Working Women, Working Men

Working Women, Working Men
Author: Joel Wolfe
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 334
Release: 1993
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780822313472

In Working Women, Working Men, Joel Wolfe traces the complex historical development of the working class in Sào Paulo, Brazil, Latin America's largest industrial center. He studies the way in which Sào Paulo's working men and women experienced Brazil's industrialization, their struggles to gain control over their lives within a highly authoritarian political system, and their rise to political prominence in the first half of the twentieth century. Drawing on a diverse range of sources--oral histories along with union, industry, and government archival materials--Wolfe's account focuses not only on labor leaders and formal Left groups, but considers the impact of grassroots workers' movements as well. He pays particular attention to the role of gender in the often-contested relations between leadership groups and thee rank and file. Wolfe's analysis illuminates how various class and gender ideologies influenced the development of unions, industrialists' strategies, and rank-and-file organizing and protest activities. This study reveals how workers in Sào Paulo maintained a local grassroots social movement that, by the mid-1950s, succeeded in seizing control of Brazil's state-run official unions. By examining the actions of these workers in their rise to political prominence in the 1940s and 1950s, this book provides a new understanding of the sources and development of populist politics in Brazil.

Feminist Global Health Security

Feminist Global Health Security
Author: Clare Wenham
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2021
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0197556930

"Global health security, focused on a firefighting short-term response efforts fail to consider the differential impacts of outbreaks on women. For example, the policy response to the Zika outbreak centred on limiting the spread of the vector through civic participation and asking women to defer pregnancy. Both actions are inherently gendered and reveal a distinct lack of consideration of the everyday lives of women. These policies placed women in a position whereby were blamed if they had a child born with Congenital Zika Syndrome, and at the same time governments required women to undertake invisible labour for vector control. What does this tell us about the role of women in global health security? This feminist critique of the Zika outbreak, argues that global health security has thus far lacked a substantive feminist engagement, with the result that the very policies created to manage an outbreak of disease disproportionately fail to protect women. Women are both differentially infected and affected by epidemics. Yet, the dominant policy narrative of global health security has created pathways which focus on protecting the international spread of disease to state economies, rather than protecting those who are most at risk. As such, the state-based structure of global health security provides the fault-line for global health security and women. This book highlights the ways in which women are disadvantaged by global health security policy, through engagement with feminist security studies concepts of visibility; social and stratified reproduction; intersectionality; and structural violence. It argues that it was no coincidence that poor, black women living in low quality housing were the most affected by the Zika outbreak and will continue to be so, until global health security is gender mainstreamed. More broadly, I ask what would global health policy look like if it were to take gender seriously, and how would this impact global disease control sustainability?"--

Cashing in on Education

Cashing in on Education
Author: Mercedes Mateo Díaz
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2016-10-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464809038

Investments in education across countries in Latin America and the Caribbean have transformed the lives of millions of girls and the prospects of their families and societies. Unleashing the full economic potential of women is nevertheless still a curtailed issue in the region: just about half of women are unable to participate in paid work. The majority of the population out of the labor market is women between the ages of 24 and 45. This is the largest share of the available pool of unused human capital countries have, and where mothers of young children are concentrated. This book argues that more and better childcare constitutes a fundamental policy option to improve female outcomes in the labor market, but countries need to pay particular attention to the design and features of such services. First-rate educational programs will be useless if children are not enrolled or do not attend formal education centers. A large program expansion will be wasted if parents cannot enroll their children because they are unable to reach the center, don’t trust its quality, if the program is too expensive, or if work and care schedules are not compatible. Through an integrated framework applied to each country and an overview of the existing evidence, this book addresses the why and what questions about policy relevant instruments to achieve female labor participation. Parts I and II of the book lay out the motivation for Latin-American and Caribbean countries to act depicting their current situation both in terms of women’s labor participation and the use and provision of childcare services. Moreover, this book tackles the how question contributing to the incipient evidence about factors affecting the take-up of programs and demand for childcare services and other informal care arrangements. Part III of the book explores how to improve services and implement more and better formal, center-based care arrangements for young children. It looks at international benchmarks, discusses different experiences and proposes specific actions to solve potential inequalities in access to childcare.

Fighting Forced Labour

Fighting Forced Labour
Author: Patricía Trindade Maranhão Costa
Publisher:
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2009
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

This book shows how Brazil is leading the way for the rest of Latin America in fighting forced labour.

The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Markets, Poverty and Inequality in Brazil

The Short-Term Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Markets, Poverty and Inequality in Brazil
Author: International Monetary Fund
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2021-03-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1513571648

We document the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Brazilian labor market focusing on employment, wages and hours worked using the nationally representative household surveys PNAD-Continua and PNAD COVID. Sectors most susceptible to the shock because they are more contact-intensive and less teleworkable, such as construction, domestic services and hospitality, suffered large job losses and reductions in hours. Given low income workers experienced the largest decline in earnings, extreme poverty and the Gini coefficient based on labor income increased by around 9.2 and 5 percentage points, respectively, due to the immediate shock. The government’s broad based, temporary Emergency Aid transfer program more than offset the labor income losses for the bottom four deciles, however, such that poverty relative to the pre-COVID baseline fell. At a cost of around 4 percent of GDP in 2020 such support is not fiscally sustainable beyond the short-term and ended in late 2020. The challenge will be to avoid a sharp increase in poverty and inequality if the labor market does not pick up sufficiently fast in 2021.

Sustaining Activism

Sustaining Activism
Author: Jeffrey W. Rubin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2013-02-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822399318

In 1986, a group of young Brazilian women started a movement to secure economic rights for rural women and transform women's roles in their homes and communities. Together with activists across the country, they built a new democracy in the wake of a military dictatorship. In Sustaining Activism, Jeffrey W. Rubin and Emma Sokoloff-Rubin tell the behind-the-scenes story of this remarkable movement. As a father-daughter team, they describe the challenges of ethnographic research and the way their collaboration gave them a unique window into a fiery struggle for equality. Starting in 2002, Rubin and Sokoloff-Rubin traveled together to southern Brazil, where they interviewed activists over the course of ten years. Their vivid descriptions of women’s lives reveal the hard work of sustaining a social movement in the years after initial victories, when the political way forward was no longer clear and the goal of remaking gender roles proved more difficult than activists had ever imagined. Highlighting the tensions within the movement about how best to effect change, Sustaining Activism ultimately shows that democracies need social movements in order to improve people’s lives and create a more just society.

Getting to Work

Getting to Work
Author: Jennifer L. Solotaroff
Publisher: World Bank Publications
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2020-03-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1464810680

Sri Lanka has shown remarkable persistence in low female labor force participation rates—at 36 percent from 2015 to 2017, compared with 75 percent for same-aged men—despite overall economic growth and poverty reduction over the past decade. The trend stands in contrast to the country’s achievements in human capital development that favor women, such as high levels of female education and low total fertility rates, as well as its status as an upper-middle-income country. This study intends to better understand the puzzle of women’s poor labor market outcomes in Sri Lanka. Using nationally representative secondary survey data—as well as primary qualitative and quantitative research—it tests three hypotheses that would explain gender gaps in labor market outcomes: (1) household roles and responsibilities, which fall disproportionately on women, and the associated sociophysical constraints on women’s mobility; (2) a human capital mismatch, whereby women are not acquiring the proper skills demanded by job markets; and (3) gender discrimination in job search, hiring, and promotion processes. Further, the analysis provides a comparison of women’s experience of the labor market between the years leading up to the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war (2006†“09) and the years following the civil war (2010†“15). The study recommends priority areas for addressing the multiple supply- and demand-side factors to improve women’s labor force participation rates and reduce other gender gaps in labor market outcomes. It also offers specific recommendations for improving women’s participation in the five private sector industries covered by the primary research: commercial agriculture, garments, tourism, information and communication technology, and tea estate work. The findings are intended to influence policy makers, educators, and employment program practitioners with a stake in helping Sri Lanka achieve its vision of inclusive and sustainable job creation and economic growth. The study also aims to contribute to the work of research institutions and civil society in identifying the most effective means of engaging more women— and their untapped potential for labor, innovation, and productivity—in Sri Lanka’s future.

Making Transnational Feminism

Making Transnational Feminism
Author: Millie Thayer
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 533
Release: 2009-10-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1135197768

This ethnographic study examines the transnational relations among feminist movements at the end of the twentieth century, exploring two differently situated women’s organizations in the Northeast Brazilian state of Pernambuco. The conventional narrative of globalization tells the story of inexorable forces beyond the capacity of individuals to mute or transcend. But this study tells a different story, one of social actors purposefully weaving cross-border relationships. From this vantage point, global social forces are not immaculately conceived. Instead, they are constituted by human actors with their own interests and identities, located in particular social contexts. Making Transnational Feminism takes what some have called "global civil society" as its object, moving beyond both dire predictions and euphoric celebrations to understand how transnational political relationships are constructed and sustained across social and geographical divides. It also provides a compelling case study for use in advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in globalization, gender studies, and social movements.