Introduction

This book draws on research undertaken over 20 years, a journey I outlined in the preface. It aims to unpack some of the complexities of changing gender patterns of work associated with global value chains. My experience, talking with workers in many sectors and countries over the years, is that both benefits and challenges come from working in global production. It is often preferable to alternative livelihood options. However, it can also involve significant problems, especially for the most precarious workers. For women, paid work can provide a route to greater economic independence, despite being low paid and despite combining it with multiple household and care responsibilities. As a Chilean temporary fruit worker told me in 1998, ‘We have always worked hard, now we are being paid for it.’

In my research, I have always tried to analyse both the commercial and the social dimensions of global value chains. I soon realized it is not possible to understand how one sphere operates without understanding how it interacts with the other. Analysing this interaction underpinned the development of the global (re)production framework examined in Chapter 4. An important dimension has been the commercial retail of many goods previously produced by women unpaid within households is now based on paid work in production largely in middle- and low-income countries. Global value chains, coordinated by buyers, now reach beyond a narrow market focus, into the households of consumers, operations of suppliers and lives of workers and smallholder farmers.

The G(r)PN framework has also helped unpack tensions within global value chains between the financial drivers of cost and efficiency and the societal drivers of quality and caring. This enables differentiation between a low road, based on downgrading trajectories of low wages, poor conditions and few rights, and a high road, based on upgrading trajectories of higher productivity with better rights, terms and conditions. Analysing the commercial dimension helps us understand how financial drivers and buyer purchasing practices can exert constant pressure on suppliers to reduce unit labour costs (via low wages or rising productivity) while delivering on quality. Analyzing the social dimension helps understand how fragmented work sustains the commercial dynamic of global value chains.