Workers or Slaves?

The Ciudad Juarez graphic novel was incredibly captivating. These poor women whose lives are lost seem to mean nothing to anyone but their close friends and families. In comparison with the United States, whenever there is a crime brought against a woman, it can usually make national news. Winnie Woodhull says, “Given the global arena in which third-wave feminism emerges, it is disappointing that new feminist debates arising in first world contexts mainly address issues that pertain only to women in those contexts.” She makes a valid point. There are feminists that work so hard to make the voices of oppressed women in America loud and clear, but when it comes to the third world, they turn a cheek and act as if there is nothing they can do…why? Why stop at the border? Woodhull also mentions that transnational feminists have so many more available outlets through the internet and the media, but they rarely take advantage. I almost never hear any stories of women outside of the U.S. being assaulted and left for dead, yet we all assume and know that it does occur. Why don’t they get a voice? Sure, the police and government restrictions in those countries do not help us to find this information, but when someone gets wind of it they need to set it on fire.



As we discussed in class, Nike has been commonly known to use cheap labor in third world countires to produce their products, yet despite what we know, the swoosh still covers American billboards and tshirts. We’ve all seen the picture of the little boy making the Nike soccer ball, but what about the women and little girls that are used? We hear about a general population, but even then we assume that it mostly consists of men who are working for their families. In the “Ciudad Juarez book, it stood out to me when she said, “Claudia, we were born in the same year. When you started working a forty-five hour week, I was in high school cutting pictures of Kurt Cobain out of Kerrang! Magazine, pasting them onto the cover of my agenda. I was in the washroom with an eyeliner pencil and a compact of powder trying to cover it all up. You were coming home so tired, maybe smelling like the exhaust from the bus that took you in and out of the maquiladora factory zone.” This really struck me…we are able to lead such charmed lives here, to the point that we expect all teenagers to have the same opportunities. Sure, some of us had jobs in high school, but we didn’t work more than 20 hours a week by law and were in comfortable malls or restaurants, not harsh factories and fields. These girls have their childhoods taken away from them, and are not gaining anything from it.
With such low wages, women are forced to work. In the chapter of our IWS book by the Human Rights Watch about the maquiladoras, I was shocked to read about the discrimination of women who are pregnant in the workplace. In the United States, we do not stand for such discrimination. The fact that a pregnancy test is a condition for employment is one problem, but refusing a woman her position or an alternative task through the duration of her pregnancy is downright wrong. An intersectional approach to gender when it comes to labor on a global scale will provide many things. First, it will provide men and women with the fair wages and working conditions that they deserve. They will no longer work for less than 2 American dollars, and will not be exposed to harmful chemicals and working areas. They will also be given equal opportunities, and will not be discriminated against. Women will be able to bear children and be given the opportunity to work during pregnancy. They will not be exploited and will have a lot more protection so that the rate of missing and murdered women will hopefully go down. These ideas all seem so ideal and fair, but reality unfortunately will not take these changes lightly. The companies are too hidden and the government is too uninvolved to make a stand. The people of these countries have other issues that they are more concerned with, such as staying economically afloat, and with our American companies continuing to utilize this labor, we are buying in to this tragic cycle. I can only hope that one day, the voices will become louder. Someone of power will take a stand and say that enough is enough once and for all before it gets any worse.

Here is a link to a really interesting website about women and inequality in around the world.