Introduction

The rise of global retail value chains has been closely associated with changing gender patterns of work and growing labour force participation of women across many countries. As discussed in the previous chapter, global retailers facilitate the commercial provision of many affordable goods previously produced unpaid by women within the home. These include processed food, ready-prepared meals, ready-made garments, personal care and household goods. At the retail end of value chains, companies monitor customers (including their gender profile) to deliver a wide range of products. At the producer end, retailers coordinate suppliers to deliver on a JIT basis at low cost while ensuring quality. This commercial model, and coordination of end-to-end JIT delivery, has important implications for the types of paid work undertaken by women and men at every tier of retail value chains, from retail sales to global sourcing. Examining this is central to addressing the core questions of this book: How are global retail value chains shaping gender patterns of work, and what are the gendered outcomes for workers?

In this chapter, I explore this further by examining how engagement in global retail value chains is driving gendered fragmentation of work. It examines how women are concentrated in work that is more flexible, less well-remunerated and more insecure compared to men in every value chain tier. Drawing on information from various sources, it provides an illustrative gender mapping of work across the global agri-food value chain supplying supermarkets. This shows how gender discrimination is systemic at every tier from retail through distribution to production. The chapter then examines the trajectories of economic and social downgrading and upgrading. This provides a framework for assessing challenges and opportunities for attaining more gender equitable outcomes, which will be examined in more depth in later chapters.

As we saw in Chapter 2, three key issues constituting the mantra of global retail value chains are cost, quality and speed of delivery. I argue in this chapter that fragmented workers provide the ‘oil’ that lubricates the integrated functioning of global retail value chains on a JIT basis across national borders. In most countries in which retailers sell and/or source, labour markets are deeply embedded in social norms that configure the gender division of labour. Traditionally this has assigned certain unpaid functions to women within households—including food preparation and sewing.