Aportes
THEORETICAL EXPLORATIONS ON THE SPECIFICITY OF WORKING
CLASS WOMEN’S EXPLOITATION
EXPLORACIONES
TEÓRICAS SOBRE LA ESPECIFICIDAD DE LA EXPLOTACIÓN DE LA MUJER TRABAJADORA
Verónica Norando1
[1]
CONICET, UBA, IIEGE, Argentina. Correo electrónico: norandoveronica@gmail.com
Abstract:
As social
scientists we face the difficulty of unraveling the chaos of social relations
as perceived by the naked eye. On the one hand, there seem to be relations of
production; on the other, antagonistic gender relations coexist together, while
we also see ethnic inequalities. While intersectionality studies have advanced
all these topics, in this article I propose a more sophisticated analysis of
Marxism, by compounding relations of production (class) and gender relations,
as they are embedded in real life. Studies on these matters still appear to be
separate, resisting a combined analysis, so I believe that as social scientists
we need to overcome this inertia from an interdisciplinary perspective. In
order to do so I have considered feminist approaches on the subject, a gender
studies perspective, and the social history of work, looking at it through a
constructive critique of Marxism. By analyzing such theories I propose
categories that may unify this array of social relations; I also advance on the
key notion of gendered class; and finally I highlight the need of a
multi-layered analysis. Social studies
of the working class in particular, need to include women worker’s specific
exploitation. My method of analysis is dialectical materialism.
Keywords: Social History of work, Marxism, gender studies,
feminism, gendered class relations.
Resumen:
Todavía nos
cuesta desentrañar el caos de las relaciones sociales como se nos presentan a
simple vista al observarlas como científicos/as sociales. Por un lado, parecen
estar las relaciones de producción, por otro lado, parecen convivir las
relaciones antagónicas de género, aparecen también las desigualdades étnicas.
Se ha avanzado mucho con los estudios de la inerseccionalidad. Lo que voy a
hacer aquí es complejizar el análisis desde el marxismo. En este trabajo me
propongo avanzar, siguiendo con investigaciones previas, en la relación entre
las relaciones de producción (de clase) y de género y cómo están imbricadas en
la realidad concreta. Los estudios sobre estas temáticas todavía suelen estar
escindidos y se resisten a aunarse, es una inercia que a mi criterio debemos
combatir como científicos/as sociales sobre todo desde una perspectiva
interdisciplinaria. Para llevar adelante mi examen he puesto en consideración
los abordajes del feminismo, de los estudios de género y de la historia social
del trabajo haciendo una crítica aguda pero constructiva del marxismo. A través
del análisis de estas teorías propongo categorías para llevar adelante esta
unificación de relaciones sociales, sigo avanzando sobre el concepto
fundamental de clase generizada y demuestro lo
imprescindible de un análisis complejo. Los estudios sociales, sobre todo los
de la clase obrera, deben incluir en su mirada la explotación específica de la
mujer trabajadora. El método que utilizo para llevar adelante el trabajo es el
materialismo dialéctico.
Palabras clave: historia social del trabajo, marxismo, estudios de
género, feminismo, relaciones de clase generizada.
Recibido
en 15/03/2018
Aceptado
en 17/04/2018
Introduction to Analytical Frameworks
In this
article I advance on theoretical issues I have already explored in previous
works (Norando, 2013, 2016, 2018a and 2018b
forthcoming). There I have explored how gender relations and relations of
production (class) have been studied as differentiated fields for a long time,
each reaching one-sided conclusions on class and gender inequalities. Here I
propose a unifying perspective that includes intersectionalities
(Kimberlée Crenshaw, 1989) of social relations, as
they are actually combined in reality. When we speak of class and gender
relations we can only understand them as a unified phenomenon in real life.
Thus, when we speak of women exploited by patriarchal capitalism, we need to go
beyond intersectionality, and consider instead the notion of union—the union of
class and gender relations. I do not mean to ignore studies that have advanced
the concept of intersection, but rather I propose to compound them when we
consider one aspect of it: the exploitation of women workers. Our main
challenge is in understanding how intersection works, what is the structure
that supports the interplay of specific social relations that have been
analytically separated. Therefore, the main goal in this work is to describe my
conclusions (so far), and develop a hypothesis on how that structure works.
These debates did not surface in Argentina until the
1980s, after the demise of the 1976-1983 dictatorship responsible for the exile
of thousands of intellectuals and the disappearance of many more, which
effectively prevented intellectual development in Argentina during that ominous
era. However, once exiled Argentine scholars returned with the new democracy,
they brought with them these discussions. The pioneer works of Mabel Bellucci and Cristina
Camusso already integrated class and gender relations associated to debates on
domestic work.[1] Even
so, they were rather isolated articles, while other studies began to look at
women’s experience at work as part of class-gender relations.
Such debates took place while Marxism was in the process of renovating itself,
leaving behind deeply embedded Stalinist determinisms. In the aftermath of the
dictatorship debates and historiographical advances took into account the
experience of male and female workers from a gendered perspective, related with
different aspects, such as left cultures, the relationship with the State, the
labor market, etc. (Barrancos, 1990; Lobato, 2001)
We are making theoretical advances on the subject, picking up on the
debates that were left unfinished in the 1980s.
My own interest in formulating more clearly a concept that allows us to
understand the complexity of these social relations, stems from my doctoral and
postdoctoral degrees, where I have been focusing on the class experiences of
the working class community in the textile industry of Buenos Aires between the
two World Wars, as well as my present research on the work process in the
textile industry. My ideas have been informed by Marxism (Marx, 2010; Bráverman, 1981, among others), radical feminism (Delphy, 1977; Firestone, 1970, etc.), socialist feminism
(Mitchell 1971; Hartmann 1980; Eisenstein 1978, etc.), US social history, or New Labor History (Weinstein, 2000,
among others), English social history or British Marxism (Thompson, 1989; Hobsbawm, 1985; Hill, 1985; Thompson D. 2013), Argentine
labor history (Barrancos, 1990; Iñigo
Carrera, 2000; Lobato, 2001; Camarero,
2007; Andújar, 2016), and the work of present day
feminist intellectuals such as Silvia Federeici
(2010). In sum, I propose that the sexual division of labor (that assigns women
to domestic work) is the greatest catalyst in the increase of capital’s surplus
value and overall profit because it increases capital’s production capacity.
This is the root of the specific exploitation of women workers, and how the
complex structure of gender and class relations works. I will develop in depth
this notion in the following pages, analyzing the mechanism that makes women
workers do domestic work and thus turns them into the major producers of
surplus value. I will explore how free work combines with wage work in such a
way that women become the largest surplus producers in a capitalist economy.
Marxist theory provides a good framework for this analysis, although I
am quite critical of what is known as vulgar Marxism. I do agree with him that
as intellectuals we are, in fact, the product of class struggle, and women’s
struggles throughout the twentieth century also changed the course of much
scholarship. What is true is that women’s struggles and class struggles have
advanced gender studies, and not the other way around. And women’s struggles
had not yet taken place in Marx’s time. However, I disagree with the feminist
reproach to Marxist theory. I agree with Zillah Eisenstein (1980) in that the
relevance of a Marxist analysis for the study of women’s exploitation is
two-folded. First because it contributes the necessary class analysis for the
study of power and exploitation; and second, because it provides a historical
and dialectical method of analysis. Angela Davis has also highlighted the
relevance of a materialist analysis to sex-gender relations, meaning that we
cannot do away with class (nor race) differences in the analysis of
contemporary societies. (Davis, 1981) In cue with this perspective, I argue
that the patriarchal capitalist society is organized around a certain mode of
production of material life (Marx, 2010), although these determinations are not
only productive, they are reproductive as well.
Therefore, my theoretical and conceptual work is a critique of the
so-called economistic or deterministic Marxism that has ignored such a
fundamental issue as the sexual division of labor, which in my view and in
light of the advances of the twentieth century, is the key to capitalist
exploitation. They also do not include secondary though relevant topics such as
gender conditioning and normative. This work is also a critique of feminist
perspectives and gender studies that ignore class determinations and the
importance of relations of production. Thus, advancing on previous works where
I have argued that it is essential to come up with a theory that combines class
and gender relations, in which patriarchy and capitalism are considered as one
system and not two separate entities that work together, I intend to look into
this in more detail. (Norando 2018a and 2018b,
forthcoming)
I believe that this will enhance the understanding of social and human
sciences as regards social relations in history. I particularly seek to
understand the specific exploitation of women in the development of
contemporary society in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.
Empirical analyses on actual, circumscribed, case studies are improved if they
are done in light of a theory that allows them to build around the complexity
of social relations, where the accent is not just on gender relations, or only
relations of production. As I conclude in other works, these two elements are
part of the same social relation that could be called gendered social relations
(at least until all social scientists have internalized the fact that social
relations are gendered). In the
following sections I will look at working class women domestic and wage work,
on the one hand; and on the other, I will outlined the theoretical tools I have
been developing on how to identify the specific exploitation of women workers
in patriarchal capitalism. I will also substantiate my theoretical explorations
and conceptualize key guidelines to understand the specific exploitation of
women workers, who in my view are the ones that carry on their shoulders the
weight of society at large. And not just that, but they are also the major
producers of surplus value in patriarchal capitalism.
Domestic Work and Wage Work: the Labor of a Working
Class Woman
One of the
fundamental material pillars of the patriarchal capitalist system is domestic
work. (Norando, 2018a) The capitalist mode of
production regulates contemporary society, where the latter is structured in
two basic social classes, the bourgeoisie and those who work for a wage.
In this section I will analyze these two aspects: women working outside
and inside their homes, that is, wage work (as might describe it as pertaining
to the sphere of class relations), and domestic work (perceived as pertaining
to the sphere of gender relations). I will look at working class women as
defined, women who are paid wages that are not enough to pay for another
woman’s domestic work and thus have to perform that job themselves, once their
wage work outside the home is done. I will describe and analyze these two jobs
performed by working class women, their working conditions, circumstances,
social mandates, cultural imperatives, but above all the economic and
sex-gendered determinations that define them.
“Housewife”
was the central female role in the Western world in the interwar period,
1918-1939. All women are housewives; even those who work outside their homes
are still considered as such, because domestic work is what defines women’s
place anywhere she is. Women workers are born to do domestic and caretaking
work, besides their jobs outside the home. And although there is of course a
large group of women that are able to avoid wage work, they do not manage to
escape domestic work. I will describe each group in detail and their specific form
of exploitation.
As defined in patriarchal capitalist
society, domestic work is “not work;” it is not considered valid work by
capital because it does not produce actual goods for the market, thus it lacks
exchange value. (Artous, 1982; Seccombe,
1974, among others) Instead, domestic work is supposed to produce use values
that, when consumed by people, in turn produces a commodity—labor power.
However, although the latter is true, it does not mean that domestic work does
not produce for the market, or that it lacks exchange value. If we think about
it in this way, it does generate value by producing services that later
contribute to the reproduction and production of labor power, even if it is
done privately and in secluded conditions. (Rowbotham,
1977) These authors argued that this kind of work does not exist on a social
level, because there is no contract that negotiates the conditions between two
parties. Women do it out of inertia, because cultural “nature” and patriarchal
education dictate it. But although this is true, it does not imply that it is
not actual work in a social sense.
Domestic work shares the features of social work: it is rather a
private, personal service that women perform in their homes, although their
motivations are not economic or professional (working for money or advancing in
a profession). Rather, these motivations should be sought outside the job: to
lend a service to her husband and children, to take care of others, to devote
herself to them. (Artous, 1982) “This is why housewives
do not reach fulfillment in their work, because the work is in itself secondary
vis-à-vis the main role that allows her to assume such services. A housewife
becomes one through the service rendered to husband and children. In other
works, she lacks the sense of fulfillment of a personal destiny.” (Artous, 1982)
However, I will argue that domestic work is quite compatible with the
theory of exchange value, although it might be characterized as having residual
pre-capitalist features. But it can be quantified, measured, calculated, and it
is socially necessary (as I shall prove in numbers with present-day examples).
It is actually work that has become a labor power that can be sold and bought,
with domestic workers and monthly and hourly wages, except that the great
majority of women do it for free and almost in slave conditions. This work is
also expropriated by capital, as any other pre-capitalist work adjusted by the
capitalist mode of production, such as clandestine textile workshops (with
slave work), or women-trafficking, also based on slave work. This work
performed by women is also subject to the extraction of surplus value, in which
gender difference plays a key role, and where pre-capitalist conditions make it
difficult to perceive the mechanisms of exploitation.
In order to analyze the relationship between working class women and
“housewives,” the notion of “care economy” has been very useful. This notion
has a relatively recent use to refer to a rather undefined space of goods,
services, relations, and values related to basic needs, that are relevant for
the existence and reproduction of people (Esquivel, 2011). The term “care”
indicates that the good or service provided “nurtures” other people, in the
sense that it provides physical and symbolic elements that allow them to
survive in society. As Corina Rodríguez Enríquez
argues, associating the notion of care to the notion of economy implies
focusing on those aspects of these spaces that create, or contribute to create
economic value. According to her, “the existence of a care economy is essential
for the creation of economic value and the actual survival of the mode of
accumulation.” In sum, domestic work consists in producing a set of use-goods
and services with which women nurture their relatives. With this work, women
contribute in fundamental ways to the reproduction of the patriarchal
capitalist system, and entirely for free. Here I argue that domestic work is
also the catalyst for the increase in productivity, a fact I will analyze in detail
below.
Working class women’s paid work hours are usually long, as extenuating
as their domestic workday, and underpaid when compared to either equal or
better tasks (Norando, 2013, 2011, 2017, 2018) vis-à-vis men. My case studies for working class women
in the Argentine textile industry in the interwar era show wage differentials
that vary between 60% to 80%, being that women textile
workers’ jobs were more qualified than men’s. I have proven that a
skilled female textile worker earned 80% less than a day laborer in some
factories. (Norando, 2013) But these are not isolated
cases. Lavrin (2005) has carried out studies for
Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina where she arrives at the same conclusions.
In the Buenos Aires textile mills during that time, women workers were
distributed by employers in strategic positions on account of their sex, in
order to earn more profits, that is, the work process was based on gender
differences (Norando, 2018a), in order to pay women
less. For example, between 1918 and 1939, Argentine textile employers deployed
a series of strategies to increase work productivity based exclusively on
gender differences: they hired women massively using the full capacity already
in place, that is, they did not invest in machinery, but rather in labor, as
well as “management technologies.” This meant that they used new knowledge
about the scientific organization of work in order to increase women workers’
performance,[2]
something that was replicated in many other sectors, such as telephone operators.[3]
These technologies were based on the idea of increasing the pace of work,
measuring production times, increasing the number of machines per female
workers, lowering wages, etc. And they did not just affect women’s wages, but
rather textile workers’ wages in general.
Women’s wage work is blatantly reduced because that is not her “natural”
place. Thus, she enters production from her own place as domestic worker, which
turns her into an undervalued worker, more exposed to low wages, “feminized”
jobs, subject to the trials of unemployment even more than men, and massively
inserted in so-called “feminine” jobs because “having left their ‘natural’
sphere, women were not going to be treated as ‘full right’ wage worker.”
(Davis, 1981: 227) According to Davis, the price women pay includes long
working hours, working conditions beneath normal standards, and highly
insufficient wages. And needless to say, lower than men’s wages. This shows
that women are proletarianized as women, that is, in a specific gendered way. Some Marxists have
noted this and stated that women worked in systematically under-skilled trades.
But they perceived it as a vestige of the inequality inherited from
pre-capitalist societies rather than a direct product of the situation that
bourgeois society places women in. However, we have proven that this condition
continues after two centuries and is quite systematic. Thus, it cannot be
explained by the simple survival of inequalities prior to capitalism. Or maybe
it is so, but in that survival there is something that adjusted itself and
changed: its roots are embedded in the actual workings of the capitalist system
that proletarianizes women as a distinct group
vis-à-vis men.
According to Antoine Artous, although Engels
rightly notices that the proletarianization of women
is defined by the role they occupy in the family, he views it just in the sense
that proletarianization takes place “under such
conditions that if a woman fulfills her duties in the private service of the
family, she is excluded from social production and cannot earn anything; and on
the other hand, if she wants to participate in the public industry and earn
something on her own, it is impossible for her to fulfill her familial duties.”
(Artous, 1982) But Artous
emphasizes that this is only one aspect of the problem. When a woman is proletarianized what defines her is not that she has to
choose between staying at the private service of the family and seeking
employment that includes her in social production. The definitive point is that
a woman worker that spends her time outside the home is at once a proletariat
and a woman, meaning she not only works in the factory —or in any other sector—
and in her home, but also that the way in which she participates in social
production is predefined by her sex, on the one hand, and by the gender roles
imposed by capitalist patriarchy, on the other. (Artous,
1982)
A good example of this particular way to enter the labor market for
women workers is how their wages are perceived by society, and how employers
take advantage of that to lower them:
Women textile workers’ labor power is so undervalued,
that thousands of women workers who leave their homes every day to share with
men the more diverse and complex tasks of the factory, receive in exchange
wages that in some cases are up to 60% less than those of men (…) What was the employers argument? Women worked to spend it in
make-up, so they should not earn more than 2 or 3 pesos per day.[4]
If
employers could justify the fact that women workers
wages were 60% lower than men’s because they used their salary to buy
“make-up,” there is a society that “believes” the same and abides it. In fact,
there were strikes at the turn of the twentieth century in Argentina to kick
women out of the labor market (Nari, 1994), aside
from many debates between anarchists and socialists about the convenience of
women working or not. Many times these arguments stemmed from the idea that
women’s work reduced the wages of all workers. There are many more aspects to
analyze as regards gender representations, but that would take us to a
different discussion. What matters is that employers justify their actions in
that women spend their wages in trivial expenses, precisely because she is a
woman, who is already trivialized on a social level.
I will advance now some preliminary ideas that attempt to build up a
theory of the specific exploitation of men and women (although in this research
I have not yet delved in depth on the case of men). In the case of women,
domestic work is part of their patriarchal capitalist exploitation, as we will
see below.
Neither
Oppression nor Double Exploitation: Working Class Women’s Specific Exploitation
in Patriarchal Capitalism
Although
briefly, I have already described the theories as regards the relationship
between capitalism and patriarchy, oppression and exploitation, class and
gender, that have been debated from the 1960s into the late 1980s in
particular.
My own standpoint as regards these debates is still in the stage of an
exploration and I submit it here as a work-in-progress so that other
researchers might contribute their critiques in order to shape a theoretical
framework of patriarchal capitalist exploitation that transcends intersectionalities —which actually exist— and focuses on
the specific unions that buttress exploitation. I believe that capitalism and
patriarchy are part of the same mode of production; they are one system in
which capitalism adjusted patriarchy to its convenience. And although domestic
work is pre-capitalist work, it increases surplus value directly, not
indirectly, as I will explain in this section. Therefore, capitalism and
patriarchy form one system of exploitation that I call patriarchal capitalism.
My hypothesis is that in patriarchal capitalism, domestic work plays the
central role and that it produces value and surplus value. I believe that what
brought confusion among scholars is that domestic work appears to be
pre-capitalist labor. Although domestic work produces use value —which in
Marxist terms would mean that it cannot transcend the fact that it is concrete
work and thus become human labor—, in the abstract social sense of the word,
what capitalist society considers “work,” it
does fall under the rules that govern the capitalist mode of production
(contrary to the postulates of socialist feminism, especially Artous, 1982). As I understand the theory of value,
“[Labor], as any other commodity, already had a value before it was thrown into
circulation, since in order to produce it, a definite amount of social work was
needed.” (Marx, 2010: 209), domestic work defines something as important as the
value of labor power: “the value of labor power is the value of the means of
subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner. Thus, it also varies
with the value of the means of subsistence, with the amount of work required
for their production.” (Marx, 2010: 209) What Marx failed to see is that the
means of subsistence are largely worked within the home, through the domestic
work of working women.
One of my central hypotheses is that this is one of the major
contradictions of the entire patriarchal capitalist social system as regards
dialectical materialism: domestic work is labor that is governed by
pre-capitalist rules, but it is one of the most profitable works in the system,
the one that renders more surplus value directly. And not just by reproducing
the labor power, as I will elaborate later. As Marx describes it very well,
modes of production maintain labor formats of previous modes of production and
adjust them. I believe that there is no work in the capitalist mode of
production that does not create surplus value, either directly or indirectly,
although maybe in some cases it is more difficult to grasp how the mechanism of
a specific exploitation that creates such surplus value works. The notion of
intersectionality brings us closer, but it is time to go beyond it and focus
where intersectionalities fit together and merge as
one.
I will refer now to women workers. Although the literature speaks of
double exploitation, or oppression and exploitation, I strongly disagree. As I
see it, both notions are wrong because they divide women’s labor power in two, an impossible feat. Labor power is one,
it is working women’s labor power and it is by putting it at work that they
receive a wage. A woman worker appears to have two workdays, but this is not
her reality. As I see it, she has a very long workday and what is important
here is what she does with her labor
power: this is what matters to capital, how she is paid and how much.
Wage represents the value of the labor power measured in a particular,
historical time (Marx, 2010). But this notion bears an explanation, and more so
in the case of working women. In his writings, Marx did not delve on what I
understand is one of the foundations of capitalist exploitation —women’s free
work— (Federicci, 2010). This is one of my strongest
critiques, even if I agree with a large part of his arguments regarding value
theory and dialectical materialism as a method. But we cannot emphasize enough
that a large part of a woman’s workday is not compensated at all, and that
women’s (free) work is one of the foundations on which the entire capitalist
exploitation is based on (Federicci, 2010).
Women workers are forced to sell the only thing they own to satisfy
their needs: their labor power, since they lack the ownership of the means of
production. Capitalists are not interested in a woman’s work or in her as a women, but in her capacity as a human being to work;
this is what they buy/hire as capitalists-women’s labor power to create profit.
Thus, human needs force working women to work, and the means of existence that
she acquires for her subsistence have a value; therefore the value of labor
power is defined by the cost of the means needed to sustain the life of
(male/female) workers,[5] as
well as by the value of the unpaid domestic work that women do. The monetary
value of labor power is the price of the labor power, which is always much
lower than what it really takes to pay for their subsistence, because it rests
upon the free work women do that generates most of the subsistence goods for
workers at large.
Women workers spend one shift of their workday in any sector of the
labor market (let us consider an 8 hour workday, using contemporary data). Then
they go home and do the house chores. An estimate of the number of hours that
working women devote to domestic work puts it around fifty hours a week[6] (Girar, 1968), whereas other studies in Argentina (Rodríguez
Enríquez, 2013) show that working women[7]
occupy 44.8 hours per week to unpaid domestic work. As we can see, just a small
difference despite the time passed between the two studies. We also have
estimates for Argentina of the average social time devoted to housework: 5.7
hours per day (INDEC, 2013). The monetary values of this work have also been
estimated: in Peru a national survey showed that the unpaid domestic work done
by Peruvian women is worth USD $31,121,000 millions of dollars per year, or
$101,621,000 millions of Peruvian soles (ENUT, 2010).
Unfortunately I do not have precise data for the interwar period,
although I can estimate some variables. Women textile workers spent 10 hours in
the factory; the time estimated for actual domestic work is 7 hours per day.
Thus, Argentine women textile workers had a 17 hour workday divided as follows:
10 hour paid work, and 7 hours of free work per day. Based on women’s labor
power as my category of analysis, for this long workday only divided by space,
between 1918 and 1939 women textile workers in Argentina received wages that
according to official sources went from AR $1.80 to AR $4 pesos per day;[8]
organized labor places that on an average of AR $2 pesos per day.[9] I
would like to reflect this in clear numbers in order to better understand the
conditions of women textile workers. The National Department of Labor (DNT)
published its cost of living statistics for April 1936 (Norando,
2013; Norando-Wertheimer Becich,
2018; and Norando 2018a forthcoming). According to
this agency, the budget of a working class family (two parents and three
children under 14) was AR $133.89 pesos to cover basic expenses. The average
wage for the “Head of Household” (in the survey referring to a male) was AR $120,
that is AR $4 pesos per day. According to all sources —organized labor spoke of
AR $57 monthly; or an average of AR $78.3 according to official sources— based
on an average of 27 workdays since Saturdays were workdays, women workers’
wages were still way below the cost of living acknowledged by the National
Department of Labor: AR $133.89 pesos. This meant that neither men nor women
were able to cover the cost of living expenses, so I argue that this was
possible because of women’s unpaid domestic work, though not just by itself but
due to its specific exploitation mechanism for women. Even so, “domestic work
creates a large amount of socially necessary production that nevertheless is
not considered actual work” (Rowbotham, 1977; Artous, 1982).
Taking all this into account, for their extended workday —that allowed
for Argentine textile wages to be extremely low, more so in the case of women
since they were always paid less than men (as shown in previous case studies)—
women textile workers were paid a ridiculous wage:
Women Textile Workers Workday in 1938: Wages
& Surplus Value
Wages 4hours |
Surplus Value for paid work and unpaid domestic work 13 hours. |
17 hour workday |
It goes
without saying that working women’s wages have never been enough to subsist.
Actually these wages conceal an amount of free work that allows women (and men)
to make ends meet. In other others, their low wages conceal a non-wage, or a
wage that remains unpaid for a work actually performed that is fundamental to
capitalist exploitation. That is precisely why it can remain unpaid. Thus, in
patriarchal capitalism, wages conceal
(women’s) free work, which allows the total wages of the entire working class
to be increasingly lower. This is possible because there are increasingly more
women entering the labor market in all sectors and more so in those that are
paid the worst, therefore, women’s workday is increasingly longer. This fosters
an increased reduction in wages because domestic work still exists in the same
proportion that women enter the labor market: it is a wheel that progressively
increases production, surplus value, and capital profits.
The domestic work of working class women who do not work outside the
home is done in a more relaxed manner and is better distributed throughout the
week: for instance, she might not work on weekends, or she may choose not to do
it. But although she works fewer hours, she still does her job with her
husband’s wage, which is not enough to pay for domestic work. Thus, all working
class women are the ones who do the domestic work that constantly increases
surplus value in general, regardless of the fact that there is not a work
contract between them and capital. Women who work outside the home fare the
worst, because they have a longer workday and capitalists appropriate directly
from their domestic work. Women who do not work outside their home have a
shorter workday and the capitalists for whom their husbands work appropriate
their labor through the wages paid to them. In sum, all working class wages
conceal a non-wage for a workday or part of a workday that goes unpaid and
still increases surplus value.
Domestic work is never-ending, and there are
increasingly more workdays that conceal a non-wage. This is clearly a gendered
class problem, so we need to keep on discussing these ideas on a theoretical
level: I argue that all domestic work in society rests on working class women
for the minimum wage. It is women workers who must perform it, since their
income does not allow them to pay for it, aside from the fact that many of them
are also “domestic workers”, meaning that they do it for a wage. Let us not forget
that this is one of the worst paid jobs and among the most undervalued because
domestic work is perceived by society at large, and even by women, as no actual
work. Thus, the domestic work that sustains and reproduces society, and
increases capital surplus value rests solely on working class women, and not all
women in general, because there is a clear gendered class difference. Domestic
work is not “tout court”, even if bourgeois women supervise it,
the big difference is that they do not carry it on their shoulders.
The fact that the social workday is longer with the
same amount of domestic work multiplying global profits is a key factor in the
increase of productivity in capitalist development that was overlooked by Marx.
The profit rate rises because the workday is longer, and as time passes, less
is paid for it. I am not arguing that this is the only factor that contributes
to the expansion of surplus value, but I am convinced that it is a key
mechanism that deserves studying and assessment. My own observations point to
the fact that it is actually one of the basic factors: for instance in Peru,
domestic work assessments show that it amounts to 25% of the GDP (ENUT, 2010)
As regards the use value of labor power —which is the
skill that any (male/ female) worker has to create a value greater than their
labor power during the work process— in the case of women textile workers in my
case study, is even higher since it is the combination of what they produce at
the factory and in the home. This characteristic of female labor power is
precisely creating (female) surplus value and use value. Since it is part of
the same workday and the same workforce, it is the same surplus value and thus
a direct one. This brings us to the core of previous debates, that domestic
work creates direct surplus value, because it is work performed by the a
(female) person, with her labor power, in the same workday and for a salary.
Thus it is not created indirectly, as Sercombe argued (1974).
Capitalists benefit precisely from this set of surplus
value provided by women, because through it the general surplus value is much
higher than the one extracted from male workers. Therefore, this is the basis
for the specific exploitation of working women, who work an entire workday —in
which part of that work is performed in the public sphere and another part in
the domestic sphere— for a very low salary, for unusually extended hours, and
whose work in turn contributes to the subsistence of society at large. In the
case of women who do not work outside the home and just do domestic work, they
receive just a tiny portion of their husbands’ wage. So, I argue that in the
case of working class women, their wages conceal
a non-wage that accounts for their extended workday.
As soon as working class women have to sell their labor power to the
capitalist, or when they have to do domestic work for free, once their work is
in action it immediately ceases to belong to them and is appropriated by the
employer/capitalist, even if there is no contract mediating with a capitalist
from any sector. I have analyzed the textile case because textiles employers
have taken advantage of working class women’s domestic work paying them (and
men) less. Thus it is not necessary for them to “sell” their domestic work with
a contract in order for capitalists to appropriate it. Since the latter are the
owners of (male /female) workers’ labor power, they also own the
goods/merchandise/values/services produced during the workday. This is why it
is not individual “men” who exploit women and why there is no thing such as a
class of exploited women,[10]
but rather a specific exploitation of women by capital. Women’s work at home is
expropriated by capital. [11]
What we need to understand is that capitalism is
patriarchal and as such the system exploits men and women in specific ways,
because it develops gender differences based on class-based sexual differences.
These inequalities are used by capital to increase its profits. What I am
describing here is women’s specific form of exploitation. Capital exploits
women directly, and this exploitation is two-folded, not just the direct
appropriation of surplus value from her work outside the home. It is not done
through men, because it is women’s labor power that is at stake, not where she
performs it, either in the public or private spheres. Capital does not care if
women are doing their work at home, even if there are domestic workers working
in private homes and even if there is a contract it is a just detail. For
capital it is a detail: slave workers in today’s textiles industry have no
contracts and this work anyway generates surplus value, in the same way that
domestic work does.
Working women’s workday is one, because a woman’s
labor power is one; it may be divided by a trip from factory to home, but the
trip is part of her work and she always works for patriarchal capital. One part
of a woman’s workday is mediated by the market and there is (sometimes) a
contract and a wage; the other part of the workday is invisibilized,
there is no actual contract, no wage, it does not exist in the eyes of society
and even in her own eyes. It is totally naturalized that women must do domestic
work, not just working class women, but all women; the only difference is that
some are qualified to earn a salary that allows them to pay another women to do
it for them so they can avoid domestic work (though never entirely, since they
have to become employers of domestic work). This is the state of my research
today, small advances that need to go still a long way and that will only
produce meaningful results as long as it remains a collective endeavor.
Closing Remarks and New Openings
All the
questions that led me backwards in time, and further the debates between
Marxism, radical feminism, socialist feminism, and vulgar Marxism among others,
were prompted by the first question in my doctoral dissertation: what were the
experiences of women textile workers in Argentina in the inter-war era like?
After finishing my degree and starting my post-doctoral research, I still have
many doubts and unanswered questions.
I believe that to continue empirical and theoretical studies of how
exploitation mechanisms work in contemporary society form a dialectical
materialism and gender studies standpoint is a fundamental task for us
scholars. What goes on in other industrial sectors, where the workforce is not
largely female? What about men’s specific exploitation? How are these
specificities, which are actually just one, combined? We need to compound
ethnic intersectionalities and relate them to
gendered class exploitation to see where they join and become one, since I
would not argue that African, Latin America, and Asian working class women are
in the same position as a (white) American woman worker. We need to study it,
but analyzing the union where capital acts upon these inequalities in order to
extract increasingly more surplus value. We need to relate it with the
international division of labor and get into the specific fabric of patriarchal
capitalist exploitation that combines old and new methodologies of
exploitation. What is sure, at least
from my conclusions so far, is that one of the foundations
of the increase of surplus value at large lies in women’s specific
exploitation. We may find particular degrees of that phenomenon, related to
specific intersectionalities associated to ethnicity,
geographical position vis-à-vis the international division of labor, and
others.
There is a need to expand the research to many more case studies in
order to delve deeply on these matters. As yet, the gendering of society is not
rooted in intellectual consciousness and this becomes a serious problem,
because social scientists see socio-historical realities through patriarchal
lenses that prevent them to perceive how exploitation works today and how it
has worked in the past.
Scholars need to carry out specific studies, from different regions,
work sectors, etc., as well as theorize on how the system adjusts
pre-capitalist work and turns it into surplus value without changing its shape.
If we looked at slave work, for instance: does women-trafficking not create
surplus value? Do enslaved immigrants working in clandestine workshops do not
create surplus value? Is this a type of work whose characteristics are fully
capitalist? Are there work contracts mediating these work relations? What role
do gender differences play? What about prostitution? In every kind of work
considered as pre-capitalist, where there are no labor contracts, no wage
relationships, and that takes place outside the labor market, gender
differences play a very important role —that of increasing surplus value—. This
is my intuition, prompted by my observations in the case studies I analyzed. I
am now studying the work process in the textile industry and I am able to state
that it was based entirely on gender differences. (Norando,
2018)
If we want to analyze how the patriarchal capitalist system works, we
need to build a solid reference framework on a theoretical conceptual level
that does not disregard very valuable theories, such as Marxism and feminism,
because they have provided us with the most precious tools we have to
understand our societies. But we cannot do this alone; we need a collective and
interdisciplinary effort. There is a lot of work to do and we are still at the
beginning. Argentine scholars of the social history of work have already
started although there is a long way to go yet. We have endless questions and
countless paths opened: I sincerely hope that many more will walk with us in
this journey.
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[1]
Dora Barrancos
directed Mabel Bellucci and Cristina Camusso’s
project “Class and Gender Articulation in Anarchist Women’s Struggles”,
CONICET, 1987-1989. See
also, Bellucci, Mabel and Camusso,
Cristina: “La huelga de inquilinos de 1907- El papel de las mujeres
anarquistas”, Cuadernos CICSO, N.58, Buenos Aires, 1987, and Bellucci,
Mabel, “Tensiones entre la reproducción social y la producción: Estudio de caso
de las mujeres gráficas de Buenos Aires” (1890-1914), II Jornadas de
Historia de las Mujeres, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, UBA, 1992.
[2] More on this topic in Norando, Verónica, 2018
forthcoming.
[3]
Barrancos, Dora (1997): “La puñalada de Amelia (o cómo se extinguió la
discriminación de las mujeres casadas del servicio telefónico)”, CEIL-CONICET. Mimeo. Barrancos, Dora (1998): “¿Mujeres comunicadas? Las
trabajadoras telefónicas en las décadas de 1930-1940”, in Garrido, Hilda
Beatriz/ Bravo, María Celia (Eds.), Temas
de Mujeres. Perspectivas de Género. IV Jornadas de Historia de las Mujeres y
Estudios del Género. Tucumán: CEHIM, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,
Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, pp. 443-457.
Barrancos, Dora (1999): “Moral sexual, sexualidad y mujeres trabajadoras
en el período de entreguerras,” in Devoto, Fernando/ Madero, Marta (Dirs.), Historia de
la vida privada en la Argentina. La argentina entre multitudes y soledades. De
los años treinta a la actualidad. Buenos Aires, Taurus, pp. 198-225.
Barrancos, Dora (2000): "Vida íntima, escándalo público: las telefonistas
en las Décadas 1930 y 1940," in Mujeres
en escena. Actas de las Quintas Jornadas de Historia de las Mujeres y Estudios
de Género. Santa Rosa, Instituto Interdisciplinario de Estudios de la
Mujer, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas, Universidad Nacional de La Pampa, pp.
487-493.
[4]
EOT, March 1941,
Year VII, N. 39, p. 5.
[5]
More on
theoretical advances in Norando
(2018), forthcoming.
[6]
No specification of
industries or services.
[7]
No specification of
industries or services.
[8]
The DNT explains that it is
not “stating that the budget composition satisfies the needs of the type of
family under consideration, but rather it reflects the real situation of
workers that live under the indicated wage conditions, in such families”. DNT,
Boletín informativo, May/June 1936, Year XVIII, N.
196-197, Época VI, p. 40608.
[9]
EOT, July 1939, Year VI, N. 27, p. 4.
[10]
As stated by Christine Delphy (1985).
[11]
I am deeply grateful to my
discussions with Dr. Andrea Andújar who helped me
organize my writings and ideas on the subject.