This is of course part of a wider international tendency of somewhat longer duration : the emergence of international suppliers of goods who rely less and less on direct production within a specific location and more on subcontracting a greater part of their production activities. Thus, the recent period has seen the emergence and market domination of “manufacturers without factories”, as multinational firms such as Nike and Adidas effectively rely on a complex system of outsourced and subcontracted production based on centrally determined design and quality control. It is true that the increasing use of outsourcing is not confined to export firms; however, because of the flexibility offered by subcontracting, it is clearly of even greater advantage in the intensely competitive exporting sectors and therefore tends to be even more widely used there. Much of this outsourcing activity is based in Asia, although Latin America is also emerging as an important location once again. [Bonacich et al., 1994] Such subcontracted producers in turn vary in size and manufacturing capacity, from medium-sized factories to pure middlemen collecting the output of home-based workers. The crucial role of women workers in such international production activity is now increasingly recognised, whether as wage labour in small factories and workshops run by subcontracting firms, or as piece-rate payment based homeworkers who deal with middlemen in a complex production chain. [Beneria and Roldan, 1987; Mejia, 1997]

A substantial proportion of such subcontracting in fact extends down to homebased work. Thus, in the garments industry alone, the percentage of homeworkers to total workers was estimated at 38 per cent in Thailand, between 25-29 per cent in the Philippines, 30 per cent in one region of Mexico, between 30-60 per cent in Chile and 45 per cent in Venezuela. [Chen, Sebstad and O'Connell, 1998] Home-based work provides substantial opportunity for self-exploitation by workers, especially when payment os on a piece-rate basis; also these are areas typically left unprotected by labour laws and social welfare.

In addition, even other paid work performed by women has become less permanent and more casual or part-time in nature. In South Korea, one of the few countries for which such data is available, the proportion of employed women who casual contracts nearly doubled between 1990 and 1999; over the 1990s, around 60 per cent of all casual jobs were held by women workers.

Not only did paid employment conditions deteriorate in the region of women workers, but unpaid homework also tended to involve longer hours as the post-crisis adjustment process led to cuts in the provision of and access to public services. Only in China did paid employment for women workers, including in manufacturing, continue to grow – but even in China, services employment dominated in total employment for women, at more than 35 per cent. Gender wage gaps have narrowed slightly in most countries in the region, but they remain very high compared to other regions of the world.

Gendered migration patterns in Asia
Asia has become one of the most significant regions in the world not only in terms of the cross-border movement of capital and goods, but also in terms of the movement of people. Asian migration is not a new phenomenon historically, but in the last two decades, more women have moved than ever before. Within the Asian region, there is a complex and changing mix of countries of origin, destination and those that are both. The dominantly labour-sending countries in all of Asia include Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal, Philippines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. The countries that are mainly destinations of host countries for migrant labour include all of those in the Middle East, Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan China. Some countries are both sending and receiving international migrants: India, Malaysia, Pakistan and Thailand. Obviously, migration is a multidimensional phenomenon, which can have many positive effects because it expands the opportunities for productive work and leads to a wider perspective on many social issues. But it also has negative aspects, dominantly in the nature of work and work conditions and possibilities for abuse by employers and others.

Cross-border migration in Asia is highly gendered, with women migrants largely found in the service sector, especially in the domestic and care sectors, as well as in entertainment work. Male migration by contrast tends to be more in response to the requirements of industrialisation, in construction and manufacturing, as well as in semi-skilled services. Economic considerations are of course the primary reason for migration by individuals, especially women; but when this is large enough in sheer numbers, it has a substantial macroeconomic impact. Remittance incomes from migrant workers have shored up the balance of payments over the past decade in India and Philippines, to name just two countries. It is worth noting that female migrant workers are less affected by business cycle phenomena in the host countries, because of the different nature of activities in which they tend to be employed; therefore, both female migration and remittances from such migration have in general been more stable than the male versions in the recent period.

However, despite the growing significance of female migration in the region, there is little recognition by officialdom in the relevant Asian governments of this process, in terms of ensuring decent working conditions and remuneration for migrants.

Over the past decades, women migrants have come dominantly from three countries in Asia: the Philippines, Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In the Philippines, women migrants have outnumbered their male counterparts since 1992, and in all these countries women are between 60 to 80 per cent of all legal migrants for work. The majority are in services (typically low paid domestic service) or in entertainment work. While Filipino women tend to travel all over the world, women from the other two countries go dominantly to the Middle East and Gulf countries in search of employment. Elsewhere in the region, restrictive regulations have reduced legal female emigration, but may have increased illegal migration, or trafficking.

Migrants typically tend to fill unskilled, labour-intensive and low-paid jobs, and are generally unprotected by labour laws. While male migrants in the region are usually (but not exclusively) in the 3-D occupations (difficult, dirty, dangerous), women migrant workers tend to be concentrated in the low paid sectors of the service industry, in semi-skilled or low-skilled activities ranging from nursing to domestic service, or in the entertainment, tourism and sex industries where they are highly vulnerable and subject to exploitation. They rarely have access to education and other social services, have poor and inadequate housing and living conditions. When they are illegal or quasi-legal and dependent upon contractors, they also find it difficult to avail of existing facilities such as proper medical care and are almost never found to organise to struggle for better conditions. In general, host governments are less than sympathetic to the concerns of migrant workers, including women, despite the crucial role they may play in the host economy. Host country governments tend to view migrants as threats to political and social stability, additional burdens on constrained public budgets for social services and infrastructure, and potential eroders of local culture. 

This is why there is so little attempt across the region to ensure decent conditions of migrants, even in terms of ensuring their basic safety and freedom from violence. This is an important issue for women migrants in particular, since they are specially vulnerable to sexual exploitation, not only when they are workers in the entertainment and sex industries, but also when they are employed in other service activities or in factories as cheap labour.

There is often a fine line between voluntary migration and trafficking in women (and girl children). Trafficking is a widespread problem which is on the increase, not only because of growing demand, but also because of larger and more varied sources of supply given the increasingly precarious livelihood conditions in many rural parts of Asia.

A substantial amount of trafficking of both women and children occurs not only for commercial sex work, but also for use as slave labour in factories and other economic activities such as domestic or informal service sector work. It is true, of course, that the worst and most abusive forms of trafficking are those which relate to commercial sexual exploitation and child labour in economic activities. Nor is it the case that trafficking occurs mainly through coercion or deception: there is significant evidence to indicate voluntary movement by the women themselves, especially when home conditions are already oppressive or abusive, or at least voluntary sending by the households of such individuals, given the poverty and absence of economic opportunities in the home region. Traffickers throughout Asia lure their victims by means of attractive promises such as high paying jobs, glamorous employment options, prosperity and fraudulent marriages. When there is employment, however badly paid, precarious and in terrible conditions, it may still be preferred to very adverse home circumstances. This in turn means that those who are employed through trafficking may not always desire to return home, if the adverse economic and social persist. Also, the possibilities of return to home communities with safety and dignity are often limited, given the possibilities of being stigmatised and not easily reintegrated into the home society.

All this makes the problem of dealing with trafficking much more complex than is generally appreciated. From the point of view of attacking the causes, it is important to address the issues of economic vulnerability, marginalization and attitudes to women, which encourage such movement. Environmental disasters and development-induced risks such as displacement are also known to play a role in increasing the incidence of trafficking.

Obviously, across the region there is need for more pro-active policies regarding migration. It is unfortunate that most government policies with respect to migration are designed with the male breadwinner model in mind, because this effectively excludes women, especially those who are trafficked, from the purview of regulation and protection by law. Very easy immigration policies can create routes for easier trafficking; but conversely, tough immigration policies can drive such activities underground and therefore make them even more exploitative of the women and children involved. The specificities and complexities of the trafficking processes, as well as the economic forces that are driving them, need to be borne in mind continuously when designing the relevant policies. Across the region, there is hardly any host country legislation specifically designed to protect migrant workers, and little official recognition of the problems faced by women migrants in particular. The same is true for the sending countries, which accept the remittances sent by such migrants, but without much fanfare or gratitude, and with little attempt to improve the conditions of these workers in the employment abroad. Women migrants, who typically are drawn by the attraction of better incomes and living conditions or by very adverse material conditions at home, are therefore is a no-woman’s land characterised by a generalised lack of protection.

Recently there is also a trend for increased migration by more educated women workers, in the software and IT-enabled service sectors. While such female migration is still a very small part of the total, it is pointing to a different tendency with different implications both for work patterns and for gender relations in both sending and receiving countries.

Conclusion
The picture of women’s employment and migration in Asia today is much more complex than it has appeared for some time. There have been some clear gains from the relatively short-lived process of using much more women’s labour in the greater export-oriented production of the region. One important gain is the social recognition of women’s work, and the acceptance of the need for greater social protection of women workers. The fact of greater entry into the paid work sphere may have also provided greater recognition of women’s unpaid household work. At the same time, however, such unpaid work has tended to increase because of the reduction of government expenditure and support for many basic public services, especially in sanitation, health and care-giving sectors. Recent reversals in the feminisation of employment also point to the possibility of regression in terms of social effects as well. Already, we have seen the rise of revivalist and fundamentalist movements across the Asian region, which seek to put constraints upon the freedom of women to participate actively in public life. This process is not new to capitalism: in the United States, women were actively encouraged to participate in paid work to fill in for labour shortages created by the war during the second World War, only to be thrust back into unpaid household work almost immediately once the war was over. However, the speed and extent of the equivalent processes in Asia still have the capacity for creating major social changes which can have destabilising effects on gender relations and on the possibilities for the empowerment of women generally. At the same time, advances in communication technology and the creation of the “global village” provide both threats and opportunities. They encourage adverse tendencies such as the commodification of women along the lines of the hegemonic culture portrayed in international mass media controlled by giant US-based corporations, and the reaction to that in the form of restrictive traditionalist tendencies. But the sheer knowledge of conditions and possibilities elsewhere can have an important liberating effect upon women, which should not be underestimated.

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