting complex social, economic, and political forces. Under the new
international division of labor, a new working class is emerging, with women
at its center.
In taking a political economy of health approach, it is understood that
health conditions reflect the interaction between biological and social
systems and are a microcosm of the social totality. With such an approach
to the study of electronics workers in Asia, the aim is to arrive at a
better understanding of how the dynamics of the larger system affect
people's well-being, both individually and collectively. The changes in the
labor process and in those institutions reflect developments in the world
capi tal i st system. Under the new i nternati onal di vi si on of 1 abor, the most
recent tendency in the capitalist system, Asian countries are becoming
capitalist countries in their own right.
The Empirical Study
Methodology
The study seeks to understand the rel ati onshi p between worker's heal th
and (l) the technical means of production, (2) the social organization of
work, and (3) the patterns of consumption and reproduction. The study is
centered around a survey of 900 semiconductor workers in Singapore and
Malaysia and a 10% subsample interview. The survey questionnaire method was
chosen both because collected statistics on the health of electronics
workers as a group di d not exi st, and because of the need to go beyond the
anecdotal information previously reported in the literature.
To obtain large random samples of workers, access to the workforce was
obtained through management cooperation at five semiconductor companies