Enloe's Bananas, Beaches, And Bases

Front 1

Rana Plaza

Back 1

On April 24, 2013, the collapse of the Rana Plaza building killed 1129 Bangladeshis. Most of the deaths were women, all of whom had been working in the five garment factories housed in the poorly constructed building. The headlines focused on the discovery that the garments they had been sewing were for global brand-name companies.

p.250

Front 2

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Back 2

March 21, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in lower Manhattan where many Jewish, Irish, and Italian young women and men had perished: 129 women; 17 men.

p.235

Front 3

Neo-liberal economic model

Back 3

to rely simply on critiques of profit-maximizing, individualistic, lightly regulated, cost-suppressing global capitalist business practices and the worldview that drives them to describe and explain (and thus to prevent) future garment factory disasters is unreliable

p.259

Front 4

Tazreen Fire of 2012

Back 4

Happened at a particular moment in transnational women's politics and in Bangladeshi women's own organizing. One popular racialized myth that has enabled the global companies and their local allies to cheapen women's labor holds that women on the social margins in affluent countries, and women living in poor countries, are less conscious of and less in need of their rights - or that they will pursue their rights only if tutored and led by more privileged women and men. In reality, by 2012, Bangladeshi women's political thinking and organizing had become elaborate and sophisticated.

p.261-262

Front 5

Micro-finance

Back 5

Women activists not only took part in microfinance schemes but also had begun to expose how those schemes, intended to economically empower poor women, too often empowered men and left the women recipients burdened by debt.

p.262

Front 6

Deindustrialization

Back 6

A source of political anxiety, since industrial decline meant the laying off of male factory workers in steel and automobile towns such as Pittsburg, Birmingham, and Detroit - and presumably because, in the minds of many male elected officials, it was only high male unemployment what could create a societal crisis. By contrast, American garment workers' earlier economic hardships and the international transformations they reflected were easier for officials to overlook because most garment workers were women, many of them immigrant urban or poor rural women. Furthermore, women's need for decently paid employment still looked to these masculinized policy makers like a societal aberration. Women losing paid work was not, for the policy makers, a cause for political alarm.

p.270

Front 7

Essay Topic

Manufacturers without factories

Back 7

Managers began farming out contracts to smaller garment producers, who in turn hired workers or employed another layer of subcontractors. Many of them hired women to sew in their own homes. These new home-based working arrangements often appealed to women caring for their own young children, but they had to deal with being paid low wages, receiving few health or pension benefits and had to cover their own electricity bills.

P.271

Front 8

Structural Adjustment Program

Back 8

combines cuts in a debtor government's expenditures on "nonproductive" public services with the expansion of exports: locally mined raw materials, locally grown plantation crops, or locally manufactured goods.

p.278

Front 9

Export Processing Zone

Back 9

The centerpiece for the bankers' export strategy. Indebted governments were encouraged by economists to set aside territory specifically for factories producing goods for the international market. Governments were to entice overseas companies to move their factories to these zones by offering to provide them with electricity, ports, and runways, as well as low-cost workers, and by offering tax holidays and police protection. The governments' promised to provide "cheap labor."

p.278-279

Front 10

Essay Topic

4 Patriarchal assumptions of the garment manufacturers

Back 10

1. They have defined sewing as something that girls and women do "naturally" or "traditionally."

2. Women's labor can be made and kept cheap by reversing allegedly skilled jobs for men.

3. Factory owners and managers justify paying women workers less than men, and less than a living wage, by imagining that women are merely secondary wage earners in their families.

4. Factory owners' and global clients' fourth self-serving claim is that the single woman at her machine, working eleven hours a day, six days a week, is not a "serious" member of the labor force because she intends to work only until she finds a husband and "settles down," thereafter to be supported by him.

p.279-281

Front 11

Light Industry

Back 11

the kinds of industries that are most labor-intensive. Because it is more labor-intensive and less reliant on large infusions of capital, it is also less likely to be concentrated in the hands of just a few owners. It is more decentralized and more globally intensely competitive. They are those that have been the most feminized meaning the management prefers to hire women for the majority of its workers, and that patriarchal assumptions about conventional femininity shape labor-management relations.

p.282-284

Front 12

Heavy Industry

Back 12

the kinds of industries that are least labor-intensive. They are those that have been the most masculinized meaning that managers presume that most of the industry's jobs are allegedly best done by men and that patriarchal presumptions about manliness shape the dominant culture in its labor-management relations.

p.283-284