Brianna Wright on "A View from Jamaica"

In the piece entitled, "The Gendered Politics and Violence of Structural Adjustment: A View from Jamaica", author Faye Harrison discusses the effects of economic globalization, specifically on poor Jamaican women. One aspect of this discussion I would like to look into with greater detail would be the assumptions that businesses and corporations make about women.

When discussing the assumptions corporations make about working women, Harrison writes, “Transnational capital…has enjoyed the freedom to employ workers, to a great extent female, whose labor has been politically, legally, and culturally constructed to be cheap and expendable.” I think this quote is particularly of note because of its implications towards women. It’s clear that women are seen as expendable goods due to the lack of care towards their working conditions or wages. It’s not as though this kind of discrimination towards women hasn’t been seen before; it’s just that corporations are using women for their own profit and attempt to escape blame for these injustices under the guise of promoting Jamaica’s “economic growth”.

Another example of corporations making assumptions about women lies in the garment industry. Harrison writes, “…transnational garment production has taken advantage of and reinforced the patriarchal assumptions that activities such as sewing are ‘natural’ women’s tasks…”. I was absolutely shocked to read about the kind of abuses poor women in industries such as these; however, when the notion of “sewing” being “women’s tasks” came up, I certainly felt like I heard the same kind of attitudes toward working women before. Even though it is the twenty first century, notions of certain jobs being “women’s work” still comes up. For example, a Google employee had put out a memo inciting that due to “genetic differences”, women couldn’t possibly fulfill roles in technology careers and leadership paths. This kind of rhetoric is used in order to promote patriarchal assumptions of women and still keep the notion of certain jobs being “men’s work” and “women’s work”. However, it is important to note that the degree of which these assumptions are enacted changed drastically when you factor in a woman’s class and race, which plays out in the example of Jamaican women in the garment industry.

Something that I think should be discussed in class is patriarchal structures that are enacted upon women; how do they play out in modern society and how does the disparity between these actions on certain women change that kind of perspective?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2017/08/07/a-googlers-manifesto-is-the-hr-departments-worst-nightmare/?tid=a_inl&utm_term=.17223829572f