Global Production and Labor: How Globalization Transforms Women’s Work

Walk into any large export factory in Tiruppur, Bengaluru, or Gurugram and one pattern becomes immediately visible: most of the hands stitching, trimming, and packing goods bound for European and American shelves belong to women. This is not a coincidence. It is the result of decades of restructuring in how the world produces things, a system economists call global production. Under this system, a single t-shirt or smartphone may pass through a dozen countries before reaching a buyer, and at almost every low-paid step of that journey, women’s labour is what keeps costs down and profits up.

What is global production?
Integration and exclusion: the twin faces of global production
Who gets included and who is left out
Decentralisation and the demand for flexible labour
Why employers prefer women workers
The rise of the informal economy
Gendered impacts: why women bear the heaviest burden
Concentration in low-skilled, low-paid jobs
Insecurity and precarious contracts
The double burden of paid and unpaid work
Harassment, denial of rights, and the silencing of dissent
Resistance and the road ahead

What is global production?

Global production refers to the way goods and services today are manufactured across multiple countries, with different stages of work spread across different regions. A garment brand headquartered in Sweden may design clothes in Stockholm, source cotton from Maharashtra, get the fabric dyed in Tamil Nadu, have it stitched in Bangladesh, and finally sell it in Berlin. This fragmented system is held together by what scholars call global value chains or global production networks.

This shift was theorised in 1980 by economists Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye as the New International Division of Labour (NIDL). They observed a departure from the older colonial pattern, where the Global South simply supplied raw materials to industrial nations. Instead, developing countries now host export-oriented assembly operations, with corporations exploiting differences in labour costs through containerised shipping, air freight, and telecommunications that make dispersed production possible.

Integration and exclusion: the twin faces of global production

Global production is often celebrated for its integrative power. It connects markets, technologies, and consumers across continents. A farmer in Andhra Pradesh growing cotton is, in a real sense, linked to a shopper in London buying a fast-fashion top. Sectors that were once isolated, like rural handicrafts or small-scale electronics assembly, are now tied to international demand cycles.

Yet this integration is highly selective. The same system that includes some workers excludes many others. Multinational corporations and lead firms in the Global North capture the most lucrative parts of the chain, like design, branding, marketing, and retail, while suppliers in the Global South are confined to low-margin manufacturing. The result is what feminist economists describe as a paradox: more people are working for the world economy than ever before, but the rewards remain concentrated.

Who gets included and who is left out

Inclusion in global production rarely happens on equal terms. Workers from marginalised castes, rural migrants, and women from poor households are typically absorbed into the lowest tiers of supply chains. Research on India’s garment export industry has shown that women and girls from historically oppressed communities do significant home-based garment work, with about 85 percent directly linked to supply chains for exports to the United States and European Union.

Meanwhile, others are entirely excluded. Small farmers displaced by subsidised agricultural imports, traditional artisans undercut by mass production, and informal sector workers without skills demanded by export industries find themselves pushed out. A World Commission report on the social dimension of globalisation noted that the social cost of integration into the global economy continues to fall disproportionately on women, especially in countries where gender inequalities were already deep-rooted.

Decentralisation and the demand for flexible labour

One of the defining features of modern global production is decentralisation. Instead of producing everything inside one large factory, companies break production into smaller tasks contracted out to multiple suppliers, subcontractors, and home-based workers. This model gives lead firms enormous flexibility. They can quickly switch suppliers if costs rise, scale production up during peak seasons, and scale it down without bearing the burden of permanent staff.

This flexibility, however, has a human cost. To respond to fast-changing global demand, suppliers need a workforce that can be hired and fired easily, paid by the piece rather than by the month, and made to work long hours during rush orders. This is where the demand for flexible, low-wage labour becomes intense, and this is precisely where women’s labour gets pulled in.

Why employers prefer women workers

Employers in export industries have historically preferred to hire women, and the reasons are revealing. Women are often paid less than men for similar work. They are perceived, often through patriarchal stereotypes, as more docile, patient, and willing to accept repetitive tasks. They are less likely to be unionised. And because many women are seen as secondary earners in their households, employers can justify lower wages by claiming that women’s incomes only supplement a male breadwinner’s.

The International Labour Organization notes that nearly 60 percent of garment workers globally are women, with the figure reaching 80 percent in some regions. Asia alone employs roughly 42 million women garment workers. The same source observes that prejudices placing household and care responsibilities on women push them disproportionately into home-based production or smaller enterprises in the lower tiers of supply chains.

The rise of the informal economy

Decentralisation has blurred the line between formal and informal work. A factory that appears formal on paper may rely on a vast network of home-based workers stitching, embroidering, or finishing garments in their own kitchens for piece-rate wages. A study of home-based garment workers across nine Indian cities documented in the Tainted Garments report found that more than 99 percent of these workers did not receive even the state-stipulated minimum wages, earning between 50 and 90 percent less than the legal minimum.

None of the 1,452 workers surveyed had a written employment contract. More than 42 percent had begun garment work as children, and over a third faced severe wage payment delays. These workers exist within global supply chains, yet they remain invisible to the brands whose products they make.

Gendered impacts: why women bear the heaviest burden

Global production does not affect men and women equally. The system has, in fact, deepened existing gender inequalities in several specific ways.

Concentration in low-skilled, low-paid jobs

Women workers are overwhelmingly concentrated in jobs classified as low-skilled, even when the work requires genuine skill. Stitching a complex garment, sorting electronic components, or peeling shrimp for export all demand dexterity and concentration, but because these tasks are coded as feminine, they are systematically devalued. Higher-paid supervisory, technical, and managerial positions in the same factories are dominated by men.

In export processing zones across the developing world, women have made up roughly the majority of the workforce, but the ILO has acknowledged that they tend to suffer more from the inherent problems of these zones, including long working hours, low wages, and the near-total absence of childcare and social welfare facilities.

Insecurity and precarious contracts

Flexible labour also means insecure labour. Short-term contracts, daily wage arrangements, and piece-rate payments shift all the risks of fluctuating global demand from companies onto individual women workers. When orders dry up, women are sent home without pay. When orders surge, they are forced to work overtime, sometimes without compensation. The COVID-19 lockdowns made this brutally clear, when millions of garment workers in India lost their incomes overnight, with reports suggesting nearly 400 million informal workers risked falling into poverty.

The double burden of paid and unpaid work

Even as women enter paid employment, the unpaid work of cooking, cleaning, childcare, and elder care does not disappear or get redistributed. Women simply do both, creating what feminist economists call the double burden. The care economy continues to be sustained by women alongside their factory or home-based work, often invisibly and without compensation.

Harassment, denial of rights, and the silencing of dissent

Women workers in global supply chains face workplace harassment at alarming rates. A recent Amnesty International investigation found that female garment workers in South Asia are routinely harassed, attacked, and abused physically or sexually in the workplace, yet rarely receive justice. Despite making up the majority of the workforce, they are underrepresented in factory management, which mirrors the patriarchal, caste, and class hierarchies of society outside.

Attempts to organise are often met with intimidation. Workers in major sourcing countries report a climate of fear, where supervisors threaten, harass, or dismiss those who try to join unions. This denial of the right to collective bargaining keeps wages low and conditions exploitative, which is precisely what makes the supply chain so profitable for brands at the top.

Resistance and the road ahead

Despite these conditions, women workers are not passive victims. In Bangladesh, garment workers have organised major strikes for better wages. In Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur textile cluster, women have begun forming independent unions and worker associations. Transnational feminist networks have linked workers across borders, recognising that exploitation produced by a global system needs a global response. Researchers have also documented the emergence of women workers as active labour protestors in India’s garment export factories, challenging the stereotype of the docile female worker.

What global production reveals is that the world economy is built on a hidden foundation of women’s labour, much of it underpaid, insecure, and invisible. Recognising this is the first step towards reshaping it.

What do you think? Should brands at the top of global supply chains be held legally responsible for the wages and working conditions of home-based women workers stitching their products, even when those workers are several subcontracting layers removed? And if women’s labour is what makes globalisation profitable, why does it remain among the least visible and least rewarded work in the world economy?

References

PDF 📄

Global Production and Labor: How Globalization Transforms Women’s Work

Table of Contents

What is global production? 🔗

Integration and exclusion: the twin faces of global production 🔗

Who gets included and who is left out 🔗

Decentralisation and the demand for flexible labour 🔗

Why employers prefer women workers 🔗

The rise of the informal economy 🔗

Gendered impacts: why women bear the heaviest burden 🔗

Concentration in low-skilled, low-paid jobs 🔗

Insecurity and precarious contracts 🔗

The double burden of paid and unpaid work 🔗

Harassment, denial of rights, and the silencing of dissent 🔗

Resistance and the road ahead 🔗