Women at work: a study of migrant women in a Melbourne auto-parts factory

I have investigated the situation of women factory workers in Indonesia. Here, I am looking at factory in Australia in order to broaden my understanding of gender relations at the industrial labour market. The systemic subordination of women in the industrial labour market through fairly consistent patterns of domination can be observed across many otherwise sharply demarcated boundaries of nationality and culture. These patterns are most frequently found in the labour-intensive sectors of industry, and, regardless of the presence or absence of unions, exist in both industrialised and industrialising countries. The bargaining power of unskilled labour in industrialised countries like Australia can be undermined, as in recent times, by a combination between a slump in the economy of industrialised countries and the willingness of the abundant labour force in industrialising countries to do the same job for much lower wages. Gender and ethnicity, two characteristics that migrant women embody, recur among these patterns of domination as socio-cultural bases whose roots lie in society at large, yet whose existence contributes powerfully to highly effective strategies of labour control in the workplace. Through a dynamic interplay between the forces of patriarchy and capitalist relations of production, migrant women have been manipulated into acceptance of regimes of control which the organised work-force of earlier decades would have contested.