SOSC 300K

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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 Nelsons research)
• 2. Gender and Work in Hong Kong
• B. Ethnicized Labor Market (Emily Honigs
  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 mens
  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 womens jobs
• 1. gender inequality at work would be diminished
• 2. as womens 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 womens 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 Nelsons 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 Nelsons Organizational Inequality
Theory

• B. 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 organizations 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 Nelsons 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 organizations 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 Nelsons 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 Kongs labor
  market
• Familialism
• Womens 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 Kongs economy
  was emphasized in the course of Hong Kongs
  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 Kongs Economy

• The prevalence of family-owned enterprises
• Family is regarded as an option of last resort in
  of governments 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 textbooksemphasize
  womens 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 womens 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 citiesnative-place based ethnic status
  becomes important, once again

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Characteristics of Shanghais 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
  provincethe Subei northern Jiangsu
  peopledominated 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 (????) 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 Chinas 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