Tag: neoliberalism

Is the Neoliberal Education Market Gender-Neutral? A Comparative Review of the Global North and Global South — by Wajiha Saqib

Wajiha Saqib (Department of Educational Leadership and Policy, University of Texas at Austin)

Abstract

Over the past several decades, neoliberal ideology, including concepts of marketization and competition, has entered public education. For example, we see charter schools, aka Public-Private Partnerships schools (PPP), expanding globally. Neoliberal policies often downplay the role of gender in society, and while research has shown how charter schools impact inequalities by race, class, language, and disability, there is little research that looks at gender gaps in charter schools. In this narrative literature review, examining literature from the Global North and Global South and drawing on 38 sources, I conduct a comparative review of gender gaps related to enrollment, retention, and academic performance of students in education and then turn to how these gaps emerge in the context of charter schools. Moreover, my review examines how gender gaps in charter schools vary across contexts. I ask: a) To what extent do charter schools impact gender gaps in education for students? and b) How does this relationship vary across the Global North and Global South? These questions are essential to understanding the nuances of gender in a neoliberal education market from a global comparative lens, which is missing in the scholarly literature at present.

Keywords: Charter Schools, Public Private Partnerships, Gender, School choice, “girl child” education, “boy turn” education

Read the full working paper.

Marielle Franco and the Brazilian Necropolis: Assassination and After Lives

By Xavier Durham

On March 14, 2018, news of the murder of Rio de Janeiro Councilor Marielle Franco rocked Brazil. A queer black woman, mother, feminist, and champion of Rio’s favela residents, Franco was an outspoken critic of police brutality. Her ascension as a human rights activist and elected representative gave hope for favela residents, especially Afro-Brazilian women vying for a voice in politics [1]. However, less than two years after her election, Marielle Franco was the victim of a coordinated assassination, along with her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes [2].

On March 12, 2019, the eve of the first anniversary of Franco’s murder, federal investigators in Brazil arrested two former police officers—Ronnie Lessa and Elcio Vieira de Queiróz—for their involvement in the killings. Both suspects were members of the Escritório do Crime (Crime Office), a criminal organization run by former and current law enforcement officials in the Rio das Pedras neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro [3]. Franco’s allies have long suspected that such groups, known in Brazil as militias, ordered her assassination. Their concerns held weight for four reasons: 1) Franco openly denounced former President Michel Temer’s order to militarize the city of Rio de Janeiro in February 2018 [4]; 2) the recovered bullet casings belong to ammunition purchased by the Federal Police in 2006 (the bullets used to kill Franco were reportedly stolen from a post office) [5]; 3) five cameras (that belong to Rio’s Security Department) along the route where Franco was assassinated were shut off anywhere between 24 and 48 hours prior to the killing [6]; and 4) extrajudicial killings and cover-ups involving police officers in Brazil rarely undergo investigation and point to a macabre, cyclical impunity [7]. Despite the arrests of Lessa and Vieira, Afro-Brazilians and the poor harbor serious doubts about obtaining justice, either for Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes or the countless other black Brazilians killed by police every day.

Barbara Harlow’s work on assassinations provides a useful frame for addressing the structural underpinnings of these killings. Instead of relying on the state to play “detective” and investigate crimes, we must understand how the state determines the nature of crime and those it criminalizes [8]. Afro-Brazilians take little solace in the Brazilian government’s promise to prosecute those who pulled the trigger in Franco’s case, given how the state continues to perpetuate an unwavering politics of death. As Harlow might ask, what hope for justice is there for any and all black victims given that the circumstances of Franco’s death have been replicated time and time again [9]? Indeed, the very state that they uphold as an arbiter for justice is actually the conduit through which the most structural, anti-black sentiments proliferate and remain entrenched.

Franco’s assassination reflects the violent, banal reality of police anti-blackness in Brazil. But it is also part of the quotidian nature of white supremacy and the attendant everyday experiences of anti-blackness that the spectacle of police violence obscures [10]. The spectacle of violence does not stop with the state as death squads [11]; indeed, private security also takes center stage [12]. After violent death has occurred, mourning friends and family remain vulnerable to threats and harassment from police to encourage absolute silence and deter investigation [13]. Thus, the emotional and psychological impact of anti-black state violence transcends the victims’ families and bleeds out into their communities, corrupting the health and vitality of those stuck in a shadow of death (i.e., Afro-Brazilian mothers). Black execution is nothing short of genocide.

The violent cycle feeds into what anthropologist Jaime Alves calls the “Black Necropolis,” whereby the interpellation of blackness excludes Afro-Brazilians from the rights of citizenship and, ultimately, their own lives [14]. Fatal interpellation and the direct connection to the Brazilian state is best summarized by the popular truism, “if you want to know who is black and who is not in Brazil, just ask the police” [15]. This axiom affirms that blackness is defined by its proximity to state violence and coercion. Alongside this sobering reality, Marielle Franco’s assassination illuminates how the Brazilian state maintains control through a violent politics of death, and how state-centered justice is virtually unattainable, especially in the face of dissent.

By examining the assassinations of political dissidents and writers speaking out against state oppression, Harlow illuminated those who lived by the pen and died by the sword, all of whom were in the pursuit of radical justice. Her critical analysis of the complexity of assassinations, exposing the violent innerworkings of the state, translates to the circumstances surrounding Marielle Franco and anti-black violence in Brazil. Like dissidents before her, Franco was a threat to an established order that upheld the status quo and praised a neoliberal bent of progress. Her opposition is exemplified in her denouncement of former President Michel Temer’s order to deploy federal troops to favelas under the guise of crime reduction and security [16]. For that, her silence was paramount within the particularities of a macabre, death-driven logic all too common to the Brazilian state’s repertoire [17]. Indeed, to rely on the state to confront the pervasiveness of one of its foundational components through criminal investigation is to reinforce this component and uphold the state’s legitimacy as it stands. Harlow understood the fraught nature of political dissent and how justice cannot come from the propagator of injustice lest we remain satisfied with cosmetic solutions to deeply-entrenched structural issues.

The Brazilian state cannot and will not provide the avenues necessary for justice, and until the Necropolis crumbles, convictions for the murders of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes are mere parodies. Therefore, activists carrying on the struggle today must reimagine the future of Brazilian governance through a radical and intersectional political agenda that honors Franco’s legacy. Among the necessary components to this radical reimagining of Brazil, black life must be affirmed and elevated beyond mere survival; Afro-Brazilians must thrive. For now, the struggle continues as activists across Brazil rally against police brutality in a state where they were otherwise never meant to survive. Through these campaigns, Marielle Franco lives on.

#MariellePresente

#AndersonPresente

Bibliography

  1. Theresa Williamson, “Marielle Franco’s Legacy the the fight for Rio’s, and Brazil’s, Future,” RIOONWATCH, March 21st, 2018, http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=42394.
  2. Dom Phillips, “Marielle Franco: Brazil’s favelas mourn the death of a champion,” The Guardian, March 17, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/18/marielle-franco-brazil-favelas-mourn-death-champion.
  3. Redação RBA, “’Escritório do Crime’ está por trás do assassinato de Marielle,” Rede Brasil Atual, March 12, 2019, https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/politica/2019/03/escritorio-do-crime-esta-por-tras-do-assassinato-de-marielle.
  4. Dom Phillips, “Brazilian army to take control of security in Rio as violence rises,” The Guardian, February 16, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/brazilian-army-rio-de-janeiro-michel-temer.
  5. Leonardo Demori, Carolina Moura, Juliana Gonçalves, Yuri Eiras, and Bruna de Lara, “Who Killed Eduardo, Matheus, and Reginaldo?,” The Intercept, March 21, 2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/03/21/marielle-franco-death-brazil-violence-police/.
  6. teleSUR, “Brazil: Public Security Cameras En Route to Marielle Franco’s Home Were Turned Off Before Assassination,” May 4, 2018, https://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Brazil-Public-Security-Cameras-En-Route-to-Marielle-Francos-Home-Were-Turned-Off-Before-Assassination-20180504-0002.html.
  7. Human Rights Watch, Good Cops Are Afraid: The Toll of Unchecked Police Violence in Rio de Janeiro. São Paulo: Human Rights Watch, 2016: 5.
  8. Barbara Harlow, After Lives: Legacies of Revolutionary Writing. New York: Verso, 1996: 22.
  9. This question is a paraphrased re-wording of the next dilemma Harlow sees in the aftermath of assassination (See: After Lives, pg. 21).
  10. Christen Smith, “Strange Fruit: Brazil, “Necropolitics, and the Transnational Resonance of Torture and Death.” Souls 15, no. 3 (2013): 177–198.
  11. Death squads are usually groups of vigilantes, current officers, and ex-military personnel that abduct and/or kill primarily Afro-Brazilians under the cover of night. The state’s lack of investigation into cases involving alleged death squad participation highlights their complicity in the practice and reinforces its anti-black logic.
  12. Martha K. Huggins, “Urban Violence and Police Privatization in Brazil: Blended Invisibility.” Social Justice 27, no. 2 (2000): 113–134.
  13. Christen Smith, “The Dangerous Game of Mourning the Dead: Police Violence and the Black Community in Brazil,” Truthout, March 3, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/speakout/item/35078-the-dangerous-game-of-mourning-the-dead-police-violence-and-the-black-community-in-brazil.
  14. Jaime Alves, The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
  15. Jaime Alves, “From Necropolis to Blackpolis: Necropolitical Governance and Black Spatial Praxis in São Paulo, Brazil.” Antipode46, no. 2 (2014): 328 – 329.
  16. Dom Phillips, “Brazilian army to take control of security in Rio as violence rises,” The Guardian, February 16, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/feb/16/brazilian-army-rio-de-janeiro-michel-temer.
  17. Ernesto Londoño and Lis Moriconi, “Ex-Officers Arrested in Killing of Marielle Franco, Brazilian Politician and Activist, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/world/americas/marielle-arrest-rio.html.

Xavier Durham was the inaugural Barbara Harlow Intern in Human Rights and Social Justice at the Rapoport Center, in Spring 2018. He will soon begin the second year of his PhD program in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. After studying Black Feminist activism in Rio de Janeiro in the Summer of 2016, Xavier hopes to return in the Summer of 2020 to resume his work on private policing, surveillance, and anti-black violence.

Sierra Leone’s Experience with In-Country Outsourcing

by Francis Kaifala

23 DEC 2017

In 2007, I was in my first year as a lawyer working for a firm in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The managing partner of the firm forwarded an email from some foreign clients and instructed me to provide a well-researched, comprehensive response to the clients’ inquiries. The questions on “doing business in Sierra Leone” were fairly routine, as I had already responded to similar ones before. However, one question left me a bit confused – it asked what local legal and regulatory regime existed with respect to “outsourcing practices” in Sierra Leone. Until then, I had never heard the term “outsourcing” and had no idea what the clients were asking.

My research led me to one conclusion: there was nothing in our laws specifically regulating either cross-border or in-country outsourcing practices. Sierra Leone’s labor laws are primarily concerned with traditional employee-employer relationships.[1] Other practices such as consultancies are governed almost entirely by contract law. Our laws had paid little attention to outsourcing and there were scarcely any regulatory references to the practice. I came to learn that outsourcing—reflecting neoliberal motivations—aims to cut costs and reduce other liabilities associated with standard employee-employer relationships. This is achieved by creating an outside company that hires workers and then outsources them to other institutions to provide services.

I reported my findings about outsourcing to my Head of Chambers. After listening to me, he calmly said, “that which is not prohibited, is lawful.” My understanding of his statement was that because our laws did not explicitly prohibit outsourcing, it was an acceptable practice. We later explained to the clients that Sierra Leone’s labor laws protect workers but allow outsourcing based on a business’s right to contract freely.

As years went by, we provided similar opinions to additional clients, particularly in the US, UK, Nigeria, and Senegal. By 2010, Nigerian banks and service providers, many of which had benefited from our advice, started businesses in Sierra Leone. While cross-border outsourcing did not take really take root in Sierra Leone as in other countries like South Africa and Nigeria, in-country outsourcing – the phenomenon whereby workers are hired by an outsourcer and then sent to provide services to another company on a contractual basis – has become more prevalent.

Before the influx of foreign companies, most local banks and other financial sector businesses directly hired their employees (from janitors to managing directors) who typically enjoyed full rights and relatively good conditions of service. Employees worked within the normal structure of the company and were paid reasonable salaries, ensuring that they and their families lived at least middle-class lifestyles. Apart from normal sub-contracting, outsourcing of work was not known.

With the introduction of the Sierra Investment Promotion Act of 2007,[2] which opened the market and guaranteed incentives for foreign investments, more and more Nigerian companies started establishing branches and subsidiaries in Sierra Leone. These included banks, insurance companies, mining companies, oil companies, technology companies, general supplies companies, and general services providers.

With the advent of outsourcing, newly launched financial institutions, insurance companies, and mining companies capitalized on this trend: staff members were laid off then heavily recruited and hired by outsourcers. Companies could then hire (or rehire) workers directly from outsourcers, sidestepping the standard worker protections required in employee/employer relationships. Payments were made directly to the outsourcer who then paid the worker a lesser amount. Other Nigerians established their own outsourcing companies to create a ready pool of local workers with a range of skills, providing a market for companies that needed them. They took advantage of the fact that in Sierra Leone, one could hire workers on “contract” for specific periods.[3]

Because contract workers are not categorized as employees, they cannot benefit from collective bargaining agreements or union rules. Thus, workers lacked formal employment relationships with both the outsourcer and with the company where they might be stationed. In some cases, contractual workers found themselves placed at the very same institutions that had fired them in order to make way for outsourced hires. Those affected mostly included custodial staff, security personnel, cashiers, and tellers. They were no longer part of the staff structure of the businesses and were not classified as employees. As contractors, they lost employment benefits like employee loans, car loans, leave allowances, sick day allowances, paid holidays, and medical insurance.

Today, businesses that once offered competitive wages and good benefits to employees have outsourced jobs to institutions that do not prioritize workers’ well-being. This has left workers with lower wages, disadvantageous terms and conditions of service, and many unregulated harmful labor practices. With outsourcing practices growing,[4] the livelihoods of workers affected in Sierra Leone are declining, leaving them worse off than workers from previous decades.

Without some protective intervention from the government this pattern will continue. Workers ought to be treated fairly, not exploited. A company’s environment and conditions must include respect for workers and protect their human rights. Therefore, domestic standards need to be developed to create a level playing field. Such standards should prescribe a minimum set of worker rights and conditions in labor and employment agreements. This action would balance the benefits that businesses accrue from outsourcing with their obligation to safeguard the vulnerable workers’ rights.

Work Cited

[1] “Traditional” here refers to direct employment relationship between and employee and employer whereby all responsibility and work is for the employer.

[2] After the end of the civil war, this Act was introduced to encourage and attract foreign investment in the country.

[3] With proper framing, these contracts would not be employment contracts to attract the application of Collective Agreements to them.

[4] In 2014, it was estimated to be growing at 12% to 26% according to the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).

Francis Kaifala was a Fall 2017 Human Rights Scholar at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice. He is also a Fulbright Scholarship recipient and a native of Sierra Leone.

Shining Light on Bad Practices: Re-assessing Tools for Corporate Accountability in Burma

by Kate Taylor

30 NOV 2017

Over the last twenty years, transparency has become a watchword within international policy-making institutions. Specifically, enhanced transparency has emerged as a critical component in the pursuit of corporate accountability for human rights abuses. Transparency-enhancing initiatives related to corporate accountability have proliferated enormously over this period, and their various forms have diversified substantially — from voluntary codes of conduct to mandatory reporting requirements. Despite this breadth, nearly all transparency-enhancing initiatives, whether legally mandated by the state or voluntary private initiatives, push corporations to make periodic public disclosures of financial and non-financial matters (primarily regarding human rights, labor, environmental and anti-corruption).

For human rights advocates embracing transparency as an accountability tool in the business and human rights arena, the broadly stated theory of change is that shining light on bad corporate practices can lead to remedy and reform. Of course, human rights advocates who promote such transparency do not accept corporate disclosures at face value — and many are willing to scrutinize their veracity and completeness. Yet, in assessing advocacy and accountability tools in the business and human rights arena, it seems necessary to examine the opportunity cost of this focus on transparency, querying what it both overlooks and obscures.

Recent reforms to Burma’s investment law illustrates the risks of over-emphasizing transparency as an accountability tool. Throughout 2016-17, the newly-sworn-in National League for Democracy (NLD) Burmese government rewrote its investment law, as well as its subordinate rules and regulations.  The reform process was undertaken by Burma’s Directorate of Investment and Company Administration (DICA) with technical assistance from the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

Human rights NGOs provided feedback with the aim of embedding respect for human rights and the environment within Burma’s new investment law regime. Ensuring that the Law and Rules incorporated rigorous transparency provisions was of fundamental importance to human rights advocates — bearing in mind the country’s egregious legacy of business-related human rights abuses and the opacity which has long-characterized Burma’s particular brand of crony capitalism.

Civil society feedback submissions covered a number of human rights issues and included transparency as a key concern. Notable among these suggestions was that the new government impose a set of “Responsible Investment Reporting Requirements,” which would require businesses investing over a certain monetary threshold to publicly disclose an annual report addressing a wide range of issues, including human rights, environmental matters, labor rights, anti-corruption measures, property acquisition and military communications.

Ultimately, civil society submissions regarding transparency were among the few suggestions taken up by DICA and the IFC in the re-writing of the new Investment Law and Rules. The final iteration of the Rules requires basic project information to be publicly disclosed before the government makes large-scale investment decisions. Additionally, it requires investors to submit annual reports on certain financial and non-financial matters to the Myanmar Investment Commission (which the Commission may decide to make public), including details of the investments’ impact on the environment and local community — but the disclosure requirements are bare-boned and are not accompanied by serious institutional buy-in on the part of the Myanmar Investment Commission. Ultimately, the drafters were hostile to rigorous human-rights based reporting requirements, which would have required due diligence on the part of companies, despite the urging of human rights NGOs. It seemed that the government, together with the IFC, was willing to incorporate only the smallest measure of transparency into the legal regime.

Without much more, embedding strong transparency requirements into Burma’s new investment law regime would do little to rectify the serious pathologies which characterize its business and human rights landscape. Enhanced transparency in Myanmar’s investment climate may begin to foster responsible business practices and encourage due diligence, but it does not promise to address broader structural issues that directly cause or exacerbate business-related human rights abuses extant in Burma, such as reckless investments in conflict-affected areas, systemic corporate tax avoidance, mammoth land grabs and displacement, and chronically weak labor-rights institutions.

Indeed, allowing irresponsible businesses to proceed as long as their disclosure requirements are met annually may actually legitimate a range of harmful business practices and obscure others that are undisclosed. Frequently, corporate disclosure efforts (especially in weak institutional contexts, where the prospects for audit and scrutiny are scarce) are little more than public relations exercises, with scant connection to the businesses’ real impacts on the ground. By emphasizing transparency as a global governance tool, we risk allowing corporations to give the allure of being a ‘rights-respecting’ or ‘socially responsible’ entities, with no substantive responsibilities being met to those most affected by their operations.

The focus on enhancing transparency also fails to support local communities affected by large-scale investments that frequently face intimidation and repression for speaking out against projects. Merely having information does little to open up spaces for contestation and access to justice. In addition, without linkages to domestic or transnational advocacy networks, ‘access to information’ means little for impacted communities. In the case of highly technical corporate disclosures, such reports can easily become sites of exclusion. The disclosure of a company’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a salient example. EIAs are largely unintelligible for those untrained in environmental management (and in Burma, are frequently disclosed in languages and terms not understood by impacted communities). Yet, in producing and disclosing an EIAs, companies often claim to have met their obligations toward community consultation.

As a governance tool, information disclosure and transparency fit well within the prevailing neoliberal logic and its preference for due process rights over substantive equalities. Human rights advocates would be remiss in their work to solely focus on such tools. Transparency is a laudable beginning for investments in Burma, but it is the start, and not nearly the end of the broader accountability project. The risk that mere transparency is conflated with accountability and justice should not be overlooked.

Kate Taylor is a human rights lawyer and Postgraduate Fellow at the Rapoport Center for Human Rights and Justice, and is a member of the 2017-2018 Working Paper Series Editorial Committee. Her impressions in this post are drawn from her experience working in Burma on human rights reforms to the country’s investment law regime. 

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.