From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERFordist mass production, with its giant factories, regular jobs, andworkplace trade unions has given way to smaller factories pursuinglow-inventory,‘just in time’production methods. These require a flexibleworkforce and make it harder for trade unions to organise acrosscontinents and multiple workplaces.Deregulation of the labour market is often described as enhancing‘flexibility’. Occasionally, flexibility benefits workers, such as when itmeans greater entitlements to family leave or flexible working hours,but largely it is a euphemism for driving down entitlements and jobsecurity. 111 Typical ‘flexibilisation’ measures include the introductionof temporary contracts, little or no recognition of labour rights suchas freedom of association or collective bargaining, part-time working(which limits access to standard benefits such as holiday pay andpensions), piece-rate payments, and making it easier for employers tohire and fire staff.Women predominate in many of the categories of jobs and workerstargeted for flexibilisation or ignored altogether by labour law:domestic workers, home workers, agricultural workers, undocumentedworkers, and workers in export-processing zones. In the case ofdomestic workers, a review of the labour legislation in 60 countriesrevealed that nine exclude domestic workers from their labour code,while 19 refer to them in a ‘specific’ chapter, which often means thatthey are afforded a lower degree of protection than other categories ofworkers. 112Flexibility often includes loosening minimum wage requirementsand ending sector-wide collective bargaining. As well as introducingor scrapping legislation, governments have undermined labour rightsby failing to update labour laws to match the changing nature of work,and by turning a blind eye to the violation of existing labour codes.As a result:• In Chile, 75 per cent of women in the agricultural sector arehired on temporary contracts to pick fruit, and put in morethan 60 hours a week during the season – but one in threestill earns below the minimum wage.• Fewer than half of the women employed in Bangladesh’stextile and garment export sector have a contract, and the154