Women in the global factory*

In the 1800s, farm girls in England and the northeastern United States filled the textile mills of the first Industrial Revolution. Today, from Penang to Ciudad Juarez, young Third World women have become the new “factory girls,” providing a vast pool of cheap labor for globe-trotting corporations. Behind the labels “Made in Taiwan” and “Assembled in Haiti” may be one of the most strategic blocs of womanpower of the 1980s. In the past 15 years, multinational corporations, such as Sears Roebuck and General Electric, have come to rely on women around the world to keep labor costs down and profits up. Women are the unseen assemblers of consumer goods such as toys and designer jeans, as well as the hardware of today’s “Microprocessor Revolution.”