It was my summer semester break, and I was visiting my home in Pakistan. I relished the delicious food my mother made every day when I noticed that she got sick from the hot one day, and even then, she continued working in the kitchen. Summers in Pakistan are blazing hot, with severe electricity shortages, and the temperature often exceeds 40°C (104°F). Middle-class families cannot afford the luxury of having an air-conditioner in their kitchens, thus making the kitchen the hottest room. While the less privileged people can hardly afford the perk of having an air-conditioner in their homes, one can imagine the dire conditions in which women work. My mother’s condition made me wonder why a woman working at home does not enjoy the same benefits as any office worker.
We see violence and insecurity as a global phenomenon, encompassing wars, terrorism, and armed conflicts. Feminist scholars continue to inform us that violence and insecurity are multidimensional, and there is a need to rethink their implications (True & Tanyag, 2017). True & Tanyag (2017) argue that violence and insecurity are also rooted in everyday political economy that heavily relies on women’s labour but keeps it undervalued and unrecognised; thus, making it important to reconceptualise insecurity and violence through a feminist political economy framework. The traditional approach to political economy focuses on leading economic indicators like the balance of payments, international trade, financial statistics, labour market statistics, etc., thus reducing the spectrum of political economy to macroeconomic indicators.
In this article, I set to explore how the contemporary global political-economic structure overlooks the mundane sites where women are marginalised or exposed to violence. Globally, women spend 2.8 more hours than men on unpaid care and domestic work (Pinheiro & Leite, 2023); this burden often impacts their physical and mental health and increases their vulnerability to violence. Thus, the article will attempt to offer a nuanced understanding of how the unrecognition of women’s unpaid work and cheap labour contributes to a non-traditional security threat, eventually exposing women to violence and systemic vulnerabilities.
A Woman’s Unpaid “Love” in South Asia
Women in South Asian society are burdened with a disproportionate responsibility of looking after the home. From cleaning to cooking to fetching water from long distances and looking after children, to not enjoying the perk of getting a break even when sick, the unpaid work by women is often unrecognized, and so are those who do it. More so, despite all the housework they do, their individuality is often the most neglected and pain of unrecognized labour labelled as ‘love’ towards family. This extends to the fact that there remains discrimination in the allocation of food and healthcare resources (like medical health access) within a household as well, where often men are preferred in both cases.
Hitkari (2023) writes that a United Nations report noted that women spend nearly 5.867 hours (352 minutes) per day on unpaid care work in India compared to just 51.8 minutes spent by men. In Pakistan, women spend 11 hours more than men on unpaid care work. In Bangladesh, women spend 11.7 hours compared to 1.6 hours men spend. In Nepal, women spend 7.5 hours daily, 2.5 times higher than men. In Bhutan, women were found to be spending 15% of their time on domestic care work, which is 2 hours and 11 minutes more than men (Hitkari, 2023). These figures reflect that the ratio of women’s unpaid care work surpasses men’s in most South Asian countries. Utilizing the feminist political economy framework, it can be seen that unequal political and economic power relations in a society exacerbate gendered inequalities. It does so by bringing our attention to the masculine and patriarchal nature of the current economic structure, which places women as responsible for the household chores—a work that often goes unpaid, invisible, and unrecognised.
Cheap Labour in the Global Economy
The feminist political economy framework draws a connection between such violence and insecurity and women’s unpaid domestic work at the house. The care provided by women sustains families, supports the economy, and is often found filling the space for the lack of social services. Sassen (2000) reminds us that women continue being primary caregivers in households and communities on whose backs economies are violently built. It should make us question why, despite this, women’s domestic work continues to remain unpaid and unrecognised in our economic structures. True & Tanyag (2017) argue that such a level of nonrecognition of women’s domestic work intimately finds its roots in the everyday depletion of individuals and eventually harms women’s well-being. Such a negation of women’s work finds its roots in structural inequalities, which only allow particular labour to be respected and not others, eventually putting women in the category of ‘cheap labour’ in the global economy.
Even when the inclusion of women in paid work outside the homes has increased, it is often done at a very cheap cost. The feminist political economy critique on the global economic structure reminds us that capitalist competition encourages hiring women as cheap labour to maximize the benefits of the companies. Such situations have attracted women from developing societies. True (2010) reminds us that such feminisation of poverty, where the expansion of women’s employment has taken place at a cheap rate, makes women an easy target for abuse and violence within the workplace as well. Hossain, Mathbor, and Semenza (2013) researched the readymade garments (RMG) sector in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the country’s economy now heavily depends on the exports made by the garment industry, and women make up 80% of the workforce in this industry. They argue that gendered discourses remain prevalent in the industrial section, contributing to the feminisation of the workforce. In doing so, they recorded a woman’s comments on gendered culture in factories:
“We are bound to be sincere and attentive because we will not be allowed to leave the factory until we fulfill our quota. If we make any mistake, they will use abusive and vulgar words, like, “Hi lady, is your vagina wet now?” Did your Vatar [husband in a vulgar way] not give you any input at night? They even call our parents names.” (Hossain et al., 2013)
These comments by the interviewee show that women are not merely treated as cheap labour, but are also subjected to daily humiliation and violence, creating a need to recognise that unpaid work and cheap labour should be treated as a non-traditional security threat for women. It is also essential to remember that major driving factors behind such cheap labour and unpaid care work include the patriarchal norms around gender, unequal access to the labour market, and a weak legal and institutional environment at workplaces. Therefore, the feminist approaches to political economy continue to remind us that we remain vigilant about the discourses that contribute to the labour vulnerability and exploitation of women. Such gendered discourses around unpaid work and cheap labour practices are not randomly created in a vacuum; instead, such practices are an outcome of sociocultural practices embedded in the patriarchal structure and a neverending shadow of the global capitalist economy that thrives on the marginality of women and their intense, yet unrecognised labour.
Gender Equality and Legislation
One of the ways to enhance gender equality and move towards recognising women’s care work is to have proper legislation at work that can safeguard women’s rights. For instance, one such intervention was done by India in 2017, when the country passed the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Bill, increasing the paid maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks and enabling work from home for new mothers after the expiry of the 26-week leave period (Strachan & Adikaram, 2023). Such legislation is an affirmative move towards a healthy change and a more equitable world. The UNDP (2024) report shows that expanding access to childcare initially increases women’s participation in the labour force by about one percentage point. Thus, investing in policies that support women’s active participation in the economy can allow countries to utilise women’s productivity and improve the situation of gender equality.
However, the reality of outcomes of such legislative and policy frameworks can be different for women. It is, therefore, equally necessary that we promote policies that redistribute such caregiving responsibilities across gender and societal actors. We must also be critical of the broader cultural and social beliefs embedded in our society that interpret realities differently for men and women and how they are interconnected to the economic apparatus of our societies. To make conditions better for women and recognise their commitment and contributions to the economy of the country, it is imperative that we first acknowledge and uncover the systemic inequalities that perpetuate gender-based oppression. Unlike traditional economic theories, which have their importance, the feminist approaches to understanding the economic structure allow us to focus on the social and relational aspects of the current economic structure.
To the Invisible Labour of the Capitalist World
Placing our attention on the seemingly mundane forms of violence and insecurity, such as the piercing burden of housework that cuts no slack to women even when sick, the frustration of having no money despite doing all the arduous work within the household, the strains on marriage that the gendered division of work can bring in, and harassment faced within home and at workplaces, can allow us to see that women carry a mounting weight of economy on their shoulder, which we continue to disregard in our current global economic structure. The article proposes that we must recognise that unpaid work and cheap labour stand as an invisible non-traditional security threat to women, which not only reduces their agency but also puts them at risk of violence and limits their well-being. Thus, when I was watching my mother working in a hot kitchen despite being sick, I was reminded of what Selma James, a feminist activist, articulated: that there is a need to recognize and compensate women’s unpaid labour and that it is foundational to thriving capitalist system that treats it as invisible (Gardiner, 2012). I end the article by embracing the pain of my mother and all those unseen people on whose sweat the current capitalist economic system continues to thrive.
Bibliography
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