Just in time

The effects in the Global Restructuring Process

Global South
Nadia Hasan

March 8th, 2011

In a world that is constantly changing and not necessarily to offer better conditions, there is a continuous increase on gender inequalities. Global restructuring is a gendered process; in transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms ofgendered personhood , and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its implications for workers themselves. The constant process that women especially have confronted throughout history seems to never end. The world order has opened up its barriers to facilitate a more globalized process. This paper explores the analysis of the gender perspective and itsimplications in global restructure, as well as the process through narrating the evolution of a local labor market in Mexico's export-processing (maquila) industry.
Although, as it is mention in the book Gender and Global Restructuring, ‘in order to move beyond a narrow materialist analysis of global restructuring it is important to develop a better understanding of the roles played by ideas ,identities, and culture in international affairs’ (8, 32-35). In fact, gender operates at a various levels that are distinct. Social expectations between men and women are certainly different as practices in our culture have always portrayed it. For instance there are certain sectors in the market that are becoming more masculinised or vice versa. This influences some social and economical patterns in theway on how men and women are treated unequally in the job market. In effect, looking at it in a more feminist point of view, women are usually the ones confronting more inequalities than men.
The account that can be allocated within the evolution of the labor market is that it has contributed enormously to the growth of low wage female employment in third world countries. This is what in factexport-led industrialization does, as it was mentioned in class by professor Mukherjee, this has led to the creation of many strategies to lower costs by reorganizing production on a global scale. Furthermore, women make up for the majority of workers in these industries simply because they are considered to be more patient and prepare to do the tedious and monotonous job. The methods of leanproduction directly affect women in this process because they rely in the demand sector, thus if there is no demand, the company stops production and women have no work. In addition, these big transnational companies employ women only when there is demand because they would work under pressure and hard conditions. Men instead, have more possibilities in other areas. Another important fact that wasalso named in class by professor Mukherjee on Jan 18th was the male migration effect, which men do it seeking for employment. This has also led female headed households merely relying on insufficient and unstable remittances.
Furthermore, the lean production also call Just In Time(JIT) production, “involves the workforce much more directly in controlling their own inventory needs, and it allows avariety of models to be produced on the same assembly line simultaneously”(The Economist, 7-9). This contributes to those big transnational corporations to manage their assembly lines and allow them not to keep too much inventory. In the real world this is what only seems to benefit producers, since now, even the north have witnessed a loss of jobs as multinationals from the north movedproduction to the South, creating a ‘global assembly line’. Moreover this has affected both, men and women in the global market, but again this global projection also ends up in what is call the relocation process. In fact, this is what most transnational companies seem to advocate now, such as is the case of Manitoba, “The Canadian garment industry has been one of the industries hardest hit by economic...