Making the Women Worker: Global Labor Standards and the Politics of the Body

This contribution explores the centrality of the body to the making of the woman worker through global labor standards, as seen in the deliberations of the International Labor Organization since 1919. These standards were to stabilize capitalism by curbing exploitation. However, with the male industrial and maritime proletarian representing the universal covered by social protections and workplace regulations, the woman worker stood for difference, whose presence in industry threatened the health of future generations and tempted the social order through the threat of sexual danger. Special conventions on maternity, hazardous substances, night work, and family responsibilities before the 1980s would protect women’s health and that of her offspring through control of the body. Among women, those in the global South appeared in ILO reports and programs as difference’s other, whose bodies were more at risk from poverty, patriarchy, and purdah. Nonetheless, labor standards covered only those judged as workers, leaving out women in agriculture and home-based labors as well as domestic servants and sex workers—thus excluding the very groups portrayed as vulnerable. After 1975 ILO officials in the Rural Women’s Programme sought to transform women’s subsistence family labor into income generation, finding a model in the self-employment and self-organizing of the Self-Employed Women’s Association of Gujarat, India. In campaigning for global standards for home-based and household workers in the 1990s and 2000s, such activists deployed affective discourses based on bodily harm to transform mothers and wives into workers. They both challenged and accommodated capitalist social relations.