Abstract
The examination of the inter-scalar relationships and the day-to-day realities of economic globalization in São Paulo reveals that much of the literature dealing with economic globalization and the labor market, the “informal” sector, and women and development basically offer theories of exclusion. This concluding chapter offers a discussion on the author’s argument that the inhabitants of the three communities she studied, as well as the street vendors of São Paulo and the Bolivian sweatshop workers she has discussed in the book, are not excluded from the global economic system. However, she argues that they are largely excluded from the profits and wealth that they produce for the owners of capital and the global economy. This chapter also builds upon the work of Janice Perlman on Rio de Janeiro comparing and contrasting the theories of marginality and exclusion. The chapter ends by arguing that the role of women in the economy needs to be analyzed along three inclusion/exclusion continua: specifically the use of women workers to gain more profits and the exclusion of women from the profits but also the exclusion of women in the discussion about economic globalization.
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Notes
- 1.
Caldeira (2001) argued that the reason for these gates in low-income communities was to express higher social class than their neighbors. However, it may also be for security because many of the research participants had been robbed by hoodlums from neighboring communities.
- 2.
Although, as Portes (1977) and others argued, Perlman’s study of the 1960s failed to acknowledge theories of poverty that already had critiqued the culture of poverty, I would argue that Perlman’s critique of marginalization was crucial for the reexamination of the contribution of low-income workers to the urban economy.
- 3.
This is a concept that in some ways breaks away from blaming the poor, but it also ignores who is involved in marginalizing the poor.
- 4.
The focus group interviews by Narayan-Parker and Petesch (2002:Box 2, p. 379) in Brazilian favelas in São Paulo, Recife, and Itabuna also revealed that people living in the favelas see marginais (marginals) as “others,” those people “having no scruples, being thieves, murderers and drug addicts, trying for the easy life by harming others.”
- 5.
Like Brazil in the 1990s and early 2000s, at the end of 2012, countries ranging from Greece, Spain, France, and the United States to Egypt and Iran were also struggling with high levels of unemployment and poverty rates.
- 6.
A lit fuse jutting out of French bread wrapped in ribbons with the colors of the French flag adorned the cover of the November 17th–23rd, 2012, edition of the Economist with the headline reading “The time-bomb at the heart of Europe.” The headline of the 14-page special report on France read, “So much to do, so little time.” Even though inequality in France is lower today than it was in the mid-1980s (a rarity today for most countries) with most people enjoying high living standards and France is the fifth-biggest economy, the sixth-biggest exporter, and the fourth-biggest recipient of foreign direct investment, the French government – particularly President Holland – is chastised by the Economist as not reforming, spending too much, highly taxing the wealthy, and slow to reform its labor market, pension, and social security and welfare systems. The worry is that France is losing its competitiveness. Part of the solution espoused in the article is to make the labor market more flexible with more part time contracts and curbs to the freedom of fired workers to sue in the courts (Special Report France. Economist. November 17th–23rd 2012: pp. 1–14).
- 7.
Although the growth rate slowed down considerably to 2.7 % in 2011 and to an estimated 1 % in 2012, it is expected to possibly increase to 3 % in 2013 during years when many countries’ economies are hardly growing (Focus “Brazil.” The Economist online. Nov 1, 2011 and “Brazil’s Economy: Wrong Numbers,” Economist. January 19, 2013. p 38).
- 8.
Inequality rates reached a fifty-year low Gini coefficient of 0.519 by 2011 (Focus “Brazil.” The Economist online. Nov 1, 2011.)
- 9.
Often problematic male language is employed to discuss economic globalization such as globalization “penetrating” most countries, MNCs as tapping “virgin” markets, and global forces as the most powerful forces able to overpower local forces.
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Buechler, S.J. (2014). Conclusion. In: Labor in a Globalizing City. Urban and Landscape Perspectives, vol 16. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01661-0_8
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