The study uses an eclectic framework and through an intersectional analysis and use of narratives explores the meaning of janitorial work, the gender division of labour (GDL), the unions and organizing for janitors engaged in industrial cleaning for a big cleaning company, Pluto, in Toronto. Pluto was organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in 2006. The study is based on the organizing drive for Pluto and uses participant observation and interview methods. Intersectional analysis is useful in understanding the worker's perceptions of the racialized, gendered and classed constitution of cleaning work as 'dirty' and their resistance to these constructs. We explore GDL in industrial cleaning and the construction of women's work as 'light duty' and men's work as 'heavy duty'. We conclude that union membership is important not only for material benefits of the janitors but also for their alternative identity construction. However, there is a persistence of GDL and gender pay equity is not addressed seriously in the organizing drive or upon organizing.

The article contributes to the epistemological debates in feminism through the analysis of multisited research on jewellery production in India. The multisited research focuses on different localities -Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ), Delhi and villages of Medinipur having direct and indirect links to the global market. It analyses how the multiple sites structured by gender, class and age hierarchies reveal the multiple and fluid standpoints of different actors. The multiple standpoints of different actors feed into discursive practices of a complete exclusion of women from the production process of handmade jewellery in NEPZ, their marginal presence in Delhi, and their invisibility despite preponderance in the villages of Medinipur. These narratives constitute the subjectivity of men as 'breadwinners' and of women as 'housewives'. However, some women contest the discourses around marginalization of their work and present points of break in the configuration of power, questioning their subject position as 'housewives'. Weaving these complex webs of narratives, I am reflexive of my multiple positionality as Indian, non-Bengali, elite, woman and the fluidity of my position as an insider/outsider in the 'field'.

This article traces methodological discussions of a multidisciplinary team of researchers located in universities and community settings in Ontario. The group designed and conducted a research project on the enforcement of labor standards in Ontario, Canada. Discussions of methodological possibilities often began with “nots”—that is, consensus on methodological approaches that the team collectively rejected. Out of these discussions emerged suggestions and approaches through which we navigated dilemmas in research design. The purpose of this article is to illustrate the following: (a) epistemological tensions around mixed methods and the politics of mixing, (b) the attempt to capture the relationships between research and its impact, and, (c) the need to develop interviews which both establish respondents as knowers, and simultaneously focus on that which is unsaid/normalized.

The study uses narrative analysis to understand the workers discursive constructions of their classed, gendered and racialized subjective identities and their investments into the collectivity of the union in the context of the lock-out. It goes beyond the Marxian analysis and uses poststructural feminist analysis to understand how the intersectional subjective identities are constituted and their interrelationship to the investments in and constitution of collectivities in the context of industrial action. The study is based on participant observation and interviews of hotel workers in the food and beverage section of a hotel in Toronto, who were locked-out in 2007, and of other workers on the picket line supporting the locked-out workers. These workers are members of UNITE HERE-Local 75 (Now HERE-Local 75), who had been in the process of renewal of their contracts at the time. I would argue that the intersectional subjectivities of the hotel workers and their investments in the collectivity of the union are fluid and relate to their pursuit of material and/or symbolic security through search for an identity as a unionized, active worker or an identity which is secure irrespective of the union.

Export processing zones (EPZs) are like islands of globalization. Much of the literature on EPZs and export-oriented industries (EOIs) notes a preponderance of women who are constructed as “cheap,” “nimble fingered,” and “docile” labor. This literature is dominated by socialist feminist thinkers, and this paper argues that there is a need to incorporate the insights of postmodern feminist thinkers. The article focuses on the role that language, discourse, and subjectivity play in the gendering process in handmade jewelry production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and in the ranch production units related by common ownership in Delhi, India. It thus gives “voices” to women and men, and brings out their agency in structuring the labor market. The study confirms that gender division of labor is a product of discursive and material practices that are reproduced through discourses into which different actors invest, and that feed into the gendered subjective identities of these actors.Subjectivity, gender division of labor, discourse, export processing, India, JEL Codes: J16, J4, J49,

The paper analyses the discursive construction of the gender division of labour in machinemade jewellery production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ), India. It examines the construction of gendered subjectivities of women and men in investing in the discourses about their work. Men constitute their masculine subjectivities by investing in the discourses around their work in master making, casting, and polishing as 'skilled' and 'tough'. Women's subjectivities are fragmented in that though they invest in the discourses constructing their work in wax and quality control sections as 'light', requiring 'eye for detail' and 'patience', they present disruption to the construction of their work and their identities as 'unskilled'. By challenging their discursive construction as 'unskilled' they negotiate and interrupt the power structures or what Ong (1991: 297) calls 'expand the space of political struggle in their everyday lives'.

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The restructuring of world economies in the 1980s and the 1990s has given rise to debates around globalisation, feminisation and flexibility. In the light of these macroeconomic debates, this article analyses the relationship of feminisation and masculinisation to flexibility in the microeconomic context of jewellery production in the Noida Export Processing Zone (NEPZ) and Delhi. It compares ‘flexibility’ in the handmade jewellery sector, which is largely informal, to machine-made jewellery, which is quasi-formal. Most debates on flexibility focus on the supply side and the removal of ‘institiutional rigidities’ that prevent the functioning of free market forces. These debates focus on the issues of organisational flexibility, labour market flexibility and functional flexibility of the entrepreneur. This study goes beyond the employer–worker dyad to examine ‘flexibility’ for the intermediate actors involved in production. In the handmade jewellery sector in both Delhi and NEPZ, labour market flexibility is occurring with a largely masculinised labour force. In machine-made jewellery, there is a slight feminisation of flexible status but it is not marked. The gendered division of labour, thus, is only a small part of what flexibility constitutes, if at all.