discussion homework 400-500 within 12 hours

Asian Women, Labor, and Globalization

Industries

• What industries do you think women, particularly Asian Women in the U.S., participate in?

• What type of work/labor is associated with Asian Pacific American Women?

Labor/Work

• Labor-exertion

• Work-career and job

• Labor and Work can be paid or unpaid

Work is a Contested Terrain particularly for women

• Work as a vehicle of (socioeconomic and socially) liberation and independence

•VERSUS

• Work as an oppressive system

Work-Theory

• Foucault-Work is a social organization of inequality in which social relations among classes, races, and genders are fundamentally unequal

• Weber-Advanced capitalism needs the administrative structure of work organization to impose predictability, efficiency, and accumulation

Work-Marx

• Conceptualization of work organization as both a structure and process set up as a mechanism of social control to maintain domination, to reproductive inequality, and to suppress opposition--Thus the work organization becomes one of the primary sources of exploitation and oppression of working class, people of color, and women.

Sexual Division of Labor •“In the idealized American family, women are full-time

homemakers and mothers and men are the breadwinners. US culture aligns these gender roles--the bread baker and the bread winner--as complementary, ignoring the historical and political context of their constructions and gliding over questions of power and conflict. This naturalized sexual division of labor engenders other sex-specific stereotypes: men are independent, capable, while women are dependent, ineffectual, and weak.” -Yen Li Espiritu

• How can this discussion be racialized?

Productive and Reproductive

• Both productive and reproductive labor are both part of a process of survival and renewal

• Which is associated with Asian Pacific American Women?

Productive Work/Labor

• Productive: work for exchange…is the means by which one can BUY basic human needs such as food, shelter, and clothing

Reproductive Work/Labor

• Reproductive: work for use and satisfaction of immediate needs…is the production of people, not only the bearing of children but also the caring--the day to day physical and ideological maintenance of human beings--which enables individuals to fit into the social structure of society

Work Shifts

• How many work shifts to do women, particularly Asian Pacific American Women, endure?

Work Shifts • 1st Shift

• Productive Labor • Wage Labor-Income Generating

• 2nd Shift • Reproductive • Maintenance of Family or Home

• 3rd Shift • Reproductive • Emotional Maintenance of Workplace and

Community

Work versus Role • Gendered Work and Gender Role • If the wage system reward men for the their labor

by paying them more than women…what happens to the worth of the labor of women at home when it is unpaid. Is it regarded as roles rather than labor?

• Is it just about monetary value • how does status fit in? • where does worth fit in? • where do expectations fit in? • where do conditions fit in? • where does treatment fit in?

Issues and Involvement

• What are the issues that Asian Pacific American Women face?

• How do global issues affect local issues? • How do the global issues worldwide affect Asian

Pacific American Women? With regard to their treatment media, community, at work, and homelife?

Sex Work • Rest and Recreation (R & R): a euphemism for the

use by military personnel of “entertainers” or prostitutes. • Sex Tourism: a tour to a destination where sexual services

are available to tourists. • Trafficking: illicit and clandestine movement of persons (or

goods) across national and international borders, largely from developing countries and some countries with economies in transition. Sex trafficking has the end goal of forcing women and children into sexually or economically oppressive and exploitative situations for the profit of recruiters, traffickers, and crime syndicates. This is also related to forced domestic labor, false marriages, clandestine employment, and false adoption.

Rampant Sex Trafficking • U.S. State Department, which estimates that

600,000 to 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labor and sex worldwide each year -- and that 80 percent are women and girls

• 700,000 and 4 million worldwide- Trafficked-- according to SAGE (Standing Against Global Exploitation)

• Most from Southeast Asia, Soviet Union, and South America

• In Japan, an estimated 150,000 Asian women, mostly Filipinas and Thais, work as entertainers and commercial sex workers

video clip: “Asia’s sex industry” https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=eu_K5wvdMAY

United States- Top Destination

• United States is among the top three destination countries for sex traffickers, along with Japan and Australia. Once in the United States, traffickers most often set up shop in California, New York, Texas and Las Vegas.

• 18,000 Women and Children to the U.S. annually • 5,000 Filipinas enter the US annually as mail-

order brides

California- Sex Slaves •Once in California, the women are taken most

often to Los Angeles or San Francisco, where they are hidden inside homes, massage parlors, apartments and basements, only to learn that the job offer was just a ploy. Typically they are locked inside their place of business, forced to have sex with as many as a dozen men a day. Sometimes victims are forced to live in the brothel, too, where five or six "co-workers" are crammed into one room.

San Francisco- Sex Masseuses

• There are at least 90 massage parlors in San Francisco where sex is for sale, according to the online sex Web site myredbook.com

• On average, there are about eight women working in a massage parlor, police say. That would mean more than 700 Asian sex masseuses working in San Francisco

I am not allowed to be a woman. I am not allowed to be a mother Where the world requires me to leave my children, To work elsewhere, Across the ocean from them, Where money is made But not for a better life.

Excerpt from poem, Overseas Female Worker by Elsa Valmidiano

What is the Context the allows this to happen?

• Imperialism

• Globalization

• War

• Poverty

• Displacement

Imperialism • The system, policies, and/or practices of one nation to establish

economic, and political hegemony over other countries. Imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. (Lenin 1916)

• This is accomplished by controlling another country’s: • Land-By establishing colonies, neo-colonies, or political rule • Labor-Through slavery and/or exploitation • Liberty-By taking away freedom and/or violating human rights • Life- By attempting to destroy indigenous culture, ideology, identity,

and spirituality • Language- To control of communication and education • Legacy- Through the destruction of histories, herstories, and

ourstories.

• Hegemony: Paradigm of dominance.

Global Issues • Globalization: The term “globalization” describes the

increased mobility of goods, services, labor, technology and capital throughout the world.

• Diaspora: The dispersion of a people from their original “homeland” and the community formed beyond national borders maintained by economic dependence and cultural preservation.

• Displacement: What is displacement? Who gets displaced? Who is responsible for this?

• Polarization: What is polarization? How does it apply to wealth? Why does a disproportionate amount of wealth exist in such a small fraction of the world’s population?

Contextualizing Global Issues

• Displacement: the direct or indirect removal of people from their home or homeland.

• Labor: work activity, sometimes attached with a monetary value. • Liberalization: the removal of all barriers that hinder the export and

import of commodities. • Migration: the movement of people from one country or locality to

another. • Militarization: the act of assembling and putting into readiness for war

or other emergency;mobilization of troops. • Privatization: the selling of state-owned industries, services, and

assets to the private sector.

Transformative Resistance

• What should we do?

• What would make things better?

• How do find hope in all of this?

Involvement • Policy • Services

• Refuge • Skill Building • Religious

• Organizations/ing • Women’s organizations- SAGE, One Billion Rising,

NAPAWF • Community organizations

• Global and Local Education on the Issues • Personal Commitment