‘Indispensable to All Working Women and to Mothers in the Home.’ Global Labor Standards and the Quest for Social Justice, 1919-2019

The binary productive and reproductive labor –what the International Labour Organization (ILO) has called work and family responsibilities– cordoned off care from employment. Until the 2000s, paid care work mostly stood outside of ILO deliberations, while unpaid family care became a concern as a means to enhance labor force participation and thus reinforce the valuing of care as a special kind of activity. This analysis traces the construction of the woman worker under global labor standards by focusing on ‘All Working Women’ and ‘Mothers in the Home’ to complicate feminist discussions of equality.

Mujer, trabajadora y madre: la superheroína del siglo XXI = Woman, Worker and Mother: the Superheroine of the 21st Century

Resumen. La inserción de la mujer en el mercado laboral es un claro ejemplo de logro histórico ya que, gracias a la lucha de muchas mujeres, a día de hoy, es una realidad que la población femenina ha logrado su inserción en el mercado laboral. Sin embargo, aun queda mucho camino por recorrer, prueba de ello es que, en la actualidad aún existe un cierto rechazo a considerar que la mujer está cualificada para ser trabajadora, dando lugar a la segregación ocupacional y vertical que provoca como resultado la brecha salarial, circunstancia que refleja como sufre una discriminación salarial frente a los trabajadores de sexo masculino, simple­mente por su género. El objetivo perseguido con este ensayo consiste en facilitar al lector una visión genérica de cómo la situación de la mujer en el mercado laboral se ha ido transforman­do hasta llegar a la visión actual, finalizando con una reflexión que pretende constatar en los lectores la importancia de favorecer una igualdad plena y real en la sociedad.Palabras claves: mujer, trabajadora, igualdad, discriminación, segregación ocupacional, brecha salarial,Abstract. The insertion of women in the labor market is a clear example of historical achievement because, thanks to the struggle of many women, today, it is a reality that the female population has achieved its insertion in the labor market. However, there is still a long way to go, because, at present, there is still occupational segregation which drives to the wage gap and, even, wage discrimination. The objective pursued with this essay is to facilitate the reader a broad view of how the situation of the women in the labor market has been trans­forming until achieving the current situation.Keywords: women, workers, equality, discrimination, occupational segregation, wage gap.

Equality

When the 1944 Philadelphia International Labour Conference set forth to imagine the woman worker’s place amid postwar demobilization, it unearthed old fissures. This chapter explores discourses of equality in the making of the woman worker, when equal remuneration and non-discrimination came to stand for universal progress for women workers, displacing deliberation on the home as a workplace, in terms of both industrial home work and domestic service. Women inside and outside of the ILO pushed for equality measures. The “double-difference” of colonized women, however, produced a notion of “equality” with multiple and unequal tiers of meaning. Ultimately, “equal rights” would enable women in “non-metropolitan territories” to produce goods or reproduce labor power for the benefit of the Global North. The developing Cold War and institutional rivalry between the ILO and the new United Nations Commission on the Status of Women influenced agenda setting. Labor feminists won a revised maternity protection convention, which did not challenge the ideal of the male breadwinner. A shift from interwar policy occurred, but reluctantly and incompletely as a strategic measure rather than as a step toward decolonization or as an affirmation of women’s rights.