Life on the Global Assembly Line (1984)

Summary of “Life on the Global Assembly Line (1984)”

In this article, titled ‘Life on the Global Assembly’, which was published in the MS Magazine (2001), the author Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes have tried to bring forth the social equality in terms of gender. The authors present various examples where women in various parts of the world are being exploited under the name of development. Although, the structural functionalist approach considers gender role as complementary sets which help the society to grow, the authors present various other examples around the world which shows the reality.

The gender approaches have changed a lot during the past sixty years wherein some parts of the world, like the developed countries, the women role has improved but in other parts of the world, like the developing countries women have been exploited. For example, an assembly line female worker working in US may get up to $ 5 a hour, whereas in third world countries, the same work would earn a woman up to $ 5 a day!

Even the governments like those of Malaysia are not ashamed of portrayed the female workers as suitable for doing hard work – to attract companies which want to invest and get the benefits of cheap labor. In fact, UNIDO has been the chief promoter of free trade zones where the maximum exploitation of cheap women labor takes place.

Thus, the social conflict theory which views gender as a structural system of power resulting in grant of privileges to some and denial of rights to others. Often, women are preferred to do the monotonous repetitive work as their temperament is more suitable than young men who are impatient and cannot focus on monotonous forms of work in general.  This, pattern of gender is biological as well as learned. Society has trained females to be more expressive and patient whereas men as trained to be guardian of families. Thus, these social perspectives of gender have helped the male gender to have dominance over the females over the ages.