CULT 320: Trading Away Our Rights, Histories of Unfreedom

Essay: Question 2
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Essay: Question 2
This paper responds to the essay question number one. Using the article of Kate Raworth and another article by Uma Kothari, this paper describes the diverse labour practices which are employed in global production. Moreover, this paper exhaustively examines how the two works cover different and/or similar issues. Lastly, the degree to which the theories conceptualized by Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx could be applied to these readings is considered.
Labour practices used in the global production
According to the article by Kate Raworth, Trading Away Our Rights, the labour practices that are being employed in the global production include the following: Long overtime at short notice – to work overtime is voluntary according to the law. For many female workers however, overtime is actually a condition of employment and is often imposed at short notice. In some factories in Shenzen China for example, employees who cannot do overtime are required to apply to their supervisor for exemption (Raworth, 2004). Workers are overworked and underpaid – to increase output without increasing costs, a lot of employers falsify records of hours worked, set excessive production targets, or use piece-rates. For female workers, it implies long hours of overtime which is significantly underpaid (Raworth, 2004). Permanently temporary – female workers have a higher chance than their male counterparts to be employed on homework, casual, seasonal or short-term contracts that are renewed every day, every 3 months, or after 12 months. Such employees end up working for a long-term period but without the support and protection which comes with long-term employment. In South Africa and Chile for example, female workers get the impermanent jobs within the fruit sector. These women are hired year after year on rolling contracts for eleven months (Raworth, 2004).
Trade unions face significant restrictions – workers are discouraged from joining trade unions. Little support for families – paid maternity leave helps to support women as mothers and as workers. It also helps to ensure the health of the present and future labour force. Nonetheless, female workers who are employed on short-term contracts and become pregnant lose their job as their contract is never renewed (Raworth, 2004). Short-term hiring for long-term jobs – employing labourers on contracts that are short-term could be lawful, for instance for jobs which are genuinely impermanent or seasonal in nature. Even so, a lot of employers are abusing the law and employing workers in this manner repetitively for many years. They do this in order to avoid employment benefits and to cut costs (Raworth, 2004).
In the article Geographies and Histories of Unfreedom by Kothari (2013), the labour practices used in the global production include the importation of labour and the use of migrant workers. In Mauritius for example during the 1990s, most foreign labourers in the country’s clothing and garment factories came from China, since most manufacturing companies here had established networks in China and were in fact Hong Kong owned (Kothari, 2013). About 90% of these mostly w...