Abstract
Hitherto, emphasis has been laid on the factors that have influenced the sexual division of labour in the context of proletarianisation. The prominent economic role taken by women has been considered as both reflecting the weak proletarianisation of men and accentuating that lack of commitment. But that does not mean that women have not comprised the major component of the surplus labour population — holding down wage levels in general and contributing to the hierarchical division of the working class, both of which are essential for capitalist industrialisation.
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Notes
D.M. Gordon: Theories of Poverty and Underemployment (Lemington, D.C. Heath, 1972);
H. Braverman: Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York, Monthly Review Press, 1974).
C.D. Long: The Labour Force under Changing Income and Employment (Princeton, NBER, Princeton University Press, 1958), pp. 392–93. This phenomenon also seems to exist in a slightly different form in low-income rural areas. In several African studies it has been observed that in the slack seasons recorded absence from work and attendance at hospitals are relatively high.
J.H. Cleave: African Farmers: Labour Use in the Development of Small-holder Agriculture (New York, Praeger, 1974), p. 191. For a general analysis of the relationships between sickness and malnutrition and labour force participation, see Standing, 1978, op. cit., pp. 89–101.
Interestingly even in highly industrialised countries informal methods of seeking work predominate. Thus in the United States it was found that ‘friends and relatives’ was the most common method of seeking and finding employment. H.L. Sheppard and A.H. Belitsky: The Job Hunt: Job-seeking Behaviour of Unemployed Workers in a Local Economy (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), p. 44.
S. Pinera and M. Selowsky: “Unemployment, labour market segmentation, the opportunity cost of labour and the social returns to education”, Bank Staff Working Paper No.233 (Washington, DC, IBRD, June 1976), p. 7.
R.A. Berry: “Open unemployment as a social problem in urban Colombia: Myth and reality”, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol.23, No.2, January 1975, pp. 276–91.
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© 1981 International Labour Organisation
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Standing, G. (1981). The Female Labour Reserve. In: Unemployment and Female Labour. ILO Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06148-8_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06148-8_7
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