Getting By: Women Homeworkers and Rural Economic Development (Rural America) - Softcover

Gringeri, Christina E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 070061107X ISBN 13: 9780700611072

Publisher: University Press of Kansas, 1994

Synopsis

In this book Christina Gringeri investigates the effects of homeworking on workers—mainly women—and their families and explores the role of the state in subsidizing the development of homeworking jobs that depend on gender as an organizing principle. She focuses on two Midwestern communities—Riverton, Wisconsin and Prairie Hills, Iowa—where more than 80 families have supplemented their incomes since 1986 as home-based contractors of small auto parts for The Middle Company, a Fortune 500 manufacturer and subcontractor of General Motors.

Gringeri looks at rural development from the perspective of local and state officials as well as that of the workers. Through the use of extensive personal interviews, she shows how the advantage of homework for women—being able to stay home with their families—is outweighed by the disadvantages—piecework pay far below minimum wage, long hours, unstable contracts, and lack of company benefits.

Instead of providing the hoped-for financial panacea for rural families, Gringeri argues, industrial homework reinforces the unequal position of women as low-wage workers and holds families and communities below or near poverty level.

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

About this title

About the Author

Christina E. Gringeri is assistant professor in the Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Utah.

From the Back Cover

"A fascinating case study of industrial homework as a rural development strategy. This book covers a wide range of issues and disciplines, from the question of homework and its regulation to the problem of women and development in an international context; from the crisis of America's farm areas and the transformation of industrial relations to the power relations within households as well as between the houshold and other social structures. The oral interviews are wonderful-the voices of homeworkers come through in all their hope and pain."--Eileen Boris, author of Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States

"This is a significant contribution to scholarship on rural development as well as to the literature on women's work. The quotations by the women are rich and compelling, and those from mangement are rather astonishing in terms of their strategies for relocation. . . . An excellent study of a largely unexplored but increasingly important area of homework in the contemporary U.S."--Carolyn Sachs, Pennsylvania State University

Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 070061107X
• ISBN 13: 9780700611072
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208