Tag: child labor

Child Labor Among Syrian Refugees: A Closer Look at the Coercive Effects of Lebanon’s Refugee Policies

By Aaron Burroughs

Child labor among Syrian refugees in Lebanon is exceedingly present and, unfortunately, ordinary. An estimated 180,000 children are working in Lebanon, 3 out of 4 of which are from Syria [1]. The conditions faced by children forced into child labor in Lebanon are harrowing, even by adult labor standards. In a survey conducted by the International Rescue Committee [2], over two thirds of Syrian children engaged in child labor are forced to work six days a week, over half of them work up to ten hours a day, and one in four work between 11 and 15 hours each day. These children, as young as six years old, typically work under dangerous conditions, with 60% of the children surveyed saying they have faced some form of violence in the course of their labor. Child labor that falls below certain minimum age requirements is a violation of fundamental human rights inscribed in the Convention on the Rights of the Child [3] and the International Labor Organization’s Minimum Age Convention [4]. At the domestic level, labor under the age of 16 that “harms the health, safety or morals of children” or prevents the child from pursuing an education is illegal in Lebanon [4], but the prohibition is largely unenforced [5]. While a formal prohibition on child labor is a crucial first step, to fully confront the issue, there must be a reckoning with the complex set of legal and social exclusions that create the conditions under which child labor among refugee populations occurs. To truly protect the rights of Syrian refugee children, Lebanon must ensure employment opportunities for Syrian refugees of working age and fair access to resources and services, easing the coercive economic conditions that necessitate child labor within refugee households.

The harsh reality is that many families in Lebanon, especially refugee families, are forced to rely on the income of their children to sustain even a minimally acceptable livelihood. In many cases, children are the main or sole source of income for households, due to restricted job opportunities and exclusionary legal statuses for adult refugees [6]. While child labor is harmful to a child’s development and a violation of human rights, it may be a family’s last lifeline.

It should go without saying that life for Syrian refugees in Lebanon is extraordinarily difficult. An estimated 1.5 million Syrian refugees reside in Lebanon, a country with a population of only 4.4 million people [6]. 76 percent of refugee households are living below the poverty line and 58 percent are living in extreme poverty [7]. Receiving a work permit outside the sectors of agriculture, cleaning, and construction is virtually impossible [15], leading 92% of economically active Syrian refugees to work in informal sectors where they are paid less than minimum wage and deprived of social protections [14]. The economic precarity of refugee livelihood in Lebanon produces and sustains an epidemic of refugee child labor.

The international human rights regime has worked to eradicate violations of the rights of children and refugees. Lebanon’s refugee policy, however, is vague and insufficient. The state is not a party to any international refugee conventions[9], leaving absent a national framework for refugee rights [10]. Domestic legislation regarding Syrian refugees does exist and is instituted on an ad hoc basis. However, the Lebanese government avoids the term ‘refugee’ as this entails binding legal actions, and, instead, refers to Syrian refugees as ‘displaced’ [14]. We should understand these actions as tactics by the Lebanese government to evade any obligation to provide refugees permanent residence or tailored services. Aside from the stress mass inflows of people into the country would place on the economy and the country’s resources, Lebanon’s fragile sectarian balance is threatened by foreigners, refugees or otherwise. The inflow of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon after the Arab-Israeli War in 1948, for example, is often cited as a prominent cause of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) [16]. Overt anti-refugee sentiment is held by the government and many Lebanese citizens, making any issue regarding refugees both highly politicized and provocative. Lebanon’s vague policies act as a barrier to refugee integration and protection, working (unsuccessfully) to deter migrant flows and to avoid checks on the government’s treatment of refugees.

In May of 2015, Lebanon suspended the registration of Syrian refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), effectively abolishing the right to asylum as a legitimate reason for entry. The UNHCR registered about one million refugees since the start of the Syrian Civil War, but an estimated 500,000 more Syrians were not able to register [11]. Subsequently, the government established a sponsorship system for unregistered individuals to obtain legal residency status. The sponsor may be a friend or family member, but oftentimes, sponsors exploit the dire circumstances of Syrian refugees, selling sponsorships at a steep price or sponsoring them for employment purposes, creating highly coercive sponsor-refugee relations akin to indentured servitude. The phenomenon of Syrian refugees facing mistreatment and abuse from their employers who extort their labor with threats to cancel their sponsorship is well documented [12]. Additionally, many refugees cannot afford the $200 residency fee also imposed on them by the government, however, and continue to reside in the country illegally [12]. Evidently, the Lebanese government has prioritized erecting obstacles for Syrian refugees to maintain their livelihood over abiding by international law.

Hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees in Lebanon without legal status remain vulnerable to deportation [13], which is why many adult Syrian refugees have resorted to sending their children to work and limiting their own movement and visibility [12]. Employers prefer to hire Syrian children because they are forced to accept far less pay than an adult and will complete more strenuous labor than any “Lebanese boy who wants to do this work” [5]. While unauthorized work by a refugee adult can result in deportation due to heavy policing and constraints enforced upon them [8], refugee children engaged in labor are much less likely to attract retaliatory penalties from the state.

It bears mentioning that the contribution of refugee child labor serves to benefits Lebanon’s economy, and consequently the government has no true incentive to stop it. Refugee child labor avoids the political uproar of refugees competing for jobs with citizens. It helps local Lebanese businesses, both formal and informal, function at a low cost. At the same time, refugee families are able to scrape by instead of being forced to resort to petty crime or violence to sustain themselves. The rights of the children, of course, are subordinate to these concerns, and the best interests of the child fall by the wayside. For Lebanon to genuinely eradicate refugee child labor, it would have to stop treating adult Syrian refugees as a security concern and, instead, as human beings with rights, skills, and dignity, as well as recognize their productive potential to bolster the Lebanese economy. It must create opportunities for adult refugees to participate lawfully and equally as legitimate participants in the labor force. The formalization of the economy and refugee integration of the workforce have the potential to stabilize host economies and improve conditions for all workers [14]. Additionally, the government should offer financial support and services to families whose primary wage earner is unable to work due to injury or illness. Alternative development strategies must also be implemented. The creation of special economic zones that grant work permits to refugees can foster refugee business and sustainable livelihoods, although they must be highly regulated to avoid labor exploitation and must be carefully framed so as not to legitimate and foment nationalistic and anti-refugee sentiment. Greater financial support from the international community is crucial to providing these opportunities through grants and loans and investment, as well as greater resettlement of refugees by countries like the United States. Once employment opportunities are made for refugees to earn a living wage, only then can children graduate from working in the streets to working in the classroom.

Bibliography

  1. UNHCR, Child Labor in Lebanon, unhcr.org, accessed November 6, 2018, https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/.
  2. International Rescue Committee Europe, “New survey reveals extent of hardship and abuse experienced by Syrian children working on streets of Lebanon,” rescue-uk.org, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.rescue-uk.org/press-release/new-survey-reveals-extent-hardship-and-abuse-experienced-syrian-children-working#Fullsurvey.
  3. UNICEF, “FACT SHEET: A summary of the rights under the Convention on the Rights of the Child, unicef.org, accessed Jun21, 2018, https://www.unicef.org/crc/files/Rights_overview.pdf.
  4. Republic of Lebanon Ministry of Labor, “Guide of Decree 8987 on Worst Forms of Child Labour,” ilo.org, accessed November 3, 2018, https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—arabstates/—ro-beirut/documents/publication/wcms_443273.pdf.
  5. Lisa Khoury, “Special report: 180,000 young Syrian refugees are being forced into child labor in Lebanon,” vox.com, accessed June 20, 2018, https://www.vox.com/world/2017/7/24/15991466/syria-refugees-child-labor-lebanon.
  6. Human Rights Watch, “Growing Up Without an Education,” hrw.org, accessed June 25, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/07/19/growing-without-education/barriers-education-syrian-refugee-children-lebanon.
  7. UNHCR, “Survey finds Syrian refugees in Lebanon became poorer, more vulnerable in 2017, unhcr.org, accessed June 24, 2018, http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/news/briefing/2018/1/5a548d174/survey-finds-syrian-refugees-lebanon-poorer-vulnerable-2017.html.
  8. Sima Ghaddar, “Lebanon Treats Refugees as a Security Problem – and It Doesn’t Work,” tcf.org, April 4, 2017, accessed August 15, 2018, https://tcf.org/content/commentary/lebanon-treats-refugees-security-problem-doesnt-work/?session=1. .
  9. Library of Congress, “Refugee Law and Policy: Lebanon,” loc.gov, accessed June    21, 2018, https://www.loc.gov/law/help/refugee-law/lebanon.php
  10. United Nations General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, (G.A. Res. 429 (V), 1951).
  11. Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: New Refugee Policy a Step Forward,” hrw.org, February 14, 2017, accessed June 27, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/02/14/lebanon-new-refugee-policy-step-forward
  12. Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: Residency Rules Put Syrians at Risk,” hrw.org, January 12, 2016, accessed June 27, 2018, https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/01/12/lebanon-residency-rules-put-syrians-risk
  13. Human Rights Watch, “Lebanon: Events of 2016,” hrw.org, accessed June 27, 2018,  https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2017/country-chapters/lebanon.
  14. Diana Essex-Lettieri et al., Refugee Work Rights Report: The Syrian Crisis and Refugee Access to Lawful Work in Greece, Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. (Oakland: Asylum Access, 2017), http://asylumaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Middle-East-Refugee-Work-Rights-Syrian-Crisis.pdf.
  15. Rasha Faek, “Little Hope of Jobs for Syrians in Lebanon and Jordan,” al-fanarmedia.org, February 25, 2017, accessed August 15, 2018, https://www.al-fanarmedia.org/2017/02/lebanon-jordan-syrians-face-bleak-employment-future/.
  16. Maja Janmyr, “No Country of Asylum: ‘Legitimizing’ Lebanon’s Rejection of the 1951 Refugee Convention,” International Journal of Refugee Law 29, no. 3 (2017), https://academic.oup.com/ijrl/article/29/3/438/4345649

Aaron Burroughs served as an undergraduate intern with the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice in Spring and Summer 2018. He now resides in Amman, Jordan.

Child Labor and the Mountain that Eats Men

by Sofia Bonilla

12 JAN 2018

The town of Potosí in Bolivia rests at the bottom of a soaring, 15,800-foot mountain called Cerro Rico. The mountain provides the primary, and nearly only, source of income for the town of 240,000 inhabitants. During their 16th-century conquest of Latin America, the Spanish enslaved the indigenous people there, imported African slaves from overseas, and forced both groups to mine silver from the mountain. At the time, Cerro Rico held one of the richest silver deposits in Bolivia and the world and was a source of abundant wealth for the Spanish Empire. Eventually, the slaves nearly hollowed out the mountain—although there remains a residual supply of silver, Bolivian miners mainly extract tin and zinc.[1]

As a result of years of mining activities, modern-day Cerro Rico is riddled with caverns, shafts, sinkholes, and precarious tunnels, so much so that engineer Nestor Rene Espinoza describes it as “a slab of Swiss cheese.”[2] The risks associated with mining this mountain are not new. Historians estimate that over eight million miners have died since extraction began at Cerro Rico in the mid-1500s.[3] However, these are not the only reasons it is called “The Mountain That Eats Men.” Miners, a majority of whom are of indigenous descent, still use equipment introduced in the nineteenth century: headlamps powered by fire, manual hammers and pickaxes, and outdated drills. Even more startling is the prevalence of child miners, some of whom start mining at age twelve. These children work in oxygen-scarce conditions, risk falling down mine shafts hundreds of feet long, and face being blown to pieces by a surprise detonation. Despite these treacherous conditions, the most common killer is silicosis—a lung disease caused by breathing in rock particles that reduces one’s lifespan to just forty years—locally known as “black lung.”[4] Miners wear face masks for protection, but the thin paper layer does little to stave off the disease.

The child miners earn less than two dollars and fifty cents (US) per day on the precarious mountain, sometimes less, depending on how much silver, tin, and other precious minerals they can extract. Many of these young miners have nowhere else to turn. Cerro Rico is their only option for work. Without their labor to supplement—or even provide—the family income, their families will starve. A majority of the child miners and their families live on the side of the mountain in huts powered by a single light bulb. They perform this extremely dangerous work in the early hours of the morning so they are able to attend school during the day.[5]

Though the many dangers of Cerro Rico loom over Potosí, “[n]either the labor ministry nor COMIBOL—the national mining agency that leases concessions to more than 30 mining cooperatives grouping together some 15,000 miners on Cerro Rico—even attempt to enforce health and safety laws.”[6] Oscar Cáceres, a COMIBOL geologic engineer, explains that the state is not responsible for deaths or accidents on or within the mountain, leaving miners of all ages to their own devices upon entry.[7] The child labor laws in Bolivia allow children as young as ten years old to work legally,[8] while the International Labor Organization sets the general minimum employment age at fifteen years and the minimum age for hazardous work at eighteen.[9] The Bolivian law was created in an effort to make child labor a safer, more regulated practice,[10] but work environments such as Cerro Rico suggest that the law has failed in this respect.

Rather than lowering the legal age of work, governments can create social insurance programs so that children are not expected to supplement household incomes. These programs, such as conditional cash transfers (CCTs), can help poor families—the main demographic that practices child labor—by awarding a monthly salary in exchange for their children attending school. This tactic was successfully implemented through Brazil’s state-funded Bolsa Família program which both prohibits child labor and “provid[es] financial incentives [of twelve USD per month] to poor families that ensure that their children attend school regularly and receive vaccinations.”[11] The World Bank testifies to Bolsa Família’s success, citing it as “one of the key factors behind the positive social outcomes achieved by Brazil in recent years.”[12]

The Bolivian government introduced its own national CCT program in 2006,[13] aimed at alleviating the pressure on children and enabling them to focus on school. The program, called the Bono Juancito Pinto, awards an annual two hundred Bolivianos (twenty-eight USD) to families whose children attend at least eighty percent of the school year. In 2012, President Morales announced that the CCT program had reduced the dropout rate from “6.1 percent in 2006 to 2.0 percent in 2012.”[14] Although UNICEF confirms the program’s positive impact on Bolivia, [15] research by James W. McGuire reveals that Bono Juancito Pinto mainly improved drop-out rates of preschool, first- and second-graders—not secondary school students, who are the main participants in child labor.[16] Even after the program was later extended to include secondary school students, McGuire found that the Bono Juancito Pinto had virtually no effect on child labor “given that the school day in Bolivia is only 4 hours long, and is, therefore, compatible with the average workday length of child laborers, which is about 5.5 hours.”[17] Despite these shortcomings, the program is still in use and is expected to assist 179,068 students in Potosí[18] as of October 2017.

The silver extracted and shipped internationally from Cerro Rico carries with it centuries of hazardous labor practices and millions of deaths. This phenomenon is not unique to Potosí. There are “218 million children between 5 and 17 years” working worldwide, with “almost half of them, 73 million, work[ing] in hazardous child labour.”[19] Children around the world are risking their safety in order to maintain their family’s livelihood in the face of poverty, violence, labor exploitation, and ineffective governmental regulation. Governments, in turn, must continue searching for impactful methods to aid poor families and end the dangerous cycle child labor produces. Programs like Bono Juancito Pinto and other financial plans serve as helpful starting points, but cannot alone resolve this problem. Without deliberate and effective action, the global economy will continue to place the lives of children at risk.

Work Cited

[1] Simeon Tegel, “Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” Public Radio International. March 20, 2013. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.pri.org/stories/2013-03-20/cerro-rico-mountain-eats-men.

[2] Juan Forero, “Bolivia’s Cerro Rico: The Mountain That Eats Men.” NPR. September 25, 2012. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men.

[3] Dan Collyns, “’Bolivia’s Cerro Rico mines killed my husband. Now they want my son.’” The Guardian. June 24, 2014. Accessed February 7, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2014/jun/24/bolivia-cerro-rico-mine-mountain-collapse-miners.

[4] See supra note1.

[5] Viktorija Mickute, “Mineritos: Bolivia’s Child Miners.” Global Journalist.org. September 4, 2014. Accessed February 8, 2018. http://globaljournalist.org/2014/09/mineritos-bolivias-child-miners/.

[6] See supra note 1.

[7] Jean Friedman-Rudovsky, “Mined to Death: Why Bolivia’s Cerro Rico Mountain Is Collapsing.” TIME Inc. June 16, 2011. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2077641,00.html.

[8] NPR staff, “Bolivia Makes Child Labor Legal, In An Attempt To Make It Safer.” NPR. July 30, 2014. Accessed November 14, 2017. https://www.npr.org/2014/07/30/336361778/bolivia-makes-child-labor-legal-in-an-attempt-to-make-it-safer.

[9] International Labor Organization, Minimum Age Convention, 1973, (No.138). The convention does provide for the possibility of initially setting the general minimum age at 14 (12 for light work) where the economy and educational facilities in a given country are insufficiently developed.

[10] See supra note 6.

[11] Council On Hemispheric Affairs, “Made in Brazil: Confronting Child Labor.” COHA. November 16, 2010. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://www.coha.org/made-in-brazil-confronting-child-labor/.

[12] World Bank staff, “Bolsa Família: Changing the Lives of Millions in Brazil.” World Bank. August 22, 2007. Accessed February 8, 2018. http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2007/08/22/bolsa-familia-changing-the-lives-of-millions-in-brazil.

[13] James McGuire, Conditional Cash Transfers in Bolivia: Origins, Impact, and Universality. (Wesleyan University, 2013).

[14] See supra note 9.

[15] Mariana Perez, “UNICEF Destaca El Pago de Los Bonos Sociales Para Los Niños.” Cambio. November 4, 2017. Accessed December 8, 2017. http://www.cambio.bo/?q=node/24663.

[16] See supra note 10.

[17] See supra note 10.

[18] Rocío Ruiz,. “El bono Juancito Pinto beneficia a 179.068 estudiantes en Potosí.” El Potosí. October 23, 2017. Accessed December 8, 2017. http://elpotosi.net/local/20171023_el-bono-juancito-pinto-beneficia-a-179068-estudiantes-en-potosi.html.

[19] International Labor Organization. “Child Labour.” ILO. September 2017. Accessed November 14, 2017. http://www.ilo.org/global/topics/child-labour/lang–en/index.htm.

Sofia Bonilla is a senior at the University of Texas at Austin majoring in Plan II Honors, International Relations & Global Studies, and Iberian & Latin American Literatures & Cultures. She is an Undergraduate Intern at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice.

Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism

by Megan Tobias Neely

21 NOV 2015

This commentary is a response to Maria Hengeveld’s paper, “Girl Branded: Nike, the UN and the Construction of the Entrepreneurial Adolescent Girl Subject.”

In 2009, Nike launched the Girl Effect, a “brand-led movement” targeting the alleviation of poverty among girls worldwide. The initiative advocates for investing in adolescent girls to create future workers and stimulate economic growth. For those who associate the Nike brand with anti-sweatshop movement protests over labor standards the Girl Effect may seem counterintuitive. Indeed, Nike moved to eliminate child labor in its factories only fifteen years ago, and the poor working conditions at Nike factories remain a concern for activists today.

Activists here at UT-Austin have taken up this issue. Our chapter of United Students Against Sweatshops demands the university to rethink its $250 million dollar contract with Nike. Last April, former Nike worker and worker’s rights activist Noi Supalai spoke on campus. She described how in Thailand—where women constitute a majority of garment workers—workers face unrealistic expectations for production, round-the-clock schedules, months of back wages, and little time to care for their families. Supalai led a worker’s union to negotiate improved conditions; however, Nike never responded to their requests.

Nike’s track record on worker’s rights raises the question as to whether the Girl Effect is a “brand-led movement” or a movement to re-brand Nike. In the winning paper for the 2015 Audre Rapoport Prize, Maria Hengeveld astutely argues that the Girl Effect only serves to legitimize Nike’s reputation and image by obscuring its own role in creating poverty while it rebrands itself as a proponent of human rights and gender equality. Hengeveld calls attention to how the campaign suggests simplistic solutions to alleviate poverty in the Global South that fail to consider how companies like Nike contribute to creating a global economy that exacerbates poverty among women and girls. By blaming gender inequality on the girl’s communities and placing the burden of alleviating inequality on the girls themselves, Nike does not offer viable solutions to patriarchy, explains Hengeveld.

The problem with Nike’s approach to girls’ empowerment, according to Hengeveld, stems from its neoliberal ideology that places the market as the appropriate avenue for promoting liberty, opportunity, and equality. Although the Girl Effect may have positive outcomes for individual girls, Hengeveld demonstrates how campaigns like Nike’s do little to alleviate poverty among women, because the employment available to them is low-paid and insecure.

Scholars like Radhika Balakrishnan and Jason Hickel, who spoke at the Rapoport Center’s recent Inequality & Human Rights conference, echo Hengeveld’s concerns. Balakrishnan has argued that women’s empowerment in the workforce cannot be achieved without improving conditions for laborers generally. Hickel (2014) too has examined the contradictions of the Girl Effect in which “women and girls are made to bear the responsibility for boot-strapping themselves out of poverty that is caused in part by the very institutions that purport to save them” (p. 1355).

Indeed, Hengeveld explains how Nike’s corporate agenda contributes to a neoliberal system that exacerbates poverty and inequality worldwide, with disastrous consequences for both women and men. An in-depth investigation of these consequences is the next step in Hengeveld’s research: Earlier this year, she interviewed 25 women who work for Nike in Vietnam about the factory and living conditions they face.

The solution to improving these conditions, according to Hengeveld, does not lie in resolving inequality between men and women workers in the Global South but in changing a neoliberal system that rests upon the disenfranchisement of the poor. As Hengeveld contends, “in practice, equalizing the labor standards, market access and wages of women in Nike’s factories with their male counterparts will hardly be emancipatory or liberating if male workers are not protected by decent job protections, collective bargaining rights and living wages” (p. 12).

While I agree with Hengeveld, I fear that campaigns to improve labor standards overall will not necessarily empower women unless addressing gender inequality is a central goal. Garment work is devalued precisely because it has been deemed “women’s work,” which is crucial to understanding the shortcomings of Nike’s gender campaign. Moreover, as Joan Acker (2004) argues, “gender is embedded in the structuring and ongoing practices of globalizing capitalism” (p. 23). Thus, finding a solution requires an analysis of how gender structures the exploitation of these workers in the first place. In particular, an intersectional lens can shed light on how garment work is gendered, racialized, and nationalized.

For example, in 2013, the deplorable conditions of garment workers came to the world’s attention when a factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,138 workers and injuring 2,500 others. Yet mainstream media coverage of the disaster paid little attention to the fact that women comprise 80 percent of Bangladeshi garment workers, who face precarious working conditions and unsustainably low pay.

In fact, women compose a majority of garment workers throughout the Global South and are at the frontlines demanding change. Ethnographers Leslie Salzinger (2003) and Melissa Wright (2006) demonstrate how corporations portray these women’s labor as pliable, temporary, and surplus to devalue it in the pursuit of capitalist profit. Thus, gender, race, and poverty are deeply connected in global capitalism.

Yet, liberal feminists maintain that employment will liberate women by providing them with more bargaining power in their families and communities. Nike’s Girl Effect is part of a resurgence of neoliberal feminism (also called transnational business feminism), which contends that the best avenue for women’s empowerment is through the private sector. This movement has gone global through campaigns led by U.N. Women, the World Bank, and the IMF to promote economic opportunities for women.

Socialist and women of color feminists, however, have long contended that greater participation in paid employment does not liberate women, because capitalism has been contingent on the exploitation of women of color and low-income white women (see Hartman, Hooks, Davis, and Nakano Glenn). Transnational feminist scholars like Esther Chow and Aihwa Ong pioneered intersectional scholarship on global capitalism, identifying how it constructs hierarchies according to nationality, race, class, and gender that perpetuate inequality.

While paid labor may, to an extent, improve some women’s status in society, it may also subject them to precarious and risky working conditions inextricably tied to their position as women of color in the Global South. Moreover, it is the devaluation of women’s labor that makes the profits of corporations like Nike possible. How might recognizing this lead to more effective campaigns to empower women in this neoliberal era?

Megan Tobias Neely is a PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the WPS Editorial Committee. Her current research is on gender and work in the financial services industry.