Abstract
At the end of the 1970s, researchers’ and policy-makers’ attention was focused for the first time on how a new female workforce was being created in the course of industrialisation in many developing countries. The emphasis was on a new international division of labour: relocation of production from developed to developing countries, export-oriented world market factories, western-owned multinational corporations, and the massing together of hundreds of young women in export-oriented garment factories and electronics factories (Lim, 1978; Frobel, Heinrichs and Kreye, 1979; Elson and Pearson, 1981). Two dominant themes present in much of the literature were encapsulated in the title of an article published in Signs: ‘Runaway Shops and Female Employment: The Search for Cheap Labor’ (Safa, 1981).
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© 1996 Amrita Chhachhi and Renée Pittin
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Elson, D. (1996). Appraising Recent Developments in the World Market for Nimble Fingers. In: Chhachhi, A., Pittin, R. (eds) Confronting State, Capital and Patriarchy. Institute of Social Studies, The Hague. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-24450-8_2
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