Living with Risk: Precarity and Bangkok's Urban Poor

Chapter 8: Encountering Risk: Layoffs and the Life Course of Female Workers

Encountering Risk: Layoffs and the Life Course 217 217 Chapter 8 encountering risk: Layoffs and the Life Course of Female Workers This chapter analyses female occupational paths and class disparities, focusing on the experiences of women in former-fringe community U. It is clear from arguments made in previous chapters that a big gender disparity exists in terms of occupation in the risk response process. The ratio of informal economy workers is high among females in formerfringe community U. A look at the occupational profile over time reveals, however, that this high ratio of women in the informal economy is actually a relatively new phenomenon. Most women worked in factories until the mid-1990s but were forced to leave beginning in the late 1990s. One way to examine the process of women’s entry into the informal economy is by studying these factory workers’ life courses. Of course, occupations in the informal economy are not homogenous, and there is a wide range of occupational types; individual and household conditions played a part in each woman’s choice of occupational path after she left factory work. In this chapter, I classify the occupational categories to deduce class disparities among the different occupational types, and look at the impact on women of market changes and the increase in entries into the informal economy. Female factory workers were significantly affected by macro-level restructuring from the first stage of globalisation in the late 1980s until the second stage began, around the 1997 economic crisis. These women symbolise the impact of industrial restructuring. By focusing on gender, we can better understand the micro-level aspect of how lives have been affected by the changes in occupational opportunities. Previous macro-level analyses speak of “female unskilled workers sustaining the manufacturing industry”, which certainly acknowledges women’s contributions to the macroeconomy and their place in society. 218 Living with Risk However, they have failed to elucidate the concrete, long-term impact on the labour and lives of individual women as economic agents. Female workers were primary players during the first stage of globalisation, but they were systematically squeezed out from factories during the second stage. Examining the variety of occupations they have since taken on, through which class disparities have been reorganized and maintained, the analysis in this chapter aims to shed light on the situation of female workers in terms of the maintenance and reproduction of their businesses , livelihoods, and families. Jumping ahead to my conclusion, I assert that although women were more strongly and directly impacted by industry restructuring, the resulting changes and accompanying risk response processes are not uniform, and are determined by individual conditions and household roles. In addition to their roles as wives and mothers, women also have important roles to play as income earners, yet the more a woman’s ability to respond to risk is restricted by individual and household conditions, the more vulnerable she is to change. The Life Course of Female Workers: Increase of the Informal Economy Workers Former-fringe community U’s occupational profile shows a significantly high ratio of female informal economy workers at present and high number of manufacturing workers in the early 1990s. Why did the number of informal economy workers rise? We look at this question by studying individual occupational paths. Tables 8-1 and 8-2 show the life course of females in the community . Table 8-1 looks at former factory workers and homeworkers, the latter occupying the high ratio in the community. The relevant years run across the top of the table, showing occupational experiences in Bangkok until 2004. The column on the left displays individuals according to age. The lower section of the table uses age as the horizontal axis. Table 8-2 shows the situation of women other than former factory workers and homeworkers. Former factory workers (shown in pink), particularly if there is no SME annotation, are women who used to work in big factories (scale of several hundred to over a thousand people)—the “formal economy”. It is clear from the table that most women in the community participated in factory work from the 1980s to the early 1990s. We can also see, however, that most have shifted to work within the informal economy in the last ten years. The women in Table 8-2 have mostly changed jobs Table 8-1 Life Course of Women in Former-Fringe Community U (Former Factory...