Beyond “Legal Equality” vs. “Difference” Feminism: Leah F. Vosko Interviews Eileen Boris on Women and the ILO

Abstract

Eileen Boris’s new book, Making the Woman Worker: Precarious Labor and the Fight for Global Standards, 1919–2019, traces the history of the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) incremental recognition of the work of social reproduction, culminating in the struggle of domestic workers to gain formal recognition at the ILO. Throughout three sections, Boris demonstrates the global making of the woman worker. She provides extensive evidence of how extraction of labor and raw materials from former colonies nourished and sustained the postwar welfare state. In the age of neoliberal globalization, the “global” is reconfigured partly through the expansion of migrant (domestic/care) labor alongside the production of cheap commodities. For Boris, the context of the Cold War is also central to making the woman worker, as the ILO standards regarding women’s work were produced by the struggle between the US and the USSR and these superpowers’ competing conceptions of social citizenship. Making the Woman Worker is filled with detail, reflecting Boris’s aim to intertwine biographical data, historical facts, and their interpretation, while drawing on a feminist political economy. Boris recounts the lives of women (and, to a lesser extent, men) involved in the ILO and related UN institutions. The biographical plays a particularly pertinent role in the in-depth discussion of the evolution of the Programme on Rural Women in the 1970s and 1980s, led by socialist feminist Lourdes Benería and supporting the work of Maria Mies, arguably one of the strongest and most original segments of Making the Woman Worker.The book is richly textured and covers a great deal of historical ground. It addresses wide-ranging issues and offers numerous potential explanations for ILO action, prompting me to intervene as follows:Leah Vosko:You manage to move beyond the paradigm of a struggle between labor/union feminists, who emphasized women-specific protections, and legal equality feminists, who argued for working women’s legal equality with working men. Your account suggests that both groups helped develop international labor standards. You also show how legal equality presaged future neoliberal politics, where so-called gender-neutral solutions, such as increased part-time work (supposedly for all workers) and loosening of regulations on night work in the 1980s, were welcomed by employers. In light of the adoption of this framework, under conditions of austerity, when neoliberal labor policy invokes both gender neutrality and gender difference, and given especially the rise of the share economy, might there be any use in reappropriating older “protective language” once applied to women’s work but extending it to workers in general?Eileen Boris: First, let me thank Leah for these perceptive and stimulating questions. They really help to advance the conversation that I had hoped that Making the Woman Worker would initiate.Now, women have a constitutional right to starve: so reacted Florence Kelley when the United States Supreme Court struck down the woman-only minimum wage in 1923, reasoning that enfranchisement brought equality. My update for global neoliberalism might go like, now women have the right to fail (as well as to starve) if they engage in entrepreneurial schemes that leave poor women poor. Equal treatment is not enough in the face of unequal social relations. But protection too has had its costs when those with more power — like employers, governments, and organized male workers — adjudicate the labor of women between the family/household and employment, with differential impacts between women depending on class, race, geography, and other social locations. Our moment is full of examples: claims to “protect” women by restricting access to abortion! Or, definitions of employees as managers, like frontline nurses, or as independent contractors, like Uber drivers, or as nonworkers, like prisoners and housewives. Though some legal equality feminists in the past argued for setting standards on the basis of the nature of the work rather than inherent characteristics of the worker, they ignored the persistence of occupational segregation and the devaluing of reproductive labor, whether for love or money or both. The question is not whether extending standards to all workers undercuts equality, but who the designation worker excludes and whether work is the appropriate basis for economic or social citizenship.To escape from the dichotomy of protection vs. equality, I distinguish between labor standards, which, by definition, are protections of workers, and cultures of protection, which seek to regulate sexuality, morality, or behaviors associated with women, the lower orders, racial others, and/or colonized peoples.LV:You are to be congratulated on an account that is truly global; I commend, in particular, how you place the geopolitical competition between the Soviet Union and the United States at the center of the story, including the plight of women workers in postcolonial countries. Why didn’t you, then, problematize the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union as the demise of a (potential) bargaining tool (i.e., the existence of a state-socialist alternative, with all its shortcomings) for the “developing” countries?EB: Some US historians currently decenter the Cold War and anticommunism in telling a long post–World War II story. But writing global labor history demands attention to state-socialist as well as market economies. It also requires sources, for which the ILO Archives provided only limited access after 1991. For a narrative that focused on campaigns to recognize home labors — outwork, domestic work, and care work — the end of the Cold War was less significant than other factors. Previously, the Soviet Union and its allies had attacked the existence of domestic servants and defended having mothers and people with disabilities manufacture in the home. In the 1980s, Soviet women on the ILO staff seemed more interested in industrial sectors than the informal economy. By the 1990s, the World Bank and other UN entities eclipsed the ILO — until the ILO regained some international relevance by taking up the very home labors so long shunned.The end of the Cold War brought no dividend to the ILO. The state socialist economies had joined nations from the Global South in shaping ILO statements on multinationals as early as the 1970s. (But so did international trade union federations, which had great concerns over the offshoring and outsourcing of production.) I closely looked at the Tripartite Committees in textiles, clothing, and footwear industries, sectors that women in the Global South increasingly dominated. In part due to the very neoliberal forces that led to structural adjustment, the ILO was less relevant with its social democratic roots and defense of labor standards. Tripartism fell apart by the 1990s when the Employer group simply blocked new standards or watered them down to their own benefit, as with part-time-work and private-employment agencies. In the 2000s the ILO was promoting fair globalization, seeking to formalize the informal economy, and initiating studies on global supply chains and digital outwork. But it lacked funding and struggled to find its place in the new global order.LV:In chapter 4, my favorite chapter of the book, you suggest that ILO’s Programme on Rural Women highlighted the importance of nonmonetized work and reproductive labor to processes of accumulation while simultaneously challenging colonial research methods investigating the nature and dimensions of women’s work in “industrializing” countries. In the era of austerity, what lessons does this experience of the Programme on Rural Women — informed by research from below — offer for how to move critical ideas through official policy channels?EB: I found a usable past in the Programme on Rural Women, which represents the heart of the book. Here is an instance where going beyond the printed sources into internal minutes between ILO staff and external correspondence allowed for a more robust interpretation. In facilitating collaborations between grassroots organizations and researchers, often from the area under study, the Programme turned objects of inquiry — rural women — into subjects of their own lives, into producers of knowledge and policy solutions.LV:As you indicate in the prologue, your entry point into this book stems from your long-standing activism against the exploitation of women workers through homework. The changes you trace in the ILO’s attitudes over a century (from 1919 to 2019) toward the “putting out” system or “homework” are notable. Interestingly, as the offshoring of production from industrial to industrializing countries was occurring in the 1970s and 1980s, normalizing forms of precarious employment globally, feminists at the ILO sought to set standards on industrial homework in the Global South — but without displacing the norm of the industrial workplace. Instead of targeting global capital writ large, and thus offshoring the global racialized sex/gender division of labor, ILO standards on homework targeted individual employers in the Global South.1 What explains this individualized approach which you associate with the “neoliberal consensus”?2 Was the ILO simply required to adapt to an “external” global consensus or did the institution, particularly its tripartite structure, contribute to this consensus?EB: The very tripartite structure that gave union federations a voice at the ILO inhibited tackling big structural forces. Workers needed to convince the majority of governments to support their agendas. Given divisions among states, the common denominator was often low. No employers wanted the convention on home labor and they sought in committee to limit its reach to manufacturing despite the rise of telecommuting. More recently, some at the ILO have returned to the homework convention to tackle digital labor, as well as to look at the spread of global supply chains. Norms for the industrial workplace have transferred to service and white-collar sectors, as the ILO increasingly considers the care-work economy. But as a laborite institution, it remains focused on employment. Rather than upend the racialized sex/gender division of labor, it would ensure that family caregivers can enter paid labor and improve wages and conditions in the care sector.LV:In the latter chapters of the book, you argue that the migrant woman worker has displaced the rural woman as a problem for global governance. Despite this displacement, the book largely leaves unproblematized methodological nationalism — or the tendency to take “the nation/state/society [a]s the natural social political form of the modern world” underpinning most ILO standards, including those governing various types of migrant work. Furthermore, taking domestic workers, many of whom are migrant workers, as a case in point, you suggest that a key strength of the domestic workers’ campaign at the ILO was that workers and their advocates man, lines feuvered around ILO procedures to seize voice at the main assembly of ILC by winning representation on official national delegations.3The ILO is an international institution; is it nonetheless important to explore the degree to which discussions of domestic work, and migrant work more broadly, are plagued by methodological nationalism and its effects? To this end, have you considered whether the territorial scope of labor law might be better expanded beyond the nation state to include transnational processes?4EB: You’ve really identified the problem that makes labor law problematic not only for domestic workers: the inadequacy of national standards for global processes and transnational workers. Labor and capital are both mobile, albeit in different configurations. But the ILO remains international and its instruments address nation-state enforcement of labor standards. To gain a voice, domestic workers had to get on national delegations as well as become part of international labor federations. Nationalism further operates through a country-by-country ratification process. Thus, domestic workers have deployed the ILO convention for organizing and winning new recognition and legislation in their own countries. At the same time, they have built an international organization for mutual aid to serve a transnational workforce. The lines between the global and local, transnational and national, are less stark than often imagined.LV:Following up on your response, it might be worth noting that in another recent book on the evolution of international labor standard setting on domestic work — to which you refer toward the end of Making the Woman Worker — Adelle Blackett argues that together, nation-state sovereignty and public/private divisions frustrate the pursuit of domestic workers’ rights at the level of national labor law.5 In particular, Blackett shows how nation-states’ law prevents domestic workers from exercising mobility and autonomy, insofar as domestic work is considered beyond the nation-state’s legislative reach, and yet migrant domestic workers’ access to public spaces and supports is often policed and/or controlled by national law. Given this, might it be promising for scholars and advocates to pursue a “global socio-legality” to be developed partly through ILO standard setting?EB: Yes!!! I love Adelle Blackett’s book. She brings a wealth of experience in making as well as thinking about global standards and of the “law of the household” as well as providing a transnational perspective that offers a way forward.LV:The book closes with a reference to Guy Standing’s critique of the ILO — suggesting that its tripartite organization is a central institutional failing that cannot be fixed and that basic income solutions might offer better support for workers in precarious jobs. How does the project of expanding ILO’s jurisdiction to domestic work (that which is commodified but also possibly that which is unpaid) potentially de-radicalize the political demands and the horizon of possibility that domestic labor debates raise regarding moving beyond work as employment?EB: The ILO promoted social protection (social security and other forms of social welfare). It tried to become a development agency. Throughout, it stayed a laborite organization, focused on work: conditions of, knowledge about, organization of, rights to. So it is not surprising that it would seek to transform care into work and count reproductive labor as part of production. Although some assume that domestic labor has existed outside of commodification, as a pure use value away from exchange, others have argued that the housewife worked for the capitalist indirectly. Her labor as well as that of the prostitute reproduced the labor power of the worker. Wages for Housework was a provocation to make visible the labor central to the political economy. Wages against Housework rejected the woman as houseworker. What is most radical may not be the decommodification of housework and all forms of social reproduction but their reorganization outside of a racialized and gendered global division of labor. Even more radical might be rejecting work as the standard for social protection, living wages, or identity. For a transitional demand, living wages (and/or basic income) are a good place to start, but a larger social wage (health care for all, universal programs, free college, adequate resources for the elderly and young, etc.) is a necessity — as the pandemic of 2020 is teaching us.