Flexible work, gender and globalised production

Abstract

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.