Reviews for Current topics in microbiology and immunology

The average rating for Current topics in microbiology and immunology based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-17 00:00:00 Joseph Cullen In Threads: Gender, Labor and Power in the Global Apparel Industry, Jane L. Collins shows how the apparel industry has developed under capitalism to become particularly labour-intensive, low-wage, and particularly female-oppressive work subcontracted out to the developing world. She focuses on the history, employment practices, and production techniques of two particular clothing companies, Tultex and Liz Claiborne, and their respective subcontracted plants in Mexico, Confitek and Burlmex. She further suggests that the labour conditions in such apparel plants in the developing world have shaped a new type of unionization that reflects communal and women’s interests. I’ll begin by outlining Collins’ main arguments, then I’ll explain why although her thesis is compelling and useful to broader labour relations and feminist study, I think she errs in interpreting her research on paternalism and in not focusing more on the emerging feminist unionism among maquiladora workers. Collins claims that the apparel industry was radically restructured by the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialization, tailors “produced made-to-order garments” and generally “sewed an entire garment from start to finish.”1 However, with the implementation of the sewing machine and the advent of department stores, the industry began to focus on mass markets rather than specific customers, and assembly-line-like “section work” became common practice.2 Not only were production standards themselves thus drastically changed, but the workforce was also restructured. With workers each focusing on a specific step in production, wage hierarchies and resentment developed between types of workers—especially since women, who tended to work as sewers and who were paid less than male cutters, dyers, and machine operators, felt underrepresented by unions.3 Gender distinctions thus became prominent as the industry changed to section work, already catalyzing “ongoing gendered struggles” among apparel workers.4 Industrialized apparel industry working conditions were demanding in terms of their monotony, physical strain, long hours, and gendered division of labour throughout the 20th Century in American plants such as Tultex,5 but these difficulties were further exacerbated when branding and increased demand prompted the subcontracting of apparel production to developing countries, “[transforming] apparel production from a national industry to a transnational enterprise.”6 Collins examines two subcontracted plants in Mexico, Confitek (working for Tultex) and Burlmex (working for Liz Claiborne). New trade laws made it easier to export materials and import finished products from places like Mexico.7 This spatial division of labour affects relationships between workers and management, but it also importantly also allows gender to become “a pivotal tool for managers […] segmenting a new global workforce.”8 This is to say that with international subcontracting, management is able to exploit existing gender norms within a community to assign labour roles and hierarchies. Because women tend to be viewed as “more docile and compliant and thus more appropriate workers” for the demanding, monotonous section work of apparel plants, the apparel industry exploits gender stereotypes to recruit female workers to working conditions and wages that would otherwise likely be refused—a practice employed by both Confitek and Burlmex.9 By manipulating the rhetoric of women’s work, plants like Confitek and Burlmex and companies like Tultex and Liz Claiborne are able to both underpay their workers (particularly the women) and treat them as expendable and unskilled. Less than subsistence wages for women are justified by management since there is a cultural attitude that women’s wages are merely “supplemental” to their family’s income.10 These companies justify their subcontracting operations to the developing world on the false premise that because of modernization, women in the developed world are unable to sew as well as their developing world counterparts.11 This rhetoric implies that sewing skills are natural to these women rather than a learned skill that can be improved, which in turn ensures that they are paid less that men who tend to work in positions that are thought to be more skilled.12 This “naturalization of work” paradigm13 is challenged, however, as these women gain work experience and develop a sense for the value of their labour.14 Collins argues that just as gender norms have shaped the division of labour in the apparel industry, the counterintuitive marginalization of women’s work is in turn catalyzing the implementation of a new type of labour unionism to reflect the underrepresented women of these plants, bringing “issues from what society has construed as the private domain into the zone of public discussion.”15 This new form of activism, bridging the gap between the work and private spheres, struggles against the impersonal, global labour relations of the modern apparel industry. Although Threads could benefit from a more focused critical perspective and a more explicitly laid out principal argument, Collins’ overall thesis that gender relations present a pervasive extra obstacle to female workers in addition to the problems posed by industrial globalization is compelling because it both explains how gender barriers come about in the workplace and describes the issue beyond the mere economic language of wage and opportunity. Collins refutes the neoliberal implication “that firms can operate in a purely economic dimension, independent of more multivalent social connections,”16 and her focus on the considerable disparity in labour roles and compensation between male and female workers strongly underscores this refutation. Although she examines specifically the Mexican plants Confitek and Burlmex and the American companies Tultex and Liz Claiborne, because much of Threads explores the historical development of the apparel industry at large, the impact of trade laws such as NAFTA, the U.S. Tariff Code, and quota regulations, and labour relations generally, the key messages of her ethnography can be applied more broadly to the apparel industry as a whole rather than presenting a struggle unique to these maquiladoras. I therefore feel that by contextualizing these specific plants and firms within the international industry, Collins succeeds in producing a work that applies to the gendered labour relations of the apparel industry as a whole, affirming the unfeasibility of capitalism as a sustainable system and feminist notions of work, and is therefore broadly useful both in the fields of labour relations and feminist theory. Another strength in Collins’ ethnography is her description of how the forces of capitalism and paternalism have worked together to shape the apparel industry, but I think she errs in juxtaposing the contractual system with the paternalist system as strongly as she does. She writes that Tultex’s original mills in Virginia, like most American mills, imposed a paternalist ideology upon workers, creating a “close-knit yet oppressive” work environment that essentially guilted workers into loyalty.17 This “complex and contradictory” policy in the apparel industry was displaced by contractual labour practices around 1994,18 but in describing the apparel industry’s paternalistic roots, Collins invites us to compare contemporary working conditions in maquiladoras with the Virginian mill towns. While “racial hierarchies” were reinforced under the paternalist model,19 we see this superficial distinction echoed in the imposition of gender hierarchies in the modern industry. The frequent presence of managers on the factory floor may no longer be a staple in plants like Confitek and Burlmex,20 but I argue that at least according to Collins’ research, the system remains deeply paternalistic—especially toward women. The very ideology of paying workers what is “supposed to be sufficient to allow them to educate their children and to purchase consumer goods” and the notion of the supplemental value of women’s wages imply that a company is giving to its workers what they are deemed to require rather than what they have earned through selling their labour. It implies that management knows best how employees ought to live and only allots to them what it deems permissible. The face of paternalistic labour relations has surely changed, but it is because of the subtlety of modern industrial paternalism as it exists as part of contractual labour that makes Collins’ dismissal of paternalism in her account an oversight. Rather than illustrating the juxtaposition between contractual and paternalistic systems as Collins suggests, I think her research shows the contractual system to carry with it an implicit and less obvious paternalism. If this shift in paternalist approaches were studied more deeply, I think it could provide further insight into the labour relations and worker dissatisfaction in the apparel industry, particularly with women. In Collins’ ethnography, more emphasis should have been placed on the emerging feminized unionism emerging from the maquiladoras she describes in the final chapter. She seems to imply that the non-traditional community focus of such organizations could radically reshape “the historical boundary between public and private spheres,”21 but this implication is at odds with the “pervasive harassment” posed by companies like Tultex and Liz Claiborne of threatening to subcontract production elsewhere when union activity disturbs the status quo of their production systems.22 Despite the conceptual radicalness this new breed of unionism carries, it isn’t clear how beneficial it could become when the workers involved have virtually no bargaining power. Not only could their plant be closed down and another opened in another town or even another country, but management could easily enough hire more complacent workers, given the demand for labour and the already massive turnover rates of apparel manufacturers in the developing world. As such, the maquiladora unions Collins described would seem to be no more practically effective than more traditional male-dominated unions of the kind that failed to keep Tultex’s Virginia plant active23—and indeed perhaps less so, given the disparaging attitudes toward women’s work in these areas. I therefore think that further research needs to be done on maquiladora workers’ non-traditional unionism to assess whether it is actually radical enough to affect labour practices or whether it is merely another essentially powerless embodiment of worker dissatisfaction in the apparel industry. Threads’ thesis is compelling, and Collins’ research (the use of which extends far beyond the particular companies and plants she studies as it reflects broader trends in the anthropology of work and feminist anthropology) is of great value to both labour relations studies and feminist theory. However, Collins errs in completely juxtaposing contractual and paternalistic labour practices, and in doing so, she obscures the subtle but considerable role of paternalism in the contemporary apparel industry, which I feel ought to be researched further. Moreover, her ethnography could benefit from a more in-depth study on the emerging unionism trends among maquiladora workers to examine what, if any, effects they might have on labour practices in the apparel industry and beyond. Despite these criticisms, Threads draws attention to the production of items we use everyday. We are surrounded by mass-manufactured clothing, and despite the vague awareness of international sweatshops, we tend not to even consider the people behind their manufacture. Collins’ book is accessible and engaging enough to appeal to casual readers, and this is a great strength since it has the potential to promote awareness of the complex global production systems in which we constantly and perhaps inadvertently take part.

Review # 2 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 Matthew Nutting Collins has managed a delicate balancing act in this book between respect for the position of her corporate informants and a critical exposition on the reasons for corporate investment in developing countries – in this case, the Mexican textile and apparel industry. The opening two chapters discuss the development and relations of power within the clothing industry, whereas the substantial chapters explore four workplaces (a Virginia-based production plant, the Liz Claiborne HQ in New Jersey, and two factories in Aguascalietes in Mexico) which allows her to compare and contrast corporate relations, production and labour processes in high-end and mass production clothing contexts. As a result, she is able to debunk a series of scholarly and business myths about skills bases, motivations for investments, and so forth. Although issues of gender and race/ethnicity weave implicitly through the text as a whole, they are not consistently highlighted until a discussion towards the end of the place of gender as a factor in investment decisions and a critique of male defined workplace issues-focussed unionism (contrasted to broader ideas of community unionism). Despite the emphasis on gender in the title, the text is more compelling as a spatially informed sociology drawing on the work of David Harvey where she argues that US investors see maquiladores as just another place in which to invest while workers in those places see them as the spaces of their lives. As a result, a particular strength of the work is the way she draws out gendered labour relations practices in the context of deterritorialisation of production to argue for a workers’ struggle to territorialise and spatialise production in their lives. This is a rich a sophisticated analysis that has lost little of its currency ten years after it was written.