Non-waged Work Research Articles

Women’s employment exits in Egypt: the roles of marriage, children, job characteristics, and women’s empowerment

ABSTRACT Transition to non-employment is prevalent for women in the Egyptian labor market, particularly those working in the private sector. This paper analyzes women’s labor market transitions, particularly to non-employment and to other labor market states in the time around marriage and childbirth. We test whether individual characteristics, work characteristics, or agency affect women’s transitions. Specifically, the paper answers three main questions: First, what are the explanatory factors for the women’s transition to non-employment? Second, what are the differences between the effect of previous job characteristics and women’s agency on the employment decision? Third, what are the determinants of the transition to other labor market states (multiple employment decisions)? Drawing on panel and retrospective data from the 2012 and 2018 waves of Egypt’s Labor Market Panel Survey, we estimate these relationships using a single risk model and a competing risk model. Results show that marriage and motherhood increase women’s transition to non-employment. The timing of the transition happens at marriage and the year before marriage (anticipation effect). This impact is more considerable for women working in the private sector than the public sector. Women working in non-wage work transition to private wage work in the years before marriage. The results show that the sector of employment plays a crucial role in women’s transition to non-employment. In addition, the availability of external help in the household is considered an important factor that can help retain women in the labor force.

Explaining the MENA Paradox: Rising Educational Attainment, Yet Stagnant Female Labor Force Participation.

Despite rapidly rising female educational attainment and the closing, if not reversal, of the gender gap in education, female labor force participation rates in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region remain low and stagnant. This is a phenomenon that has come to be known as the "MENA paradox". Even if increases in participation are observed, they are typically in the form of rising unemployment rather than employment. We use multinomial logit models estimated, by country, on annual labor force survey data for four MENA countries - Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia - to simulate trends in female participation in different labor market states (public sector, private wage work, non-wage work, unemployment and non-participation) for married and unmarried women and men, of a given educational and age profile. Our results confirm that the decline in the probability of public sector employment for educated women is associated with either an increase in unemployment or a decline in participation. We argue that failure of employment rates to increase in line with women's rapidly rising educational attainment - the so-called MENA paradox -- can be primarily attributed to the change in opportunity structures facing educated women in the MENA region in the 2000s, rather than the supply-side factors traditionally emphasized in the literature to explain low female participation in MENA. We argue that female labor force participation among educated women in four MENA countries - Algeria, Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia -- is constrained by adverse developments in the structure of employment opportunities on the demand side. Specifically, the contraction in public sector employment opportunities has not been made up by a commensurate increase in opportunities in the formal private sector, leading to increases in female unemployment or declines in participation.

Is Land Ownership a Key Factor in the Choice of Livelihood in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam?

Our main objective in this research was to examine the role of land ownership in the choice of household livelihood in the rural Mekong Delta region, Vietnam. Using secondary data on rural households in the Mekong Delta region, we use cluster analysis techniques to classify livelihoods currently adopted by rural households. Using Bonferroni pairwise tests and quantile functions (Pen’s parades), we then compare the income levels of identified livelihoods. Finally, we employ a multinomial logit model to examine different factors affecting the choice of livelihoods. We identify five livelihoods pursued by local households, and found that households engaged in farm work, formal wage-earning work and non-wage work livelihoods obtain higher levels of income than did those whose livelihoods depend on informal wage-earning work or non-labor income sources. We also found that several types of land are positively associated with the choice of high-return livelihoods, implying that lack of access to land is a potential obstacle to adopting a profitable livelihood. Also, we found education plays a major role in the pursuit of remunerative livelihoods, which suggests that better education would allow households to move from low- to high-return livelihoods.

Transiciones en las prácticas de consumo en la sierra norte del estado de Puebla, México.

In this article we document transitions in consumption practices in the Sierra Norte of the state of Puebla in Central Mexico. The disarticulation of coffee production and the reorientation of the local economy toward tertiary activities form the historical context of these changes. New patterns of consumption are associated with the generalization of waged and non-waged work within and outside of the country, individual subsidies for extreme poverty and new forms of debt that have made possible the acquisition of manufactured goods as markers of distinction.

Qu’est-ce que le travail quand on n’a pas d’emploi ?

Ce texte explore les mutations du travail et de l’emploi a partir des experiences des chomeurs. Considerant que leurs projections d’avenir sont recomposees a l’epreuve de la recherche d’emploi, nous traquons ce qu’ils considerent comme du travail accessible. Puis nous centrons l’analyse sur les projections alternatives a la norme salariale, aux frontieres de l’independance et de l’informalite. Nous identifions alors deux logiques contrastees de projections vers ces formes de travail. Elles correspondent a des distributions differentes de ressources biographiques : l’investissement d’une prise de distance avec le salariat et la rationalisation d’une mise a distance du salariat.

More than the “Wife Corps”: Female Tenant Farmer Struggle in 1920s Japan

AbstractStruggles over social reproduction intensified and took on new forms in Japan during the interwar period, as the state found it increasingly difficult to secure the foundations for the continued accumulation of capital. Landlord-tenant disputes that erupted nationwide in the midst of Japan's post-World War I agricultural recession was one concrete manifestation of these struggles. While the significance of tenant disputes has been analyzed in great detail by scholars, there has been a surprising lack of historical scholarship on the role that female tenant farmers played within them. This absence is a manifestation of two tendencies: First, gendered assumptions surrounding the figure of the tenant farmer have led scholars of agrarian social movements to work from a relatively limited understanding of what constitutes struggle and by extension, who its protagonists have been. Second, the conflation of waged work as productive work and by extension, non-waged work as unproductive has unwittingly relegated many forms of struggle that working women participated in to the realm of the pre-political. This paper contends that far from being mere supporters – the wife corps – of what was ultimately a male-driven movement, female participants in tenant disputes produced their own powerful critiques of the way that the Japanese state and capital undervalued their lives and labor. As such, they should be understood as one link in a rich history of proletarian feminist struggle both within and outside of the Japanese empire.

Transformations in Agricultural Non-waged Work: From Kinship to Intern and Volunteer Labor: A Research Brief

What is the relationship between unpaid and non-waged work and the survival, and even growth, of small- and medium-scale farms? This research brief examines this question through examining the growth of internships and volunteer positions (non-waged work) on ecologically oriented farms, with a focus on trends in Ontario, Canada. Through reporting on the qualitative and quantitative findings of our research, we track the decline of family labor throughout the broader agriculture sector and the emergence of new forms of non-waged work on ecological farms. We focus on the continuities and changes at play in shifting forms of farm work and discuss the new forms of knowledge exchange occurring on farms, the precarious economic situation of many farms, and the gendering of non-waged work. We conclude the brief by raising several challenging questions regarding the politics and sustainability of farmers' dependency on interns and volunteers.

Will work for food: agricultural interns, apprentices, volunteers, and the agrarian question

Recently, growing numbers of interns, apprentices, and volunteers are being recruited to work seasonally on ecologically oriented and organic farms across the global north. To date, there has been very little research examining these emergent forms of non-waged work. In this paper, we analyze the relationships between non-waged agricultural work and the economic circumstances of small- to medium-size farms and the non-economic ambitions of farm operators. We do so through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of farmers’ responses to two surveys we conducted of farmers using non-waged workers in Ontario, Canada. We situate our analysis within debates on the agrarian question, which we contend requires an account for both the economic and non-economic dimensions of new forms of non-waged work on farms. We suggest that many ecologically oriented farm operators are struggling financially and report low gross on-farm revenues and personal incomes. We argue that in addition to relying on off-farm incomes and self-exploitation, many farms are managing to persist in a challenging economic climate through their use of intern, apprentice, and volunteer labor. However, we also suggest that the growth of non-waged work on farms is not simply being driven by economic processes but also a series of non-economic relationships focused on non-institutional farmer training, the pursuit of sustainability, and social movement building. We suggest, the “economic” and “non-economic” dimensions of internships, apprenticeships, and forms of volunteerism sit uneasily alongside of one another, generating questions about the politics, ethics, and sustainability of non-waged work and ecological farming.

Sex Segregation in Volunteer Work

Sex segregation in the workplace—the tendency for men and women to work in different occupations and jobs—remains widespread. Domestic chores are also sex-typed, but the extent to which sex segregation is found in other forms of nonwaged work, such as volunteering, is unknown. One theory about the work/nonwork interface predicts a positive relation between the two types of activity: sex segregation will be just as common in unpaid labor. Another theory predicts a negative relation: waged work and nonpaid work are dissimilar. Maximum likelihood probit models with selection are used to estimate the incidence of sex segregation among volunteers in a nationally representative sample of adult Americans (N = 91,807). Men are more likely to occupy leadership positions than women. They are more likely to do maintenance work and teach or coach, while women are more likely to prepare and serve food or clothing, raise money, and “help out” at events. Sex segregation is most pronounced among those who volunteer to help young people, but negligible among volunteers advocating a cause.

Women’s Work: Using U.S. History to Explain Mexican Women’s Differential Work Strategies in Mexico and the United States

Mexican women, particularly married women, living in the United States appear to allocate far more of their time to waged work than do women in Mexico. The fierce debate among social scientists over the sources of American women’s steadily rising labor force participation rates during the twentieth century provides hypotheses that all plausibly explain a part of this phenomenon, including a misapprehension of the phenomenon due to the failure of official sources to recognize nonwaged work, the importance of higher wages for pulling women into employment, the growth of work perceived as “women’s work,” the desire of women to provide for their families new goods that they cannot produce at home, the increasing competition of commodity production with home production, and the impact of different social norms.

Labour's Window on the Global Commons: Non-Wage Work and Feminist Movements in a Changing World

ABSTRACT This study demonstrates that global economic development is not a process of global convergence that brings higher wage export manufacturing jobs to women who used to toil in the fields. This global economic process is not about gradually equalizing wages or offering expanded “opportunities” to a new generation of girls in the semi-periphery and periphery. It is about establishing new forms of inequality and restratifying world labor. The conclusion suggests that women- and community-centered economic relationships may be the only option for survival and development.

Preparing to Understand Feminism in the Twenty-First Century: Global Social Change, Women's Work, and Women's Movements

The history of women's non-wage work, women's wage labor, and contemporary women's movements can be understood with greater clarity if studies of "globalization", feminism, and the capitalist world-economy are examined in relationship to each other. Today many women's movements clearly reflect, respond to, and attempt to shape changes in wage (employer-organized) and non-wage (labor-organized) work relations. This paper is a conceptual, theoretical and historical exploration of how scholars, who study inter-related global areas, can prepare to do research on women's work and women's movements that will contribute to the development of "globalization", feminist, and world-economy scholarship.

Common Wealth: Self-Sufficiency and Work in American Communities, 1830 to 1993

This historical and sociological book makes the argument that, for about 90 years following the rise of steam-powered industry in the US, low- to moderate-income households continued to rely on extensive informal, non-waged work to supplement low wages.

Does women's work improve their nutrition: Evidence from the urban Philippines

Women's market work in developing countries is thought to improve their well-being directly through increased income for health-related purchases and indirectly through elevating women's status within the household. While a number of studies have looked at the effects of women's work and the cost of women's time on child nutrition and welfare, the direct effects of women's work on their own welfare have been largely untested. Using data on 1963 urban Filipino women from the Cebu Longitudinal Health and Nutrition Survey, we examined the relationship between women's work and their dietary intakes of energy, protein, fat, calcium, and iron from home and commercially prepared foods. Determinants equations for home and commercial intakes were estimated simultaneously to adjust for non-independence. Appropriate methods were used to deal with selectivity, endogeneity, and unobserved heterogeneity. Nearly half (48%) of the women worked for pay, and commercially prepared foods made up an important part of working women's diets. Not only did women's work improve the quality of their diets, but there were strong distributional implications; lower-income women gained more than higher-income women. Employment sector also influenced women's dietary patterns. Informal non-wage work was associated with increased intakes, whereas formal sector work was associated with decreased intakes. Positive effects of work in the informal sector were greater for women from low-income households. Policy implications of the dietary benefits of informal non-wage work for low-income women are discussed.

Global Integration and Subsistence Insecurity

Global integration heightens the cyclical crises of capitalism by incorporating the subsistence sectors of advanced and peripheral economies. World trends show a contraction in industrial production; the rise of unemployment, an increase in military spending and decline in social welfare, a reversal of capital flows from developing countries to developed economies, and a worldwide drop in real wages. The impact of these trends on communities in Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States where the author has done fieldwork is assessed in relation to current economic crises and the social movements that respond to them. The author shows that collective action to oppose the devastating effect on subsistence is more prevalent in marginal economies that are just beginning to experience the effect of capital penetration than in the industrial wastelands of developed countries. Theories of the crisis neglect those arenas where resistance and protest are most active: the urban barrios struggling for food and water, the rural laborers forced off of their land base, and the hunters and cultivators of the jungle. Luxemburg's thesis asserting the importance of the subsistence sector in capital accumulation acquires increasing significance at a time when those economies are threatened with extinction. Expanding the notion of subsistence production to include nonwage work allows us to theorize the significance of social reproduction in crisis conditions.

The Gender of Breadwinners: Women, Men, and Change in Two Industrial Towns, 1880-1950.

This is a story of two Ontario towns, Hanover and Paris, that grew in many parallel ways. They were about the same size, and both were primarily one-industry towns. But Hanover was a furniture-manufacturing centre; most of its workers were men, drawn from a community of ethnic German artisans and agriculturalists. In Paris the biggest employer was the textile industry; most of its wage earners were women, assisted in emigration from England by their Canadian employer. Joy Parr considers the impacy of these fundamental differences from a feminist perspective in her study of the towns' industrial, domestic, and community life. She combines interviews of women and men of the towns with analyses of a wide range of documents: records of the firms from which their families worked, newspapers, tax records, paintings, photographs, and government documents. Two surprising and contrasting narratives emerge. The effects of gender identities upon both women's and men's workplace experience and of economic roles upon familial relationships are starkly apparent. Extending through seventy crucial years, these closely textured case studies challenge conventional views about the distinctiveness of gender and class roles. They reconfigure the social and economic change accompanying the rise of industry. They insistently transcend the reflexive dichtomies drawn between womena dn men, public and privae, wage and non-wage work. They investigate industrial structure, technological change, domesticity, militance, and perceptions of personal power and worth, simultaneously as products of gender and class identities, recast through community sensibilities.

Nonwage Work In the Crisis of Capitalism

Nonwage Work In the Crisis of Capitalism