Thammasat University students interested in economics, business, sociology, gender studies, feminism, history, consumer studies, social theory, and related subjects may find a new book useful.
Feminist Futures of Work: Reimagining Labour in the Digital Economy is an Open Access book available for free download at this link.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of labor and feminism.
The publisher’s description of the book follows:
The future of work is at the centre of debates related to the emerging digital society. Concerns range from the inclusion, equity, and dignity of those at the far end of the value chain, who participate on and off platforms, often in the shadows, invisible to policymakers, designers, and consumers. Precarity and informality characterize this largely female workforce, across sectors ranging from artisanal work to salon services to ride hailing and construction. A feminist reimagining of the futures of work—what we term as “FemWork” —is the need of the day and should manifest in multiple and various forms, placing the worker at the core and drawing on her experiences, aspirations, and realities. This volume offers grounded insights from academic, activist, legal, development and design perspectives that can help us think through these inclusive futures and possibly create digital, social, and governance infrastructures of work that are fairer and more meaningful.
The introduction by the editors explains:
The Tangled Web of Women in Work: A Feminist Account
One of the great paradoxes of our times is that even as women become more educated and economies grow, their participation in the workforce drops. This drop has been most keenly experienced in emerging economies. In India, for instance, the women’s labour force participation rate (LFPR) dropped by almost 23 percentage points between 2004–5 to 2020–21. While part of this fall may be attributed to the global economic downturn in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the reasons are more complex, revealing as much about social and cultural norms as it does about the material realities at the supply end of the value chain. The past decade has seen a burgeoning of interest in the broad questions around women and work; apart from the continuing struggle to recognize the economic value of home-making and domestic care work, there is a growing awareness of the many nuances that shape the definitions and dynamics of women’s work, whether it is done in the home or outside, in the fields or on the factory floor, and how it moves through the market at local and global scales.
In the South Asian context, the decrease in women’s participation in the workforce has been found to vary according to the type of work and a range of sociocultural and demographic variables. However, there is also a strain of scholarship that contests the dominant narrative that women’s participation is falling because of increasing household income and conservative social norms (while acknowledging these) and instead point to the need to create jobs that not only attract women to the labour force but retain them. Another issue is that of counting—or accounting for—women’s work, which is often invisible or is subsumed into the household income in sectors such as farming or other traditional occupations including artisanal work, quite apart from the economic value of home-making. There are then two important directions in which we need to think, when it comes to the world of work in relation to women. The first is concerned with the nature of the labour market and the affordances of labour design (which we may also think of as platform design, though not limited to technological platforms) that encourage or discourage women workers. The second revolves around the nature of work and its valuation in the market and in society. The many questions arising within these two broad areas, and the possible answers they may yield, can allow us to build an intelligible patchwork that can inform both policy and practice, as well as offer input to the material infrastructures of work-place and work-form. For many years, the discourse of social justice has included the notion of fair work as the basis of fair trade, emphasizing the need for economic actors to facilitate transparency around working conditions and redressal mechanisms. While these issues have received attention mostly in relation to the gig economy and digital platform work, the underlying principles remain equally important in traditional economic sectors as well.
Work-place considerations can range from the physical structure of the factory or shop floor to the laws and provisions that secure workers’ rights in various sectors. In the digital era, this would include the design of platforms for gig work as also the education and sensitization of workers and employers around the evolving nature of rights and responsibilities in the new economy. It would involve the re-imagination of the role of the state and other economic actors in ensuring safety and security, and the creation of structures that foster not only productivity but also wellness and community. It would also include the recognition of places where unorganized workers engage in labour—the home, the street, the homes of others. Work-form considerations might include a reimagination of both work and worker. Work that is done in places that have not been traditionally considered locations of productive labour—such as the home—must then be counted within the economy. Whether done by hand (as in artisanal crafts) or by the heart (affective labour, physical and emotional care work), they are recognized and valued in economic, social, cultural, and psychological terms. Feminism has always been preoccupied with work; the early demands of the women’s movement had to do with better working conditions and fairer wages, and in some contexts, even the right to work outside the home. But one might argue that those early demands were still predicated on the structures of work as defined within patriarchal norms. Over the years, feminists have argued for a shift in the terms of engagement, a reconceptualization of the very understanding of “productive” labour, expanding classical Marxist notions of use and exchange value as they operate within a capitalist system. Labour that occurs within the home, mostly done by women, that creates the context and support for other forms of work done outside the home, has only recently been recognized as productive, and worthy of valuing in economic terms. However, feminist struggles have varied across the globe, their differential resistances responding to the specific ways in which patriarchal values have structured contexts, and thus thinking about women workers in the Global South and elsewhere, requires that we pay heed to these nuances.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)