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Women as a group have often been divided by a number of intersecting inequalities: class, race, ethnicity, caste. As individuals, often isolated in home-based work, their resistance has tended to be restricted to the traditional weapons of the weak. Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organization and mobilization. This crucial book offers vibrant accounts of how women working on farms, as sex workers, maids, and waste pickers, in fisheries and factories, have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle.

Precarious employment presents a monumental challenge to the social, economic, and political stability of labour markets in industrialized societies and there is widespread consensus that its growth is contributing to a series of common social inequalities, especially along the lines of gender and citizenship. The editors argue that these inequalities are evident at the national level across industrialized countries, as well as at the regional level within federal societies, such as Canada, Germany, the United States, and Australia and in the European Union. This book brings together contributions addressing this issue which include case studies exploring the size, nature, and dynamics of precarious employment in different industrialized countries and chapters examining conceptual and methodological challenges in the study of precarious employment in comparative perspective. The collection aims to yield new ways of understanding, conceptualizing, measuring, and responding, via public policy and other means – such as new forms of union organization and community organizing at multiple scales – to the forces driving labour market insecurity. For both its empirical and its theoretical content, this book is an essential addition to the libraries of scholars of gender, of work/life balance, and of what the editors prefer to call ‘precariousness in employment. - Anne Junor, Industrial Relations Research Centre, The University of New South Wales, Australia Leah F. Vosko is Canada Research Chair in Feminist Political Economy at the School of Social Sciences (Political Science), York University, Toronto, Canada. Martha MacDonald is Professor in the Economics department at Saint Mary’s University, Nova Scotia, Canada. Iain Campbell is a Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. 1. Introduction: Gender and the Concept of Precarious Employment Leah F. Vosko, Martha Macdonald and Iain Campbell 2. Canada: Gendered Precariousness and Social Reproduction Leah F. Vosko and Lisa Clark 3. The United States: Different Sources of Precariousness in a Mosaic of Employment Arrangements Francoise Carré and James Heintz 4. Australia: Casual Employment, Part-Time Employment and the Resilience of the Male-Breadwinner Model Iain Campbell, Gillian Whitehouse and Janeen Baxter 5. Japan: The Reproductive Bargain and the Making of Precarious Employment Heidi Gottfried 6. Ireland: Precarious Employment in the Context of the European Employment Strategy Julia S. O’Connor 7. The United Kingdom: From Flexible Employment to Vulnerable Workers Jacqueline O’Reilly, John Macinnes, Tiziana Nazio and Jose Roche 8. The Netherlands: Precarious Employment in a Context of Flexicurity Susanne D. Burri 9. France: Precariousness, Gender and the Challenges for Labour Market Policy Jeanne Fagnani and Marie-Thérèse Letablier 10. Spain: Continuity and Change in Precarious Employment John Macinnes 11. Germany: Precarious Employment and the Rise of Mini-Jobs Claudia Weinkopf 12. Sweden: Precarious Work and Precarious Unemployment Inger Jonsson and Anita Nyberg 13. Spatial Dimensions of Gendered Precariousness: Challenges for Comparative Analysis Martha Macdonald 14. Investigating Longitudinal Dimensions of Precarious Employment: Conceptual And Practical Issues Sylvia Fuller 15. Precarious Lives in the New Economy: Comparative Intersectional Analysis Wallace Clement, Sophie Mathieu, Steven Prus and Emre Uckardesler 16. Precarious Employment in the Health Care Sector

In the thriving urban economies of late thirteenth-century Catalonia, Jewish and Christian women labored to support their families and their communities. The Fruit of Her Hands examines how gender, socioeconomic status, and religious identity shaped how these women lived and worked. Sarah Ifft Decker draws on thousands of notarial contracts as well as legal codes, urban ordinances, and Hebrew responsa literature to explore the lived experiences of Jewish and Christian women in the cities of Barcelona, Girona, and Vic between 1250 and 1350. Relying on an expanded definition of women's work that includes the management of household resources as well as wage labor and artisanal production, this study highlights the crucial contributions women made both to their families and to urban economies. Christian women, Ifft Decker finds, were deeply embedded in urban economic life in ways that challenge traditional dichotomies between women in northern and Mediterranean Europe. And while Jewish women typically played a less active role than their Christian counterparts, Ifft Decker shows how, in moments of communal change and crisis, they could and did assume prominent roles in urban economies. Through its attention to the distinct experiences of Jewish and Christian women, The Fruit of Her Hands advances our understanding of Jewish acculturation in the Iberian Peninsula and the shared experiences of women of different faiths. It will be welcomed by specialists in gender studies and religious studies as well as students and scholars of medieval Iberia.

Globalization and economic restructuring have decimated formal jobs in developing countries, pushing many women into informal employment such as direct selling of cosmetics, perfume, and other personal care products as a way to make up the difference between household income and expenses. In Ecuador, with its persistent economic crisis and few opportunities for financially and personally rewarding work, women increasingly choose direct selling as a way to earn income by activating their social networks. While few women earn the cars and trips that are iconic prizes in the direct selling organization, many use direct selling as part of a set of household survival strategies. In this first in-depth study of a cosmetics direct selling organization in Latin America, Erynn Masi de Casanova explores womens identities as workers, including their juggling of paid work and domestic responsibilities, their ideas about professional appearance, and their strategies for collecting money from customers. Focusing on women who work for the countrys leading direct selling organization, she offers fascinating portraits of the everyday lives of women selling personal care products in Ecuadors largest city, Guayaquil. Addressing gender relations (including a look at mens direct and indirect involvement), the importance of image, and the social and economic context of direct selling, Casanova challenges assumptions that this kind of flexible employment resolves womens work/home conflicts and offers an important new perspective on womens work in developing countries.

With the spread of neoliberal projects, responsibility for the welfare of minority and poor citizens has shifted from states to local communities. Businesses, municipalities, grassroots activists, and state functionaries share in projects meant to help vulnerable populations become self-supportive. Ironically, such projects produce odd discursive blends of justice, solidarity, and wellbeing, and place the languages of feminist and minority rights side by side with the language of apolitical consumerism. Using theoretical concepts of economic citizenship and emotional capitalism,Economic Citizenship exposes the paradoxes that are deep within neoliberal interpretations of citizenship and analyzes the unexpected consequences of applying globally circulating notions to concrete local contexts.

With this book, Cheryl Hicks brings to light the voices and viewpoints of black working-class women, especially southern migrants, who were the subjects of urban and penal reform in early-twentieth-century New York. Hicks compares the ideals of racial uplift and reform programs of middle-class white and black activists to the experiences and perspectives of those whom they sought to protect and, often, control.In need of support as they navigated the discriminatory labor and housing markets and contended with poverty, maternity, and domestic violence, black women instead found themselves subject to hostility from black leaders, urban reformers, and the police. Still, these black working-class women struggled to uphold their own standards of respectable womanhood. Through their actions as well as their words, they challenged prevailing views regarding black women and morality in urban America. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hicks explores the complexities of black working-class women's lives and illuminates the impact of racism and sexism on early-twentieth-century urban reform and criminal justice initiatives.

Laboring in the Shadow of Empire: Race, Gender, and Care Work in Portugal examines the everyday lives of an African-descendant care service workforce that labors in an ostensibly \"anti-racial\" Europe and against the backdrop of the Portuguese colonial empire. While much of the literature on global care work has focused on Asian and Latine migrant care workers, there is comparatively less research that explicitly examines African care workers and their migration histories to Europe. Sociologist Celeste Vaughan Curington focuses on Portugal-a European setting with comparatively liberal policies around family settlement and naturalization for migrants. In this setting, rapid urbanization in the late twentieth century, along with a national push to reconcile work and family, has shaped the growth of paid home care and cleaning service industries. Many researchers focus on informal work settings, where immigrant rights are restricted and many workers are undocumented or without permanent residence status. Curington instead examines workers who have accessed citizenship or permanent residence status and also explores African women's experiences laboring in care and service industries in the formal market, revealing how deeply colonial and intersectional logics of a racialized and international division of reproductive labor in Portugal render these women \"hyper-invisible\" and \"hyper-visible\" as \"appropriate\" workers in Lisbon.

In recent times, the Sahel region has been particularly identified as the flash point of climate change crisis in Africa, due to the persistent reliance on both biophysical factors and natural resources, especially agriculture for economic livelihood. Agains t this scenario, this study provides an empirical evidence to establish the nexus between climate change and women employment in agriculture within the Sahel region. The study employed panel data from 1990 to 2020 of 9 countries within the Sahel region. Consequently, a panel Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) was used to estimate the relationship between the variables of interest. Thus, the results showed that about 60% of women in the Sahel region are actively employed in agriculture. However, change in rainfall pattern has a significant adverse effect on women employment in agriculture. In view of these findings, we conclude that a rise in women's employment in agriculture would be mitigated if adverse effects of changes in rainfall pattern are controlled. Additionally, policymakers should be proactive in policy formulation that increases the region's resilience and adaptation to the future adverse effects of agriculturally induced climate change.

With the turn of the century came increased industrialization and urbanization, and in Toronto one of the most visible results of this modernization was the influx of young, single women to the city. They came seeking work, independence, and excitement, but they were not to realize these goals without contention. Carolyn Strange examines the rise of the Toronto 'working girl,' the various agencies that 'discovered' her, the nature of 'the girl problem' from the point of view of moral overseers, the various strategies devised to solve this 'problem,' and lastly, the young women's responses to moral regulation. The 'working girl' seemed a problem to reformers, evangelists, social investigators, police, the courts, and journalists - men, mostly, who saw women's debasement as certain and appointed themselves as protectors of morality. They portrayed single women as victims of potential economic and sexual exploitation and urban immorality. Such characterization drew attention away from the greater problems these women faced: poverty, unemployment, poor housing and nutrition, and low wages. In the course of her investigation, Strange suggests fresh approaches to working-class and urban history. Her sources include the census, court papers, newspaper accounts, philanthropic society reports, and royal commissions, but Strange also employs less conventional sources, such as photographs and popular songs. She approaches the topic from a feminist viewpoint that is equally sensitive to the class and racial dimensions of the 'girl problem,' and compares her findings with the emergence of the working woman in contemporary United States and Great Britain. The overriding observation is that Torontonians projected their fears and hopes about urban industrialization onto the figure of the working girl. Young women were regulated from factories and offices, to streetcars and dancehalls, in an effort to control the deleterious effects of industrial capitalism. By the First World War however, their value as contributors to the expanding economy began to outweigh fear of their moral endangerment. As Torontonians grew accustomed to life in the industrial metropolis, the 'working girl' came to be seen as a valuable resource.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, due to continuing male dominance there exists widespread discrimination and gender gaps in Pakistani society which are hindering the progress of women to take an active part in development. It is common perception in development literature that countries can get considerable benefits for growth and economic development if women become more empowered. The present study while using the data of Demographic and Health Survey (PDHS) 2012–2013 tried to explore the factors that can play important role in empowering the women in Pakistan. In this regard, descriptive and correlation analysis, Logit, and Ordered Logit models have been estimated. It has been found that age, living in urban areas, education of women, participation in paid job, ownership of assets, wealth index of the household, number of sons and daughters alive and use of electronic media have positive relationships with different empowerment dimensions. However, age of household head, size of family and being relative of the husband has negative relationships with empowerment indicators. Husband’s education and use of print media have insignificant relationship with the women’s empowerment.