"Why Workers' Rights Are Not Women's Rights"
Dr. Heidi Gottfried published a refereed journal article "Why Workers' Rights Are Not Women's Rights" in a Special Issue of Laws, "Public Law - Engendering Equality," an international, peer reviewed journal in April, 2015. The special issue explores the way in which public law regulates the access of women to policymaking positions in the political, economic, and religious spheres. Dr. Gottfried has published widely on work and gender. Her article can be found at Laws 2015, 4(2), 139-163; doi:10.3390/laws4020139, and the abstract is below.
In addition, Dr. Gottfried presented "Precarity in Work and Life: Forging a New Reproductive Bargain," at the Precarity Penalty International Symposium in Toronto, May 21-22, 2015. Her presentation outlined the problem with labor laws, balancing work and family and the re-balancing of risks, rights, and responsibilities.
Why Worker's Rights Are Not Women's Rights
Abstract
"Why workers' rights are not women's rights" is an argument whose purpose is to make clear why workers' rights rest on a masculine embodiment of the labor subject and it is this masculine embodiment which is at the center of employment contracts and employment relations systems. By excavating the gender subjects implicit to and explicit in regulations of labor, the paper reveals the opposition of paired terms, masculinity and femininity privileging production over reproduction and naturalizing gender-based power relations. The paper identifies various laboring activities associated with differential rights and responsibilities. An examination of the treatment of part-time employment and waged caring labor, framed in labor, welfare, immigration, and citizenship policies and practices, locates exclusions from labor standards and exemptions from entitlements due to eligibility requirements and thresholds that assume the masculine embodiment of the worker-citizen. Gendering the analysis illustrates how contemporary labor laws and conventions grant rights on the basis of, and to, a rather abstract conception of the prototypical worker-citizen. Its origins lie in what classical political economy labeled a capitalist logic, as well as the historical practices in which free class agents entered into contracts for continuous, full-time work free of care responsibilities outside of the wage/labor nexus. Thus, it is this particular abstract construction of the proto-typical worker which instantiates the separation of "rights to" from "responsibilities for", and it is this separation that allows the masculine embodiment of the labor subject. Modes of regulation privileging rights over responsibilities will valorize the masculine worker-citizen whose rights derive from their participation in wage labor and simultaneously devalue the feminine worker who is directly connected to caring labor.