Is this a matter of 'expectations' on the part of young women? Isn't a bigger problem that owners and managers of the plants _want_ them out? One of the issues that seem to come up very frequently in the literature on labor organizing in many countries is women workers' resistance to compulsory pregnancy tests.
>Moreover, most contribute their wages to
>a family group in which they are junior members, which also gets income from
>other members. Thus, they have never had to make solely on their earnings
>-- which they couldn't.
Labor organizers in similar circumstances say that it is a mix of work-centered and community-centered organizings that are necessary, which appeal to workers not simply as workers but also as members of a community who have a stake in improving its living standards.
That said, I wonder if the family relations that Thomas describes may not be changing, if very slowly and perhaps invisibly. Women's entry into the labor market has always changed the nature of intra-family relations as well as the shape + size of the family.
>(b) labor-capital relations mediated by patriarchal/clientilistic/etc.
>relations. In the small shops, family run is the order of the day.
>Intra-familial networks and fictive kin/god-parentage (compadrazgo) are the
>mechanisms by which highly effective labor control is exercised. How do you
>strike against your uncle? Or the godmother of your baptism? Especially
>when s/he is (often) labor and capital (as owner and labor in his own shop)?
What's the proportion of workers in such family-run shops out of the totality of industrial employment in Bolivia?
Yoshie