Collective bargaining, as both a tool for representing workers’ interests and a method for finding common solutions with employers to workplace issues, has enormous potential to address structural gender inequalities. However, many of the changes discussed in this book point to the need for new thinking about how gender equality can be more effectively integrated into union strategies, policies and advocacy. Both bipartite and tripartite social dialogue has never been so relevant to workers, particularly to women workers in formal and informal employment across the world. At the International Labour Conference in 2009, tripartite delegations discussing “gender equality at the heart of decent work” emphasized that social dialogue is fundamentally about equitable participation.

These same issues were still being discussed in 2018 at the ILC, where a resolution on social dialogue and tripartism stressed the urgency of ensuring that social dialogue addresses gender equality in the light of the rapidly changing world of work (ILO 2018g). Women have entered paid employment and are joining unions or other membership-based organizations in growing numbers, and in some countries, women now outnumber men in union membership. However, in many parts of the world, collective bargaining coverage continues to be limited and only covers a proportion of the formal economy workforce, often in male-dominated industries and the public sector. Collective agreements do not necessarily extend to contract and subcontracted workers in the supply chain in key sectors of women’s employment. The majority of workers, many of whom are women own-account workers in the informal economy, remain outside of and are unprotected by collective bargaining.

Attempts to create a safe, regulated commercial sex market have clearly failed. But perhaps a more profound question is whether prostitution should be part of the market economy in the first place, or should sex be considered as one of many aspects of human life that are inalienable, that is, not for sale and not commodifiable? In a lengthy article in 1987, Margaret Radin explores the limits of the concept of “universal commodification” meaning that “anything some people are willing to sell, and others are willing to buy in principle can and should be the subject of free market exchange” (1860). She argues that as a society we continue to regard certain aspects of personhood significant for “human flourishing” including “one’s politics, work, religion, family, love, sexuality, friendships, altruism, experiences, wisdom, moral commitments, character, and personal attributes as “integral to the self”, and therefore market-inalienable”. Radin includes bodily integrity amongst these attributes as it is not an object and “we feel discomfort or even insult, and we fear degradation or even loss of the value involved, when bodily integrity is conceived of as a fungible object”. Therefore, if bodily integrity is considered as integral to the person and not an object that can be detached from the person “then hypothetically valuing my bodily integrity in money is not far removed from valuing me in money” (1881). Radin contends that a “prohibition theory” applies in relation to certain things being non-commodifiable and highlights “the importance of excluding from social life commodified versions of certain ‘goods’ such as love, friendship, and sexuality”. She also applies a further rationale she names the “domino theory” for resisting commodification of sex and sexuality because of the potential societal impacts as “the existence of some commodified sexual interactions will contaminate or infiltrate every one’s sexuality so that all sexual relationships will become commodified”.

However, in relation to prostitution, she suggests that there is a “double bind” in that whilst it can be argued that the commodification of sex in the market should not be legitimized as “it will harm personhood by powerfully symbolizing, legitimating, and enforcing class division and gender oppression” on the other hand this may deny poor women the opportunity “to improve their relatively powerless, oppressed condition, an improvement that would be beneficial to personhood” (1916).

This chapter reviews the necessary preconditions for collective bargaining to promote gender equality. There is wide agreement that centralized (national or sector-wide) arrangements, strong employers’ and workers’ organizations, participation of women in negotiations, and government support for collective bargaining and equality are among the most important preconditions for gender equality to be progressed through collective bargaining (Dickens 1998; Hayter 2015; Rubery & Koukiadaki 2016). This chapter builds on this perspective by looking at seven interrelated preconditions that underpin gender equality dimensions of collective bargaining. These are set out in Figure 2.1 below. They relate to issues both inside and outside of the workplace.

STRONG SOCIAL DIALOGUE STRUCTURES

Level of bargaining and gender equality outcomes

Overall, collective bargaining on gender equality is more effective when national and sectoral bargaining lead to institutionalized forms of bargaining and wage setting (Hayter & Weinberg 2011; Rubery & Koukiadaki 2016). In a study of 19 countries where sectoral or national bargaining exists, over 75 per cent of wage earners were covered by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) (Visser, Hayter & Gammarano 2015). In several countries in Europe (Austria, Germany and Belgium) and in South Africa, Brazil and Argentina, national and sectoral CBAs have reduced wage inequalities and contributed to productivity and competitiveness (Hayter 2012).

Gender differences are lower when bargaining is centralized and where there is a framework for equality, including model agreements implemented at the workplace (Heery 2006; Pillinger 2014; Ponzellini Aumayr & Wolf 2010). In countries with high levels of collective bargaining coverage, particularly where the law places obligations on companies to conclude collective agreements, and where there are national or sectoral agreements, less equality and smaller pay gaps are found, compared to countries with low bargaining coverage (Eurofound 2010; Hayter & Weinberg 2011; ILO 2011). In this regard Reegård argues that “coordinated wage bargaining from the centre reduces wage disparity and contributes to a more equal society” (2013: 114). Estimates suggest that with one per cent increase in social dialogue “coverage” the gender pay gap is reduced by 0.16 per cent (European Commission 2009) and the higher the degree of coordination in wage formation, the more equal the distribution of pay (ETUC 2012, 2013a; Tilly 2013).

The term “sex work” was first introduced by Carol Leigh in 1980 “to reconcile [her] feminist goals with the reality of her life as a prostitute” and “to create an atmosphere of tolerance within and outside the women’s movement for women working in the sex industry” (Leigh 1997: 224). According to Leigh, the term sex work counters the sexual shame ascribed to the word “prostitute” and provides a term of solidarity across the variety of different occupations within the sex industry, such as porn actresses and dancers which “marks the beginning of a movement” (230). By framing prostitution as work Leigh introduced a core concept into the discussion: that if sex work is a legitimate choice of occupation then the focus of feminist concern must shift from the act of being prostituted to addressing adverse and unacceptable conditions in which that work is carried out. From this perspective, sex workers simply want the same rights as any other workers, to have access to training in relation to health and safety, to control the conditions of their employment, to obtain work permits and travel and to reduce “occupational hazards” (93). The demand for legalization, regulation and/or decriminalization of the sex trade are the legislative and policy implications of such a position which continue to the present day. By recognizing sex work as a legitimate legal occupation, Chapkis (2010) claims, the possibility of rights, respect and dignity for those “performing erotic labour” can be realized (244). From this perspective, the themes of shame, guilt and isolation from family and community which recur in research on the harm of prostitution are not a consequence of sex work itself, but rather result from the pervasive, stigmatizing, societal view of prostitutes as “social pariahs, fallen women, ‘bad girls’, the abject, reviled ‘Other’” (Hubbard 1998: 58).

The stigmatization of sex work is highlighted as the main problem experienced by those working in the sex industry, in that it undermines intimate relationships because of lies and secrecy and legitimizes abuse and violence against sex workers. Mai (2009) claims that it is not the sex itself or the clients that are problematic, but rather “the stigmatization and illegality of their profession” which sex workers name as their primary concern (26).

This chapter examines existing mechanisms for collective bargaining between multinational enterprises (MNEs) and global union federations (GUFs) as effective spaces for gender equality bargaining. It looks at the role and potential of collective bargaining and ways in which gender equality is promoted through regional and global framework agreements covering workers in MNEs including in global supply chains. Global and regional framework agreements between MNEs and GUFs have been used to promote workers’ rights and gender equality across global supply chains. In the last decade, there has been a marked trend to strengthen gender equality and diversity clauses in these agreements, particularly in female-dominated employment sectors.

In many countries, however, GUFs and their national affiliates are faced with major challenges concerning workers’ rights, including violations of the right to freedom of association and the right to bargain collectively, as documented in the annual Global Rights Index of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC 2017). Corporate social responsibility initiatives often fail to respect ILO conventions or address the responsibility of business enterprises for their adverse impacts on human rights in the supply chain and in the local communities (ITUC 2011a). Furthermore, many women work in global production sites in non-unionized export processing zones (EPZs), where contract labour is used to produce goods for global supply chains (ILO 2016a; Morris & Pillinger 2016). As Hadwiger (2015) argues, EPZ workers are typically “female, young, migrant and poor, with no trade union experience and no knowledge of their rights” (14).

WOMEN’S WORK IN GLOBAL PRODUCTION

Women’s employment in MNEs is often of a better quality than in domestic enterprises, and waged work in export factories in the garment sector is an alternative to working in the informal economy (OECD 2008). When women have access to employment, household poverty is reduced and family members have better access to resources that benefit the education and health of other household members (DFID/IDRC 2012; UN Women 2015). However, many women working in global production sites face significant problems of exploitation, low pay, poor working conditions, lack of social protection, long working hours and low union representation.

The Gendered Economy is a new path-breaking series of short books which critically examine our understanding of the economy through the lens of gender and expose the androcentric biases within mainstream and heterodox economic analysis.

This book contributes to the series by looking how trade unions and other membership-based workers’ organizations can support gender equality, drawing on examples from across the world. This issue is missing from most of the global reports on women’s economic empowerment, from organizations like the World Bank and the IMF, which celebrate individual entrepreneurship but ignore collective action. As more women take up paid employment, they are joining trade unions or other membership-based organizations in growing numbers, so that in some countries women now outnumber men in trade unions. But this book is clear-eyed about the challenges: collective agreements often cover only male dominated industries and the public sector, and usually have not included sub-contracted workers; trade unions have often been slow to take up gender equality issues; and the majority of women in employment in many countries are in the informal economy where organizing is much more difficult.

Nevertheless, as this book shows, change is happening. Collective bargaining agendas have been broadened to address issues such as workplace discrimination, equal pay for work of equal value, the care responsibilities of workers, and the impact of domestic violence in the workplace. Women are increasingly participating in the leadership of some trade unions.

This book does not only look at traditional trade union organizing. It also looks at new ways of organizing workers in informal employment, and the ways in which trade unions can support this in networks developed with NGOs, and in bargaining forums in which trade unions participate alongside informal workers’ organizations. Global Framework Agreements have established new bargaining frameworks at transnational level, and some have sought to cover sub-contracted workers throughout the supply chain. Trade unions have participated in multi-stakeholder initiatives, such as the Ethical Trading Initiative. Some trade unions have also begun to engage with the communities who use the services they produce. For example, teachers’ unions have engaged with parents in campaigns for good quality public education; while health care unions have focused on the quality of patient care.

This book challenges the framing of prostitution as “sex work”, which asserts that it is a legitimate and acceptable form of work which can and should be regulated as a normal part of the market economy. Terms such as sexual commerce, sexual transactions, sexual exchange and consumer demand reflect the current trend towards situating prostitution as a legitimate business by those promoting the commercial sex trade. Sex work academics and advocates argue that the selling of “sexual services” is comparable to other forms of services, including domestic labour and care work and therefore “sex work” can and should be governed within a legal labour rights framework (Agustin 2007; Chapkis 2009; Sanders et al. 2009). It is asserted that the majority of women exercise individual choice and agency in entering and remaining in the commercial sex trade, choosing it as a better economic option than other forms of low status occupations (Bettio et al. 2017; Ditmore 2005; Doezema 2010). Given the right working conditions, it is claimed, the prostitution contract can be an equal, respectful, commercial sexual exchange where any harmful or negative consequences are minimized and through which the rights of both the worker and the consumer are protected. In recent discourse, there is also an emerging emphasis on the sex buyers’ demand for intimacy within the indoor setting and that the present-day consumer has a legitimate expectation of intimacy, emotional relationship, a “girlfriend experience” to be part of the financial transaction (Bernstein 2010; Brents et al. 2010; Milrod & Monto 2012; Sanders 2008; Weitzer 2010). It is argued that the emotional labour (Russell Hochschild 1983) this demands is also required in other areas of the gendered economy, including child care and elder care, and that the “sex worker” also develops strategies to manage the physical and the emotional needs of their “clients” (Oerton & Phoenix 2001; Sanders 2005).

The negative aspects of the sex trade including pimping, coercion, violence, child sexual exploitation and trafficking are recognized but, it is claimed, legalization will remove these undesirable elements and deliver a safe working environment where the norms of labour rights and laws can be implemented.

The question of whether it is problematic or not to commodify sex as a product, which can be bought and sold as in any other market exchange, is central to the debate surrounding prostitution. As Agustin (2007) states “the two perceptions – that sex is incomparable to anything else and that it is comparable – lies at the core of the oppositional debate within feminism regarding sex work” (61). In sex work discourse the idea that “sex is uniquely difficult to commodify or that the process of doing so necessarily causes unique distress to the worker involved” is disputed (Chapkis 2009: 242). She acknowledges that there are “challenges in relation to client behaviour and boundaries, long hours, being treated with disrespect by some clients” but asserts that these should not be regarded as “unique to prostitution” but pertain to most forms of low status work (242). That sex work is “easy for some people and impossibly difficult for others” is conceded by Agustin (2007: 64) but, it is argued, this is the same for many forms of work. She recognizes that many women disclose difficulties including an absence of feeling when with clients and feelings of “disgust, fear, loneliness, sadness, or a sense of sin” (64). However, she also claims that people feel these emotions in other jobs such as cleaning bathrooms and other people’s bodies but that they will “seek out work sites where they can at least tolerate the acts required of them” and that the difficulties women encounter arise from the working conditions not the sexual nature of the work (70).

Thus, it is the similarities between the selling of sexual “services” and other forms of work that is consistently highlighted within sex work discourse and is increasingly compared to the selling of other services where the employer or client directly engages the body of the person to perform a personal service, including domestic labour, cleaning, beauty and health treatments. The similarities between the work of female massage therapists and sex workers is drawn by Oerton and Phoenix (2001) as both are “commodified activities concerned with specific forms of tactile contact between bodies” (395).

Over the last decade, following the 2008 global economic crisis, profound changes have taken place in the world of work, particularly affecting women (Bettio et al. 2013). Driven by neoliberal policies and global competition and inequalities, along with technological innovations and shifting patterns of production, there has been a concurrent increase in women’s employment and migration for work, this latter also fuelled in some measure by wars and climate change (Eaton, Schurman & Chen 2017). These changes have major implications for labour regulations, industrial relations and traditional patterns of collective bargaining (ILO 2017a). This section examines these issues in relation to overall patterns of employment and the extent of precarious and informal work, which particularly affects women, in both developed and developing countries.

THE EXTENT OF PREDOMINANTLY FEMALE PRECARIOUS AND INFORMAL WORK

Precarious work (ITUC 2011a, 2017) or non-standard work in the ILO terminology (ILO 2016b) is found in both developing and developed economies. Of countries with available data, three-quarters of the global workforce are employed on temporary or short-term contracts, in informal jobs often without any contract, under own-account arrangements or in unpaid family jobs (ILO 2015b). Over 60 per cent of all workers lack any kind of employment contract. Two billion – or 61.2 per cent – of the world’s employed population aged 15 and over work informally, which includes own-account or contributing family work. Informal economy workers can be employers, employees, own-account workers, contributing family workers and members of informal cooperatives. Emerging and developing countries represent 93 per cent of the world’s informal employment (ILO 2018d). Table 4.1 shows the proportion of informal employment across different regions. Although increasingly common in industrialized countries, the majority of informal work is found in emerging or developing economies. In Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 90 per cent of the female workforce and 82 per cent of the male workforce are employed in informal work (ILO 2018d).

The growth of precarious work globally has major implications for trade union organizing and recruitment strategies, and for the future of existing models of collective bargaining. In an increasingly fragmented labour market, trade unions and strong labour laws have become yet more important.

The tension between the right to individual choice and agency and the structural and socio-economic forces which circumscribe and constrain a person’s capacity to exercise those rights lies at the centre of the feminist debates on entry routes into prostitution. From the early 1980s, despite a broad consensus among feminists on the issues of rape, sexual assault and domestic violence, what emerges is “a major schism” in the women’s movement over the “commercial representation and action of sex” (Alexander 1997: 81), a schism which continues to the present day. A “woman’s right to choose” was a fundamental demand of the women’s movement in relation to sexual freedom and reproductive control, but for radical feminists, extending this demand to the right to “choose” to sell one’s own body for the sexual service of men is regarded as theoretically and ethically flawed. The right to abortion, reproductive rights, or the right to choose to love someone of the same sex were considered inappropriate comparisons to the right “to choose to be used as the raw material in a massive capitalist sex industry” (Jeffreys 1998: 1300). According to Kappeler (1990), conceptualizing individual freedom and choice as primary and incontestable, dislocates that freedom from sexual relations and sexual politics. She argues that the sexual liberal concept of choice is in fact the choice of those who are subjects, i.e. sexual consumers, who have the economic and social power to choose an object for their own sexual gratification. The choice afforded to buyers infers “the licence to regard the other as sexual object” and as simply “a vehicle for the individual’s sexual pleasure” (178). Barry (1995) rejects personal choice politics as a function of the liberal ideology of modern capitalism which “emphasizes individualism to serve market competition and promote consumerism” (83). She warns that the “the hyper-individualism and elevation of personal choice as the only and therefore ultimate condition of freedom, if it prevails over the feminist movement, will be its final destruction” (179).

The sex of pornography and prostitution was regarded as the antithesis of mutuality and reciprocity of desire as within it “desire appears as lust for dominance and submission” (MacKinnon 1987: 149).

The organized labour movement – that is, workers and trade unions – has always related to “other” societal issues deemed outside its boundaries. Diverse issues – such as war and peace, environmental sustainability and gender equity – have made their mark in both discursive and practical ways on the labour movement. Perhaps the main strategic challenge (and opportunity) facing the labour movement today is how a progressive articulation with these other issues might be forged. If the labour movement is not the sole, or even the main, agent of social transformation, this task is a crucial one.

This chapter opens with a consideration of labour as a social movement. Labour has not always and everywhere been part of industrial relations machinery nor been linked to politics through social democratic parties. The tensions pitting “struggle versus structures” is explored, as is the way unions may be moving beyond managing decline to organizing for the future. Mainstream and radical critics of the labour movement alike often lack nuance and do not see how labour is constantly evolving and can, when conditions are ripe, act as a social movement.

The environmental challenge is the overarching issue in terms of sustainability and one that poses acute difficulties (although arguably also opportunities) for organized labour. How do we move beyond the “jobs versus the environment” dilemma towards some form of labour/environmental movement alliance or articulation? Labour is no longer – if it ever was – totally tied to the industrial mode of production, and needs to grasp the critical challenge of climate change. It is not easy, as it does not fit easily into traditional collective bargaining ways of thinking, but, from a global perspective, we do see change occurring.

Finally, I turn to the issue of trade unions and global justice. Ever since the 1999 anti-globalization protests in Seattle saw “Teamsters and Turtles” (labour and environment movements) unite and fight, a new form of global justice unionism has been posed. What is the potential for this articulation at global and local levels today? For the young activists of the global justice movements, labour is often seen as irredeemably compromised by established power structures.

The global precariat is on the move, with what Hardt and Negri call its “irrepressible desire for free movement” (Hardt & Negri 2000: 213). While exodus can indeed be seen as a powerful form of class struggle against the new imperial order, it is still a manifestly spontaneous, even unintentional, form of struggle. Mobility and migration are seen as a disruption of the disciplinary constraints under which workers labour. Certainly, labour is in movement in many diverse ways, and its management is seemingly beyond even the most stringent border controls of most capitalist states.

At a more prosaic level, migration can be seen as an integral part of labour market regulation in the era of globalization. Clearly, the economies of the once affluent North still depend critically on the availability of migrant labour. These workers are most often vulnerable, and many basic labour rights do not apply to them. As Harald Bauder points out, “[I]nternational migration is a regulatory labor market tool” (Bauder 2006: 4), allowing employers to drive down wages and lower labour standards through the introduction of a “cheap and flexible” migrant labour force. Is it that we are seeing the emergence of what Pierre Bourdieu has referred to as a “global reserve army of labour” (Bourdieu 2003 [1998]: 40)? If that is the case, it should be incumbent on trade union movements to respond with an inclusive policy towards migrant workers, and not through national protectionism, as has happened quite often in the past (Penninx & Roosblad 2000), even though this is sometimes forgotten.

This chapter does not seek to provide an overall analysis of migration in the current era. My focus here is simply on the interaction between labour migrants and the labour movements in the receiving countries. I begin with a unified theoretical and historical reconstruction of migration and the making of the working class that breaks with the traditional approach of considering migration and labour studies as separate domains.