1) "Developments here have tended to be incremental rather than fundamental, such as the introduction of multiple stitching machines capable of more Complex styles of stitching; sewing itself remains labour intensive in excess"
2) "Young workers to demonstrate their abilities were often used by management to push up productivity targets, thereby creating conditions for limitation and sometimes exit for older workers unable to keep pace"
3) "Under globalisation, however, there has clearly been a relatively sharp tilt towards the service sector in terms of employment as well as contribution to GDP"
4) "It primarily refers to the industrialized capitalist world of Europe and the United States. The phenomenon of Rising of the service economy there has to be, first of all, located in the enormous expansion of Agricultural and industrial surpluses available to support such tertiarization"
5) The historical root of the concentration of women in the service sector play in the fairly Universal pattern change in women's lives affected by the process of capitalist industrialization itself, which had engendered a new form of economic dependency of women on wage-earning male breadwinners"
1) Mechanization of small scale works: the empirical study done by the author shows that how mechanization affected the job status, job availability etc in small industries such as electronics, garment sector. The future scholars can try to understand this direct impact of technology on a particular social class and what their reaction is and how they engage with it. It is also important to note that whether the technology is complementing the existing labour power or is it wiping out the labour force through the automation. The basic question is what the politics of technology in a workspace is and how workers reciprocate to it.
2) Comparison of the service sector and manufacturing industry: this comparative study helped us to crack the conventional belief of solely attaching service sector with technology and forgetting the manufacturing and other sectors as something primitive. One assumption put forward by the author is regarding the effect of technology in all sector irrespective of the way the technology is imagined in the labs. Further studies on how technology is affecting the conventional sector labour will help us to rethink about the relation between technology and labour.
3) Contradictions of globalization: other aspects scholars need to follow up is how the contradictions of globalization are related to the socio-technical imaginations in each society. One of the few examples, some of the technology is implemented to make works easy and fast, but on the other hand, the excess workforce is accommodated through the service sector, which was again thinking about a networked society.
1) Demystifying the globalization: according to the author, globalization in general, and service sector-oriented economy is not a sudden phenomenon, but it is a continuation of earlier structural change happening from the world war onwards. The prominence of the service sector, which is considered as the defining character of globalization actually started with the war economy and post-war consequence as tertiary jobs, mostly women oriented, at the expense of both agriculture and industrial sectors. So she argues that there is nothing new about the exploitations and gimmicks happening in the name of globalization, but on the other hand, it is the flexible accumulation of capital by restructuring and reorganizing industrial relations and labour.
2) Feminization of labour: the author argues a similar concept to substantiate her argument, she does not consider globalization as an emancipation project, but she believes that it is the newest efficient way to exploit the cheap labour for footloose jobs shifted to the third world from the first world. For example, it is a widely accepted fact that women were too able to come out of their homemaker role and participate in wage-based economy because of globalization and boom of service sector along with it. But on the other hand, it made the wage cheaper and threatened the job security of men who were pleading for permanent jobs and better pay. The women were used as cheap labour with much patience and discipline in contract basis with less wage.
3) Mechanization and globalization: one of the biggest change happened along with globalization in the 1990s were the introductions of mechanizations in every small enterprise. Till then automation and mechanization were costly and it was implemented only at bigger industries such as engineering, steel, petrochemicals etc. due to globalization and end of license raj, Indian small scale industries also rescheduled number of workers, productivity and working hours and status of workers. Mechanization and automation in this small industry, where most of India's unorganized working class worked, made a reserve army of unemployed workers and worker's temporary status in the jobs.
The main argument of this book is about how we need to look at globalisation, technology and labour in a realistic way by getting rid of the mystic illusions around the grand phenomenon of globalisation, the book is mainly focused on how women are used as gendered labour for certain tasks and how it is leading to the bigger exploitation when compared to their male counterparts. The author is also offering a birds-eye view of globalization's functioning, processes, and driving forces in the area of labour. She studied four major areas of the economy where women are working: the first one in electronic industry, second on garment workers, the third one is home-based workers at manufacturing processes industries and the fourth on middle-class women who are working in Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES). This offers an analysis of the various changes and effects caused by the new globalization policies and paradigms which are especially affecting the living and working conditions on women workers. She also analyses the global sectorial trends and their ramifications and cutting through the hype on India's growth statistics, which negatively affected the poorest and middle-class labouring section. The most important point raised by the author is the increasing insecurity emerged from this changed political, economic and social paradigm changes.
This book helps me to find out the connection between my research ideas such as how technology is a significant factor in all levels of employment from blue collar to IT employees, how their lived experience, defence and work life and dramatically changed after the coming of globalization. This book analyses how gendered work is exploited in the name of women emancipation and freedom, it also scrutinizes the ideas behind economic liberalism and its impact on worker's or employee's life. As a comparative study of workers in garment, electronics, BPO and IT-enabled works, this book is a good navigation for my future research and it is also a great resource in both methodological and data-wise understanding. The chapter on IT sector, which is named as 'neither mental nor manual labour, the service factories of the new economy' absolutely shows the dilemma, stress and confusion attached to the Indian service sector and its exploitation of cheap insecure labour.