Globalization and the Sexual Division of Labour

Helena Hirata’s 2002 article approaches globalisation through the organisation of work and the terms of employment. Firms can demand greater initiative while shifting insecurity onto workers through temporary contracts and flexible staffing. Seeing how these changes coexist means studying what people do at work alongside their contracts and career prospects.

When employment expands in opposite directions

Hirata describes a polarisation of women’s paid work. Opportunities for some women in professional and managerial occupations can expand while low-paid, insecure jobs also grow. She places service work within relations of gender, class and race or ethnicity. Jobs in cleaning, care and coordination can demand considerable skill while being classified as low-skilled, with consequences for pay and progression.

Later sections review a French debate over employment, work and activity. Someone may be economically active without a recognised job, while a regular wage can coexist with repetitive, exhausting work. Hirata discusses proposals for protections that would follow workers through changes in employment and periods of training. The proposals invite a question about bargaining power: can people refuse poor conditions without losing access to income or support?

An employment rate can count these trajectories together. Working hours, security of contracts and mobility between jobs make it possible to ask who gains autonomy and who takes on the costs of flexibility. The article’s examples belong to the economies and period it examines.

Integrated markets can produce divergent working lives

Hirata opens by treating globalisation as a way to analyse changes in markets and questioning its use as a reason to accept particular reforms as inevitable. The polarisation of women’s employment tests that distinction. She discusses fixed-term contracts in France as one route to the expansion of insecure work. She also argues that the coexistence of professional advancement and precarious work is visible beyond Europe, including in Brazil. A similar pattern need not originate in the same labour institutions. Compare contract rules, alternative jobs and social protection before assuming that employment growth produces the same risks in each place.

A second connection emerges when the question shifts from how many women hold senior jobs to how they obtain the time those jobs require. One family can buy time for cleaning or care, while a worker in another may have to move between part-time and temporary contracts. Reading the two ends of the labour market together brings the redistribution of housework and care into the analysis. Hirata’s account of the French debate then offers a practical question: can income and training rights follow a person from one job to another, and who can organise to hold employers and public institutions to those rights?

Read Hirata and Kergoat on new configurations of the sexual division of labour for the principles of separation and hierarchy. That framework helps name what the 2002 article observes as employment changes.

Original text