Enacting the global economy in Sao Paulo, Brazil: The impact of labor market restructuring on low-income women

This dissertation examines the impact of global economic restructuring on the urban labor market in São Paulo, Brazil with a focus on the micro level—specifically, squatter settlements, households, and low-income women workers. It explores the interaction between national and local dynamics with global economic change, industrial restructuring and women workers, the changing survival strategies, and the new role of labor unions and regional and global coalitions of actors. It calls into question the dyads, informalformal sector, FordistPost-Fordist, and localglobal scales. Low-income women workers in all economic sectors form an integral part of the current global economic system and are not excluded from it. The impact of economic globalization has been different for women than for men—higher unemployment; more precarious work in the home, as vendors, and in sweatshops; fewer jobs as full-time maids because of the declining middle class; and the greater need to support the household and often the household's micro-enterprise with little or no help from male household members who have also become unemployed. The findings are based on over 200 intensive interviews over a period of 13 months in 1996, 1998, and 2000, primarily in three communities, including two squatter settlements, in the Metropolitan Region of São Paulo and from the analysis of statistics on employment. Interview subjects include women workers, as well as street vendors, immigrant Bolivian sweatshop workers, labor union activists, industrial managers, government officials, and investment bankers on Wall Street. By means of direct quotations, the different actors give their views of economic globalization and the unemployment crisis. For the six firm studied, the impact of the economic crisis and globalization has been a decline in sales leading to the need to lay off or exploit workers. Rather than constituting a byproduct of the opening of the market, the growth in downgraded manufacturing must be considered as an integral part of global industrial restructuring. The flexibilization of production and retail has led to the increasingly precarious nature both of the “formal sector” with an increase in unregistered salaried and outsourced work and of the “informal sector” with increased competition, lack of a salaried worker in the household to buy stock wholesale, and the decline of income of clients, all leading to increasing debt. The dissertation ends with a discussion of policies and programs aimed at dealing with the unemployment crisis, the social actors who are or could again become involved in fighting for change, and their actual and potential strategies. Destiny is not written in stone.