What is ‘reserve army of labour’ ? Present the position of feminist scholars on this. (UPSC CSE Mains 2019 - Sociology, Paper 1)
- Sylvia Walby (1990) points out that Marxian concept of ‘reserve army of labour’ has been extended to discuss women’s condition in capitalist economy. According to Wably, Karl Marx himself did not discuss women’s employment to any significant extent. He used the concept ‘reserve army of labour’ to explain the working of capitalist economy. For Marx, capitalism’s need for labour fluctuated as the economy went through ups and downs. It therefore required the existence of a group of workers who could be dispensed with at times of recession. Marxist feminists argued that the reserve army theory is applicable to explain employment of women.
- Marxist feminist scholar Veronica Beechey (1977) argues that women constitute a flexible reserve which can be brought into paid work when boom conditions increase the need for labour. Women are forced to return to the home in time of economic recession. However, Walby (1990) points out that there are serious theoretical and empirical problems with this theorization. Firstly she argues that if capital is considered to be the determinant of the process in which women lose their jobs before men, then capital would be acting against its own interests. If women were to let go out of the job before men, then it would hamper the interest of capital, since women can be employed at lower wage than men. Secondly, available empirical evidence does not support this theory. The relative cheapness of women’s labour creates a pressure to employ women in preference to men. For example, in recent years the shift from manufacturing to service industries in western economies has produced male unemployment and demand for female workers.
- Nevertheless, many women workers still play a marginal role in the paid labour market. They are heavily concentrated in part-time, low pay occupations, and it seems clear that their domestic roles disadvantage them in a competitive employment market that ignores family responsibilities and makes it difficult for women to defend their own economic interests.
- Nirmala Banerjee (1985) using empirical survey and census data argues that in India unorganized sector is mainly composed of women. She points out that unorganized labour is more exploitative, oppressive and difficult to negotiate than organized labour. Contrarily, the connotations of unionization for political bargaining strength, formal work records, legal support etc. are used for organized labour. She argues that unorganized sector is mainly composed of women. Most of the women who work outside home, work in unorganized sector. Hence, most of the women are forced to live in the margins of survival. According to her, from the 1970s onwards there is a shift in perception of women’s labour as complementary to men’s labour to being a competitive alternate to men’s labour. This change is brought about by the increasing industrial preference for unorganized labour and predominance of women in that sector.
- Braverman in his analysis of gender relations in the context of development of capitalism argues that there is a progressive deskilling of jobs in the contemporary monopoly capitalism. Most often women take these less skilled jobs. Deskilling of jobs occurs as a result of the attempt by employers to increase their profits at the expense of workforce. He argues that deskilling is designed to reduce the cost by decreasing the need for expensive labour. This makes it possible for the capitalist to employ cheaper labour on simpler tasks. This cheaper labour is female.
- Phillips and Taylor (1986) argue that ‘skill’ is frequently an ideological category, arising from the struggle of men to maintain their dominance in sexual hierarchy, and enabling men to resist ‘deskilling’ process by displacing this onto women. From this perspective women are not paid less simply because they are unskilled, but because working class men have succeeded in protecting their own dominant attitudes by labelling any work done by women as inherently inferior to that done by men.
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