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SOSC 300K

Lecture Note 10

Gendered Labor Market

Ethnicized Labor Market

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Main Issues

A. Gendered Labor Market

1. Two competing paradigms on gendered labor market--emphasize the organizational inequality approach (Bridges and Nelson’s research)

2. Gender and Work in Hong Kong

B. Ethnicized Labor Market (Emily Honig’s research on Shanghai)

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Gender inequality at work (1)• According to the U. S. Census Bureau, average wage of

full-time female workers is 72% of men’s average wage• Why? Existing explanations can be classified into the

following two approaches:• A. Labor Economics (such as comparative worth theory

and human-capital theory): the wage differences between male and female jobs are the product of market forces-- labor markets operate in a nondiscriminatory fashion, rewarding workers for their productivity. Thus, if women are worse off than men, it is because they are more family-oriented but not career-oriented. In other words, women are less productive than men

• B. Organizational Inequality Paradigm (William P. Bridges and Robert L. Nelson)

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Labor Market Theories

• --Some argue that employers have the right to discriminate to pursue efficiency (such as Richard Epstein)

• --tainted market theories (supply and demand are important for wage determination, but that external, invidious forces intervene in market processes to the detriment of those working in predominantly female jobs): employers’ discrimination is not allowed. Cultural bias is costly in markets and will tend to be driven out by the forces of competition

• --Comparable worth theories however argue that the pay of predominantly female jobs should be increased so as to match that of male jobs (such as Paula England)

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Comparable Worth Theories (1)• Three assumptions: • 1. the idea of cultural devaluation (not only women as a

gender but every feminine, including female skills, traits, and tasks, are undervalued by society and male decision makers

• 2. the proposition that this devaluation insinuates itself into the wage determination process by affecting the kinds of judgments that are made in the job evaluation schemes found among major employers

• 3. the diminished wages that accompany cultural devaluation become a marketwide phenomenon. The discrimination in question flows from cultural sources. As elements of a cultural system, the beliefs involved can be seen both as pervasive and as unconsciously held. Because they are socialized into these belief systems as children, adult decision makers of either gender may put them into play without even realizing that they are doing so

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Comparable Worth Theories (2)

• Can it be a solution for gender inequality at work by increasing wage rates for jobs that are predominantly female?

• According to the advocates of this approach, by increasing the wage rates for “women’s jobs”:

• 1. gender inequality at work would be diminished;• 2. as “women’s work” get higher pay, the cultural

yardsticks that measure female work unfairly• But scholars such as Fischel and Lazear, increasing the

pay of predominantly female jobs would undermine women’s position in the labor market

• Whether cultural bias or competitive markets is more crucial to cause gender inequality at pay remains unclear

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The Organizational Inequality Paradigm

• Noneconomic influences on pay levels are systematically linked to the interests of organizational constituencies and are important sources of wage differences

• 1. Bureaucratic Politics

• 2. Organizational Reproduction of Culture

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Bridges and Nelson’s Organizational Inequality Theory

• 1. Bureaucratic Politics• Bureaucratic politics are influential participants in

salary setting (e. g. the main actors in many large organizations would include staff officials within personnel departments, line officials in various departments, senior management, employee unions, and other activist groups)A. the imbalance of political resources between the

incumbents of predominantly male and predominantly female jobs can generate economic inequality between men and women

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Bridges and Nelson’s Organizational Inequality TheoryB. Bureaucratic rules: they literally create some of the

participants in the system, specify the issues on which various groups can claim to have a legitimate interest, and determine the kinds of political resources that can be brought to bear on the decision-making process

C. The nature of the decision-making principles that govern the system (such as the prevailing rate standard or the organization’s market “positioning” wage policy) and how these formal principles are translated into organizational practice (e. g. through the implementation of a wage survey)

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Bridges and Nelson’s Organizational Inequality Theory

• 2. The Organizational Reproduction of Culture• Women occupy a cultural position that devalues their

economic contributions• The general cultural disparagement of things feminine

has its most pronounced influence on pay disparities in interaction with the culture and structure of employing organizations (in other words, the organization’s normative and structural aspects of its environment determines the degree of sexual inequality)

• E. g. proportion of women workers may be higher in one industry (such as electronic) but lower in others (such as automobile). Women workers are recruited in some times (such as World War II.) but are not welcomed in some other times (such as the Great Depression)

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Bridges and Nelson’s Organizational Inequality Theory

• Internal labor markets are important of how organizations mediate the effect of labor markets:

• When workforce is made up of internal labor market, in which workers are hired for entry-level positions but then progress up a series of organization-specific job ladders, many jobs in the organizations cannot be readily compared with jobs in the external market. In large organizations, internal labor markets function to decouple pay setting from the market

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Gendered Labor Market in Hong Kong

• The noneconomic influences in Hong Kong’s labor market:• Familialism: • Women’s role is defined by the family• In traditional Chinese values, the family plays an important role in

supporting the traditional images of women as the weaker and subordinate sex. Though the size, composition and form of the family have changed in the twentieth century, women have not been able to sever their times from oppressive patriarchal family structures

• The centrality of family in Hong Kong’s economy was emphasized in the course of Hong Kong’s industrialization between 1960s and 1980s: during that time, economic migrants and refugees from mainland China fueled the process. The colonial Government did not cater to the needs of the expanding population. New arrivals therefore turned to their families and familial groups for assistance and survival

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Family and Hong Kong’s Economy

• The prevalence of family-owned enterprises• Family is regarded as an option of last resort in

of government’s social security assistance• The inheritance laws in the New Territories in

Hong Kong still deprive women of the right to inherit their family property

• Gender stereotyping images and textbooks—emphasize women’s subordinate role

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Work-family conflict for married women with paid work

• In general, women with paid work have gained more influence and power over family matter. However, these women are still expected to play out their traditional family roles and they are still responsible for childcare and housework

• It is believed that women are responsible for housework regardless of their employment status

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Organizational Inequality

• Employers often perceived them to be less committed to their family commitments

• Although Hong Kong women’s advances in education and paid work, there is still a cultural gap in attitudes toward these changes

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Ethnicized Labor Market in China (1)• Chinese urban history is replete with instances

of labor markets divided by native-place cliques• The native-place based ethnic identity is not

essential. It labeled only after people from the same place flock to a new area (mostly a city)

• How the boundary is demarcated? 1. Earlier arrivals controlled the most lucrative economic opportunities, they also unified to prevent the competition for the resources from late comers; 2. “Insider”/”outsider” (or “native”/”immigrant”) identity and division

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Ethnicized Labor Market in China (2)

• Patterns of economic specialization by native place are keys to understand “ethnic division of labor” in urban China in late imperial period till 1949 (W. G. Skinner): see case studies in Beijing (D. Strand), Hankou (W. Rowe), Singapore, Penang and Malacca (Mak Lau Fong), Hong Kong (E. Sinn, C. F. Blake [New Territories], D. W. Sparks [Teochew]) and Taiwan (D. Ownby and S. Harrell, Hill Gates)

• In contemporary China, especially after 1978, first time since the revolution of 1949 that peasants could leave their rural homes to seek jobs in cities—native-place based ethnic status becomes important, once again

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Characteristics of Shanghai’s economy before 1949

• 1. Native place was the basis on which social and economic hierarchies in Shanghai were structured– The Shanghai elites composed mostly of people from Jiangnan– Immigrants from northern part of the Jiangsu province—the

“Subei” [northern Jiangsu] people—dominated the ranks of unskilled laborers. Later, “Subei people” become a term to designate those poor, ignorant, and unsophiscated people in Shanghai by the elites

• 2. The Subei identity as ethnic is that it represented the construction of social category that enabled one group of people to declare its superiority over another in a specific historical context

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Migration and Urban Labor Markets in Contemporary China (1)

• Background information:• After the revolution of 1949, the CCP undertook

extensive efforts to curb the flow of rural migrants to urban areas. The policy was reinforced after the practice of the household registration system (戶口制度 ) from 1958

• Things changed after 1978. From then on, a significant amount of peasants left their rural homes to work in cities. By 1988, migrants represented nearly one-fourth of the population of China’s cities with populations over 1,000,000.

• They were surplus labor in rural areas. Employment in agriculture and rural industry cannot absorb these laborers

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Migration and Urban Labor Markets in Contemporary China (2)

• What kinds of jobs these people would take?

• Migrants congregate in the lowest-status, least lucrative, and most physically demanding jobs

• Young urban residents prefer to seek employment in the foreign-dominated sector of the labor market. They regard those jobs taken by immigrants as “heavy and dirty jobs”

• Most work that can be classified as jobs in the “secondary labor market”

• E. g. Factories established by Hong Kong investors in the Pearl River Delta could not attract local people. Most workers came from Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui, Henan and Jiangxi. Workers from the same area tend to live together and to congregate in the same workshops of particular factories

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Conclusion

• Ethnicity is not a trait that people are born with or carry with them, but rather involves a process created in the context of particular social relationships and in particular historical contexts

• In urban labor markets like urban China today, regionally defined ethnic identities shed light on certain structures of inequality and bases of worker solidarity