Christine Firer Hinze - Glass Ceilings and Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy

GLASS CEILINGS AND DIRT FLOORS

Women, Work, and the Global Economy

CHRISTINE FIRER HINZE

2014 Madeleva Lecture in Spirituality

Paulist Press

New York / Mahwah, NJ

Cover and book design by Lynn Else

Copyright 2015 by The Corporation of St. Marys College, Notre Dame

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hinze, Christine Firer.

Glass ceilings and dirt floors : women, work, and the global economy / Christine Firer Hinze.

pages cm. (2014 Madeleva lecture in spirituality)

ISBN 978-0-8091-4916-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-58768-479-1 (ebook)

1. WomenEmployment. 2. WomenEconomic conditions.

3. Work and family. 4. WomenSocial conditions. 5. EconomicsReligious aspectsCatholic Church. I. Title.

HD6053.H56 2015

331.4dc23

2014049710

Produced by Paulist Press

997 Macarthur Boulevard

Mahwah, New Jersey 07430

www.paulistpress.com

CONTENTS

It is a great honor to have been asked to deliver the 2014 Madeleva Lecture. I wish especially to thank Prof. Elizabeth Groppe, director of St. Marys Center for Spirituality, along with Kathleen Guthrie; Dr. Carol Ann Mooney, president of St. Marys College; Profs. Jill Vihtelic and Adrienne Lyles Chockley; and all of the students, faculty, and administrators of St. Marys College who extended such marvelous hospitality. Warm thanks as well to editor Nancy de Flon of Paulist Press for her patient and gracious help, to my colleagues in the Theology Department and the Curran Center at Fordham University for their support, and to theology PhD students Paul Schutz and Mary Kate Holman for cheerful, efficient research and editorial assistance.

W omen and W ork T oday :

F ive S napshots

MARIA TORERO AVALOS,

LIMA, PERU

Maria Torero Avalos, age 48, of Lima, Peru, knits her eyebrows, concentrating on putting the thread through the eye of the needle. Lying on the table are piles of T-shirts in various colors, on which she is to sew silver beads. She received the material and the sewing heads from a neighbor who has contacts at a company and passes orders on to her. Maria is one of ten thousand home workers in the Peruvian capital of Lima. She works for a starvation wage at home in the living room in poor light on garments that will later be available at bargain prices in our department stores. She is hired by textile workshops and larger companies that outsource various production steps to the informal area in order to save on wage costs and avoid labor law regulations. She rarely receives more than twenty garments at a time from her neighbor, so at twenty-five to thirty soles she hardly ever earns more than six to eight euros. The legal minimum wage in Peru is six hundred soles a month (150/$170.55)a sum that Maria can only dream of.

In the afternoons, after household chores, Maria sits down for six hours of sewing, embroidering, knitting, or even crocheting before she has to take care of her family in the evening again. When there is a lot to do and the garments need to be done quickly, she also works late into the night or even stays up all night. And then there are times when there is no work.

Maria Torero is constantly haunted by the fear of being unable to make ends meet. Her husband just lost his day-worker job, and for this reason she is more dependent than ever on her home work. But there have been some major cuts in Marias wages over the past couple of years. Now she only receives a fraction of what she used to receive for the same work, as the large number of women looking for work in the new suburbs of the city allows the companies to reduce wages further and further. There is no point in complaining, says Maria. If she does, she would not receive any more work at all.

ROSEMARIE SANTANIEGO,

ROME, ITALY

Rosemarie, a young Filipina widow, migrated to Rome in 1991 to take up domestic work in order to better support her five children, who, at the time she left them in the care of family members, were ages one, three, six, nine, and ten. Interviewed in 2000, Rosemarie recounts:

When the girl that I take care of [in Rome] calls her mother Mama my heart jumps all the time because my children also call me Mama. I feel the gap caused by our physical separation especially in the morning, when I pack [her] lunch, because thats what I used to do for my children.I used to do that very same thing for them. I begin thinking that at this hour I should be taking care of my very own children and not someone elses, someone who is not related to me in any way, shape, or form.

The work that I do here is done for my family, but the problem is they are not close to me but are far away in the Philippines. Some days, I just start crying while I am sweeping the floor because I am thinking about my children in the Philippines. Sometimes, when I receive a letter from my children telling me that they are sick, I look up out the window and ask the Lord to look after them and make sure they get better even without me around to care after them. [Starts crying.] If I had wings, I would fly home to my children. Just for a moment, to see my children and take care of their needs, help them, then fly back over here to continue my work.

CATHY COLLINS,

TEANECK, NEW JERSEY

Its 10:26 a.m. on a typical Wednesday for Cathy Collins, a thirty-five-year-old African American hospital administrative aide. Awake since 5:30 a.m., she had set out breakfast for her two children, left her home in Teaneck, and arrived two bus rides later at her desk in a tiny cubicle at New York Hospitals cardiology unit. Since then, there hadnt been a quiet moment between ringing phones, misplaced files, an unscheduled patient, a secretary calling in sick, and fielding calls and copying requests for her boss, a cardiologist in charge of two laboratories.

Researcher Robert Karasek defines stress on the job according to the demands of the task (how fast-paced and chaotic the workplace is) and the amount of control a worker has, with the highest stress jobs being high demand, low control. These are switchboard operators, assembly line workers, waiters, receptionists, typists, short-order cooks, garment stitchersanyone who faces constant demands but has little control in deciding how to meet them. Women hold a disproportionate number of these high-strain jobs and, unlike many men, continue to experience high demand, low control job stress in their home lives, after work. Part of a blood-pressure monitoring study, Cathy and her typical Wednesday reflect Karaseks findings.

After taking the bus back to Teaneck, Cathy had picked up her ten-year-old daughter, Candra, at ballet school, gotten home, and suddenly realized that Candra had missed a piano lesson. Amidst phone calls to reschedule the lesson and arrange a car pool, her husband, Andrew, a middle manager at IBM, arrived home, and Cathy got distracted by questions about what he should pack for his trip to Atlanta in the morning, what should go in the washing machine now, and what the children would have for lunch tomorrow. Then her son, Andre, age sixteen, came into the kitchen to ask for help with his test the next day, and there was dinner to make. By the time the family sat down to eat, Cathys diastolic blood pressure was up to 80. It dropped during dinner, but then an argument broke out between Andrew and Cathy over how to handle a minor household infraction by Candra. The episode ended with Candra sobbing in her mothers arms. Then there were dishes to clean up and a bed to be changed upstairs. At 9:34, Collinss diastolic pressure was back up to 79, again higher than it had ever been at the office.