The New International Division of Labour: A Feminist Perspective

Walk through any garment cluster in Tiruppur, Gurugram, or Bengaluru and a pattern emerges almost immediately: row after row of women hunched over sewing machines, stitching jeans destined for shoppers in Berlin, Chicago, or Tokyo. Behind these scenes lies one of the most powerful shifts in modern capitalism, the New International Division of Labour, or NIDL. Through a feminist lens, this restructuring of global production is not just an economic story. It is a story about whose bodies, hours, and homes are absorbed into world markets, and on what terms.

What the new international division of labour really means 🔗

The old international division of labour, broadly stable until the 1970s, slotted colonised and post-colonial economies into the world system as suppliers of raw materials and agricultural commodities while industrial production stayed concentrated in the Global North. The NIDL inverts a large part of this arrangement. As economies in Asia, Latin America, and parts of Africa were merged into the world economy from the 1970s onward, labour-intensive manufacturing was relocated out of high-wage countries into low-wage developing regions, while design, finance, and branding stayed in the North.

Feminist political economists were quick to point out a feature that mainstream accounts often missed: this relocation depended overwhelmingly on women workers. Maria Mies, in her influential work on patriarchy and accumulation, argued that the global economy was being rebuilt on a base of cheap, flexible, and politically docile female labour, what she called the “housewifization” of work on a world scale. The point was not that women were entering the workforce for the first time. The point was that the kind of work they entered, low-paid, insecure, and stripped of bargaining power, was being normalised as the new template for global manufacturing.

Why employers prefer a feminised workforce 🔗

Export-oriented industries such as garments, electronics assembly, leather, toys, and food processing actively recruit women. Employers commonly justify this through stereotypes: women are said to have “nimble fingers”, more patience for repetitive tasks, and a “natural” willingness to accept supervision. The deeper reason is structural. The transnational organisation of production is gendered in that women take up specific types of employment that tend to be lower-paid and less secure, and this is reinforced by overlapping dynamics of class, caste, and migrant status.

In sectors tied to global value chains, women make up the bulk of the assembly-line workforce. Women form roughly 40 per cent of the global supply chain workforce, and their share crosses 80 per cent in sectors such as garments, yet they remain concentrated in lower-skilled, lower-paid positions with limited career mobility. The NIDL therefore does not just employ women; it depends on a gendered hierarchy where women’s work is structurally cheapened.

Casualisation, subcontracting, and the disappearing employer 🔗

The second feature of the NIDL is the way work itself has been broken up. Production no longer happens inside a single large factory under one employer. A brand in Europe places an order with a factory in Bangladesh or India. That factory subcontracts to smaller units. Those units further subcontract to tiny workshops and, finally, to women working out of their kitchens and verandas. The further down this chain you go, the more invisible the worker and the weaker her rights.

The Indian garment cluster as a case study 🔗

The Indian garment industry is one of the clearest illustrations. A study of export processing zones in Delhi found that the lack of labour standards and unions has made women workers more casualised, informal, and vulnerable, exposing them to discrimination, sexual harassment, and the denial of basic rights at work. Many are hired through contractors rather than directly by factories, which means that when orders dip, they can be let go without any legal recourse. There is no provident fund, no maternity benefit, no written contract.

At the bottom of the chain sits home-based work. A woman in Delhi or Jaipur may stitch sequins, attach buttons, or finish embroidery on pieces brought to her doorstep by a middleman. She is paid per piece, often well below the minimum wage. The ILO classifies home-based work as involving routine assembly such as sewing and packing, artisan production, personal services, and clerical or professional work, with most of it concentrated in textile, garment and footwear manufacturing, and women’s share in such low-paid domestic work running as high as 80 per cent in some countries. Because she works from home, she is invisible to labour inspectors and to most trade unions. Her employer, on paper, may not exist at all.

Why casualisation is a feminist issue 🔗

Casualisation is not simply about job security. It is about the design of the entire employment relationship. Part-time, piece-rate, and contract arrangements push the costs and risks of production downward onto workers. Sick days, slow orders, machine breakdowns, all become the woman’s problem rather than the brand’s. Meanwhile, the same patriarchal expectations that demand she cook, clean, and care for children at home make her more willing to accept this flexibility. The “double burden” of paid and unpaid work that feminist scholars have long described is not an unfortunate side-effect of the NIDL. It is part of its architecture.

Structural adjustment and the making of precarious women workers 🔗

To understand how the NIDL took its current shape, you cannot ignore the Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) imposed across the Global South from the 1980s onward. In exchange for loans from the IMF and World Bank, governments agreed to a familiar package: cutting public spending, privatising state enterprises, devaluing the currency, opening up to imports, and removing subsidies on essentials like food and fuel.

India entered this template in 1991 during a balance-of-payments crisis. India adopted the structural adjustment programs required by the International Monetary Fund in 1991, and critics have long argued that such programs contributed to the deterioration of social conditions in third-world countries rather than improving them. The gendered effects were rarely on the official agenda, but they were sharp and lasting.

Pushed out of the formal sector 🔗

Public sector hiring freezes and privatisation removed many of the very jobs that had offered women a foothold in the formal economy, secure jobs with maternity leave, pensions, and union representation. Researchers studying India found that SAP increasingly pushed working women into the unorganised sector, depriving them of their trade-union rights and placing them outside protective labour laws such as the Maternity Benefits Act of 1961. The retreat of the state from employment did not free women; it stripped them of the protections their mothers and aunts had only just begun to win.

The squeeze of subsidy cuts 🔗

SAPs also cut food, fuel, and health subsidies. When the price of cooking gas, kerosene, or pulses rises, the burden of stretching the household budget falls primarily on women. They take on extra hours of paid work, often in the informal sector, while also absorbing more unpaid care work as public hospitals, anganwadis, and schools come under fiscal pressure. The ILO has noted that women’s migration, often as a family survival strategy, has been given added impetus by the negative impacts of structural adjustment programmes, economic and financial crises, and the feminisation of poverty.

Export-led growth and its gendered bargain 🔗

SAPs explicitly promoted export-oriented growth, including through Export Processing Zones (EPZs) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These zones offered foreign companies tax breaks, weak labour enforcement, and restrictions on the right to organise. The “comparative advantage” sold to investors was, in plain language, a young, female, non-unionised workforce. The bargain was that women would get jobs and foreign exchange would flow in. The cost was that those jobs were precisely the casualised, subcontracted ones described above.

A feminist reading: what the NIDL conceals 🔗

Feminist economists argue that the NIDL is not a neutral story of “comparative advantage” finding cheap labour. It is a system that actively produces cheap labour by drawing on existing patriarchal structures and by treating women’s unpaid care work as a free resource. More recent feminist research has addressed the restructuring of work and its impact on women and gender culture as an effect of neo-liberal economic adjustments, including the privatisation of services and the intensification of low-wage, informal labour for women.

The myth of empowerment 🔗

Defenders of export-led industrialisation often point out that women in EPZs earn cash incomes for the first time. This is not nothing. A wage in her own hand can shift power inside a household. But feminist scholars caution against confusing income with emancipation. The ILO has warned of a “feminisation of working poverty”, noting that more women than ever are in work but are also more likely to be unemployed, stuck in low-productivity jobs, or paid less than men for the same work. Earning is one step; earning enough, with rights and dignity, is another.

Health, safety, and dignity 🔗

The hidden costs show up in workers’ bodies. Long hours bent over machines, exposure to dyes and solvents, denial of toilet breaks, and the constant threat of sexual harassment are well documented across garment and electronics factories. When work is subcontracted out to homes, occupational hazards multiply: children inhale glue fumes, women suffer back and eye problems, and entire families are exposed to industrial chemicals in living spaces. None of this enters the price tag of the final product.

Where this leaves us 🔗

The NIDL is not going to disappear. Global value chains in clothing, electronics, processed food, and increasingly services have become deeply embedded in how the world economy functions. But understanding it through a feminist lens reframes the policy conversation. Instead of asking how to attract more investment by keeping labour cheap, the question becomes how to ensure that the women who hold up these supply chains are recognised as workers with full rights.

Concretely, this means extending labour laws to home-based and contract workers, enforcing wage floors across subcontracting chains, investing in public childcare and care infrastructure so that women are not silently subsidising employers, and treating trade union rights inside EPZs and SEZs as non-negotiable. Interlayered forms of governance involving public, private, and social actors are seen as critical to addressing gender discrimination in global value chains and advancing a gendered approach to human rights due diligence. The lesson from four decades of NIDL is clear: markets alone will not deliver gender justice, because the cheapness of women’s labour is precisely what they have been built to use.

What do you think? If a T-shirt on a global shelf passes through a factory, a subcontractor, and finally a woman stitching at her kitchen table, who should bear responsibility for her wages, safety, and social security, the brand, the contractor, or the state? And can “export-led growth” ever be truly empowering for women if it is built on keeping their labour cheap and casualised?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_international_division_of_labour
2. https://resolve.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/feminist-political-economy/global-division-of-labour/3A857A694FDF7F3FA1E22C16376557C2
3. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/gender-equality-opportunities-and-challenges-supply-chains
4. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2455632718778355
5. https://www.levyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/wp_541.pdf
6. https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/economics-facpubs/46
7. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/270259750_Women_and_Structural_Adjustment_in_India
8. https://www.ilo.org/media/317211/download
9. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-class/
10. https://www.ilo.org/resource/news/global-employment-trends-women-2007-ilo-study-warns-feminization-working
11. https://www.ilo.org/publications/gender-and-governance-global-value-chains-promoting-rights-women-workers