Put together, these factors create a dilemma for these workers: dire need of cash income keeps propelling rural parents, who make a significant portion of the workforce, to come to work at Foxconn; the family’s demand for caring and emotional labor, on the other hand, is pulling workers, especially mothers, back to the family. In the end, many of the workers end up turning this job a seasonal gig.
A long-standing element of the Chinese revolution since the 19th century is the liberation of women, especially from patriarchy, and the related physical bondages and family/social obligations. Naturally, the communists and their allies have always focused on moving women out of the tiresome and disciplining household labor. Chairman Mao [...]
My article in Capital and Class extends Marxist feminist critiques of social reproduction to explain the ways global financialization processes affect social reproduction patterns in the era of neoliberalization (1997-present) in South Korea. I focus on the question of how financialization affects contingent workers' livability.
Variegated social reproduction as a conceptual lens is meant to acknowledge that the unfolding of the contradiction between capital accumulation and the conditions of social reproduction is not uniform but uneven and variegated, involving developments that are sometimes unanticipated.
