0:00

SPEAKER 2 Okay, everybody. Welcome back to the Cutting Edge Lecture series. This week it is such a pleasure for me to introduce to speakers. I am a big fan of Stephanie's work and her recent book, Gender and Work in Global Value Chains. Capturing the games is one of the best books that I've read in development studies in the last couple of years, so I really wanted to invite her to come and speak to you guys. The book is kind of building on on a long career that is still continuing on gender and inequality within global value chains, looking at the way that the global economy has been restructured, how production and consumption have been restructured, and teasing out the kind of gendered impacts there. Stephanie is somebody who's worked all over the world on these issues. She's published extensively, but she has also worked in a kind of practical way, both with NGOs as well as private actors like supermarkets, and trying to improve the working conditions of women across the world. I think that she straddles that balance between kind of very critical scholarship that's kind of critical of the actors involved in these chains, as well as the kind of strategic engagement with them, which is a very hard pence to do. I also think that her book, although it's focussed on gender, I think it's actually really also a book about ICTs and digitisation, the way that global value chains have become increasingly data driven. And I like the way that this is kind of not the focus of her work, but more in the background, more embedded within these broader transformations in terms of globalisation, changing consumer preferences and the way that kind of plays out within the global economy. So it is a real treat to have her speak to you today. And I'm very grateful that she's come to join us. We also have our own Ted Maher. Some of you may have already. Have you been teaching DV 400 this time? Not teaching, but I've been doing a little sideline. Okay. And she's also the person who teaches the informal economy course within the department. And a lot of her work has been looking at the informal economy as well as social policy, and increasingly also in digital technologies. Her own book, Identity Economics, is also a favourite book of mine. So it's a real sort of matching of of great minds today, and I'm really looking forward to the discussion afterwards. So as usual, we'll first have Stephanie speak for 45 minutes thereabouts. And then Kate will give her comments for 15 minutes, and then we'll open it up to the Q&A. Again, I want to remind you guys that fortune favours the brave. So if you have a burning question, don't wait until the end to put up your hands. But hopefully we'll have plenty of time for lots of questions. So without further ado, shall we welcome Stephanie. SPEAKER 4 Thank you very much and for the invitation to be here. It's a great privilege. And the LSE has always been very close to my heart. And all the research that is carried on here and, and so many brilliant students that have come out of various master's programs at the MSC. And it's also great to be with Kate as a discussant who's, again, whose work I greatly admire. So I'm going to talk about I mean, just about half of the talk will be related to the book because I wasn't sure how much people I mean, some of you might have read it, some of you might not. So bear with me if it is something you've read and you're very familiar with my arguments. But I wanted to just give an overview. And then the second half is really what's going on now. What are the contemporary issues in relation to gender and global value chains. And I'm going to focus on three things. One is innovation and technology. The second is Covid. What was the impact of Covid. And then thirdly and very briefly, but this is where we don't really know the outcomes, the sorts of global shifts that are taking place with big implications for global value chains and for people who work in them. And so, just as a sort of a framing, just roughly, it's it's argued that approximately somewhere between 50 and 80% of global trade passes through global value chains. Very difficult to get the data, by the way. So that data issue is really critical because most data is collected at the point of export and import. So trade is counted solely when a product crosses a border. The reality is that in complex global value chains, commodities can cross borders multiple times. If you've got an iPhone on you, it's probably got the components from 26 countries. If not more in it. And many of those components will have multiple, multiple times cross borders. So the statistical way of of acquiring data and information based on trade between nation states, when you're in a global value chain world doesn't really work because there were organised in much more complex ways. So a rough estimate, World Development Report 2020, was that there was a big increase in over time from the late 70s, from the 70s, and that a slight decline recently in the last. Well, we're a bit ahead of 2015, the date 80% to 2000. So one of the big players. What's the key of a global global value chain is that the trade is coordinated by primarily by very large multinational companies, especially retailers. A lot of my own work on the genocide is focussed on retailers, but other multinational companies are also heavily involved in coordinating. And I'll go through in a bit more detail in a minute how that coordination takes place. But basically, a company like Walmart doesn't just go out to the local wholesale market and put in an order to fill their shelves for the next week or the next month, they pre-program nine months in advance, often more, and not only pre-programmed with their immediate suppliers, but also with their indirect suppliers. So a Walmart buyer might be negotiating with the person who the company that is bringing the product to them. Plus, the factory that produces them, plus some of the input suppliers into the factory that produces those commodities. So these are highly coordinated value chains. This is not free trade in plastic. The expansion of global value chains over the, particularly since the 1980s, when you've got a lot of outsourcing and offshoring, and when you've got a big shift in production, in the sourcing of manufactured goods, especially, and, and agri food and other goods that used to be primarily in Europe and North America, and a lot of that sourcing was increasingly shifted over to developing countries, to lower income countries. One of the reasons for those shifts was deregulation of markets. Another reason for that shift was that that you could get cheaper labour and therefore cheaper goods from countries with lower labour costs. So there were different drivers in terms of the number. And one of the outcomes of that process of, of, of global outsourcing was that it drove massive increase and helped drive a massive increase in employment in developing countries, in lower income countries. But very significantly, a large proportion of people working in these global value chains were women. So it actually generated jobs, particularly for women who in many countries had previously not had paid work. Not always, but in many countries that was the case. So you've got this talk about the feminisation of work or the feminisation of employment. We don't have good data for it, just as we don't have good data for global value trade through global value chains because it only looks the data really only comes at the point of the order. We also don't have very good data for the number of workers working in global value chains, because if you simply take the data from producers at the export level, you've only got parts of the value chain. You're not looking at all the outsourcing that's going on within a country that feeds in to an export good, that is then finally exported. So the data we do have and this is a bit old, some of this data, but it's the data that I'm trying to collect it and it should come with a health warning. But for China garments, China garments, apparel, big, big value chain, global value chain focus 5 million workers, approximately 80% of those are women. Bangladesh garments. Currently around 3.5 million workers, roughly 55 to 70% of those are women. South African fruit 400,000. Probably a bit more now, probably nearer half a million. Over half of those of women. And so we could go on. And very importantly, don't forget it's not just waged work that was generated, but also small and agri food. Smallholders are also often, for some commodities, play a critical role in the production of those commodities. And women can play a key role in that in those commodities as well. So if you take something like cocoa, West African cocoa, 70% of cocoa comes from West Africa. If you're a chocoholic like me mountain, 25% of the recognised farmers are women, but 45 to 50% of the actual work is done by women. So but often as contributing family labour. So. So we can see that there are millions and millions work in value chains. The OECD says it's 400 and the ILO says 453 million jobs, 42% female. But that excludes lower income countries. And a lot of the labour intensive sourcing is from the early countries. It excludes informal workers and that excludes casual workers. So that's just the tip of the iceberg. So just briefly, and I'm really going to have to put sort of my key arguments of the book into a bit of a nutshell here, but this is just a very simplified global value chain. And the key of it is that, as I said earlier, someone like Wal Mart will coordinate right the way through to the inputs, not just the manufacturer, through the distributors, through to the final retail. But also very important to me is that the lead firms, the buyers, the retailers, the multinationals govern the chain. They don't own production very, very rarely. But they control what the the key producers in the chain do to a very high level, sometimes down to, to, to. I mean, the level of detail is quite phenomenal. I've got a lot of time, but I could give you examples later on. So if you go and buy something from next, for example, the label will have been put on in the factory, say in Bangladesh or in China or in India with all with the barcode, with all the detail about how it was produced, where it was produced, what the final retail prices, etcetera, etcetera. This is highly coordinated and, and the governance of this and the standards that are used to govern the chains are also really critical. But each segment of any chain, particularly if it crosses borders, which many do, will be embedded in local labour markets, and it's those local labour markets that are highly gendered, and it's from those local labour markets that both men and women are drawn into production in different ways, some as co-workers, often with quite good benefits, but often as casual workers, smallholders, etcetera. And the key argument in my book, which I'm going to elaborate a bit more in a minute, is that particularly with the retail value chain, is a big dimension that underpin the expansion of retail value chains, which are highly consumer focussed. What really underpinned their their expansion was the commercialisation of reproductive work. So basically my argument in a nutshell, this work that was traditionally done in the home or in households, largely by women, largely unpaid for free, has slowly been drawn into commercial production. And as it's drawn into commercial production, women have been increasingly drawn in to the production of those goods. So these retailers and that's really focusing more in on the retailers specifically. Retailers are highly consumer focussed. They watch their customers like Hawks. Don't know how many of you in this room have loyalty cards, supermarket loyalty cards. If you do, the those retailers know more about you than you know about yourself, because they don't only know, they don't only know everything you buy. So, you know, if you've got a slight alcohol problem, they know if you constantly suffer from headaches, they know whether you've got pets, they know how many children you've got. There's all sorts of information they get immediately on the information you've given them, but they also profile you based on publicly available information. So on top of that, they'll know where you live, what types of postcode you have, etcetera, etcetera. Now, what really interested me and I, and I've got to be careful at the time, but what really drew me into the gender dimension of global value chains, and I was working on it when I was an idea, and Sussex Institute of Development Studies, and I was doing some firm level interviews with major supplier into a large retailer in the UK. A man. And this was in the 2000. And suddenly this man started to talk to me about gender, which kind of shook me. I mean, I had I was very interested in issues around gender, but why was this major supplier into retail and talking about gender? And he said, what is quite simply, 70% of our customers are women. And if we're not focussed on gender issues, then we're just not focussed on what's happening in relation to our customers. And he said what we have is it's a just one of our team specialises in monitoring gender trends and particularly in relation to female employment, what type of work they do, what kind of hours, etcetera. And so a lot of the kind of expansion was based on, on really facilitating particularly supermarkets, but other retailers as well, what we call a one stop shop. Women are increasingly in play deployment, but they also largely take responsibility for the cooking, for care in the home, etcetera, etcetera. So the retailers really focussed themselves on a lot of the expansion was how to facilitate that and how to sell more and make a profit out of it. So ready made garments, food, ready prepared food, white goods or a whole range of of things that they produce. The other dimension of of the retailers, though, in terms of this retail expansion, particularly in the global north, and I'll come back later to the global staff of Europe and North America, is that again, to expand was to produce goods that were cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. One of the key ways in which they do this, the big retailers, the big multinationals, and they have enormous control over their suppliers because. UNKNOWN Of their purchasing power from those suppliers, is the types of purchasing. SPEAKER 4 Practices that they then implement onto the suppliers. So, for example, if you're a big retailer, you don't want to hold stock yourself because the more stock you hold, the more cost it is to you. What you want to do is you want to have the goods just constantly coming through the value chain. And at the same time, with globalisation, you are getting these very, very efficient value chains in expanding shipping, freight, etcetera. So you want stock constantly coming through, so you want your manufacturers and your suppliers to be producing all literally on a minute by minute, or what they call just in time basis. If there's any change in shifts in consumer demand, you can then say, oops, sorry, no, we don't want that product. We want that product instead, or we want more of this and we want more of that. So suppliers have to work on a just in time basis to their big buyers. But where the where orders are constantly changing. But also very importantly, where there's constant downward pressure on the price at which they produce and sell to the retailer. And this is a battle that of what's called the purchasing practices. And how many suppliers deal with that pressure is by offsetting the risks and the costs onto their workforce. So you hire a core workforce, which will give you the quality of the product you you need to supply, and then you have a casual or an informal or a supplementary or a subcontracted workers who are just brought in on an as needed basis to give you the volume you need to meet your buyers requirements. And this is a constant struggle. But what you also got through government chains is the ability of civil society organisations to to track everything that is produced right the way down to the manufacturer in China or India or Bangladesh or Africa or Latin America, because as I said earlier, because of this level of governance, the identity of the ultimate buyer is put on the product at the point of production. So it's very easy for civil society organisations to identify the buyer and then campaign not necessarily against the supplier, but against the buyer themselves and say, you know, you're causing you're using all this cheap labour. So there are a lot of civil society campaigns, particularly still are, but particularly prominent in the in the 90s, I would say, and then the 2000. And as a result of some of those civil society campaigns, you've got the Oxfam behind the brands is one example and could have given many. But as a result of that, many of the big multinationals now have codes of labour practice and other codes that they particularly relate to spot to to wage workers. So you have to meet minimum standards. If you're you're supplying labour standards and you're supplying some of the big retailers and or you you need to have other commitments in relation to, say, smallholders fair trade as an example of a smallholder initiative as well as workers, but particularly focussed on smallholders to improve their position within the global supply chain. So thinking analytically. That's just sort of the overview. So analytically, the big challenge that I had in the book really addresses is how is this relation between commercial production social reproduction reconfigured in the context of global value chains. We've got these supply chains out there. What's going on. And there are three different approaches that I've used that I draw on. And I do I do call myself a bit of an eclectic analytically, I'm not my combined primary worker and I think, as Laura said, is more driven by trying to understand what's going on in reality rather than pure theory, but then drawing on theory to try and explain and better understand that reality. And there are three approaches in particular that I've drawn on. The first is global value chain analysis, which is the work of Gary Geography and many others, which looks really focussed on inter firm linkages. How do those relationships between firms along the value chain, how have they evolved? What are they like? What are the power relations between firms? How how is value extracted by the big retailers at the expense of the suppliers into the value chain? The other approach that I use is global production network analysis, which comes from that's more from economic geography. So the work of Peter Dickinson, Neal Coe, Martin Hess, others, many others are involved, Henry Jung and where they are also looking at value chains. But they look at it much more in terms of the the embeddedness of value chains in different societal, territorial and institutional contexts and how power relations play out in that context. So both in my, from my view, are informative, but neither a really addressed gender issues at all, to be honest. They were both, in my view, fairly gender blind. The other approach, from a gender perspective that I draw on is the work of feminist political economy. Many, many, many writers in their career would be an obvious example. Um, and Diane Elson Richeson. There are many in feminist political economy who also looked at global production and done some really important work on global production, but not really looked along the whole of the value chain. They tend to focus in just that, certain segments of the value chain, like production producers, for example. So what I really tried to do was to bring those approaches together, to try and address this analytical challenge of how the production and social reproduction relations were being reconfigured. The one person whose work I did draw on, but he unfortunately only wrote a short paper, was by Phillip Kelly, and he coined the phrase global reproduction network networks. And I built on that and then drawing on mine much wider. I've been doing similar work in a much wider range of sectors and countries, really trying to think through what are the implications in terms of this changing relationship, commercial and societal relationship. And I think what that the reproduction network analysis really brings in is firstly, a better understanding of the relationship between the gendered division of labour, between paid and unpaid, and how that is being reconfigured, particularly, as I said earlier, with women being brought into the labour force to produce goods that were previously previously undertaken in the home and and very importantly, how those social reproduction was being commercialised in different ways. I focus on retail. You can have similar arguments in relation to care work. And there is there are a number of very good researchers who do look at care. Look, it's just not my in my focus. And then the key argument that I put forward is that critical to the whole way in which the dynamics of the journey or the gender inequality is absolutely critical to how the commercial dynamics of these value chains operate. And they're critical in two ways. Firstly, when women are bought into the labour force and a lot of feminist political economies very clearly articulated this, women's labour tends to be under undervalued. You know, you go and buy a product and it's got some of that beautiful embroidery of Christmas coming up. So you're going to see some beautiful embroidery in the shops. A lot of that is hand-stitched by informal workers, often in India and often at a pittance of a wage. Why? Because they're unskilled. Should anyone in this room go and try and do some of that embroidery? Good luck to you. I certainly couldn't. So it's an undervaluation of some highly skilled work in some cases. But secondly, and critically, I undervaluing the work that's done at the at the base of the value chain, at the point of value creation and undervaluing women's role then in enhancing value like embellishment, for example, that facilitates value capture further along the value chain. So you're going to go and pay a very high price for that beautifully embellished product, which will be sold to a very high price by retailer because it's so beautifully done. But the actual capture of the value has been at this end by the retailer, not at the other end by the informal home base worker often. But so those are the kind of downsides, particularly from the gender perspective. But at the same time, this has created a very large amount of employment for women. And as Nyla Kabir has argued, and others as well, this can potentially be empowering. I'll come back to that in a second. But from my perspective, two key issues here. Firstly, that global value chains creates the opportunity for agency so that women workers, once they come out of the home, get involved in paid work, have more individual agency, they have an independent income, they have more collective agency that they can now work in, in organisations or can collaborate together and can collaborate with other organisations such as international NGOs. And at the end of the day, that enhances their gender bargaining and contestation. And I will return to this issue of contestation. So just to kind of wrap it up in terms of a kind of framework, and this is in the book, this is just trying to put it simply, on the on the left hand side is global production. That is the commercial value chain. I put it up before in a very linear way here. It's put up in a circular way, but it's the same thing. You've got workers going into import sourcing process manufacturing through to retail. But. Those, whereas in a kind of traditional economics, you would have quite a division between what goes on commercial and what goes on in household. What I'm arguing is that they're actually increasingly interlinked through value chains. Those big retailers monitor those households like sharks. They know exactly what's going on in those households. But also and this is highly simplified. If you were one of the big brothers and retailer, if you were one of the, say, a large confectionary company, you're not only interested in what goes on in households, you've also got to watch out for the communities in which your your product is produced. The cocoa growing communities in West Africa. And it's those communities that also produce the workers that go back into the value chain and that can become part of the circle. In other words, these are these two dimensions. Global production and social reproduction are interlinked. And increasingly in this kind of value chain world, the big multinationals and big retailer retailers are equally interested in both or not equally. This is the driving that because this is where you get the profit. But they need to know about what's going on on the other side in order to get their markets to expand this. So is this empowering or not empowering? And the value chain perspective. And there's been long debates and theoretical debates amongst, particularly in feminist political economy, between those who argue it is empowering, being a very important example. Dunaway is another academic from the US because it's very exploitative and disempowering. NGOs argue it's all horrendous. These poor women, they work their asses off. Excuse my French, they work their fingers raw and they get paid a pittance for it. Very, very exploitative businesses. And they'll provide lots of examples for companies. They'll come back and say, yeah, but look, they're really benefiting from it. And they will provide examples. So you have these kinds of two opposites to some extent. But when you come in from the value chain perspective and use that commercial lens, there's been a lot of work on issues around downgrading and upgrading in the same value chain. You will have some producers who, in order to survive and meet the purchasing practices, will downgrade. They'll go for lower value activities, low price, high volume. They accept that they're under commercial pressure. They'll just churn women workers over very exploitative, very poor wages and certainly very little gender equality. But you will also, in the same value chains and sometimes even in the same factories, have upgrading pressures where some of the suppliers will be able to produce much higher value goods or engage in higher value activities, a lot more tied in with innovation and lean production. They will get their profits from higher productivity rather than lower wages. Don't forget it's it's not the wage that matters. It's the unit labour cost that matters. So if you can you can raise wages. If you can raise productivity even more, you can still increase your profits. They then need to attract and retain more skilled workers. And in order to do that, they'll pay back wages. If those workers are often women, they will often then provide more equitable. So not always, but they're more likely to provide more equitable conditions or at least have the opportunities of that. So in other words, from a value chain perspective, really what I argue is that it's it goes both. You'll find both in the same value chains. Given time I'm not going to go into these. This are some of the examples of case studies that are in the book in quite a lot of detail. One is Coco in Ghana, which I highlight as a downgrading challenge. Kenya flowers where a lot of contestation in the in the 2000. But you definitely had some improvements and protests and a lot of change comes about through protests, but I'm not going to focus on that. I want to move on to the more contemporary challenges. And there are three things that I briefly want to touch on, and I think the first one is issues around innovation and technology, and that that really is important for the whole economic upgrading story, because what some people argue is, well, yeah, if you get economic upgrading then actually how you economically upgrade as you introduce more and more capital and capital equipment, you innovate at cetera. And that when you do that, what actually happens is you get the defence minimisation of the labour force. In other words, women were bought in in large numbers in the 2000 or the 1990s, 2000, but that you will slowly see the be expelled now or there'll be a decline in the level of female employment. Very importantly, that does vary across sector. The kind of data that you get does vary, and particularly between manufacturer and agrifood, much more difficult to to innovate and use modern high level technology in agri food than it is in manufactured goods. But and I just from a value chain perspective, I would think we need to also be bit careful in taking data that has been acquired through traditional. Statistical techniques, particularly based largely on labour force data, and apply it to a value chain, and therefore assume that you're getting a shift in the value chain. I've got time to go into the detail, but if you think of a factory that used to be a car factory that had all of its own cleaners and its own catering service, etcetera, it now outsources the cleaning and it outsources the, the, the, the catering. Those to previously would have been counted as part of the part of the car factory. Now they're not because they're known separately by catering firm and by a cleaning firm. So they disappear. So but you haven't necessarily had any decline in the number of workers. What you've had is a change in the type of work and who undertakes that work. And just very quickly, another example that's often given is Bangladesh garments. Because Bangladesh garments used to be around 80% female and is now roughly around 6,065% female. Absolutely true. There's been a relative decline as they've shifted from woven to knit, but it used to be 80% of 1 million workers is now 60% of nearly 4 million workers. So the absolute number of women working in Bangladesh garments has gone up, even though the relative number has declined. So I think we just have to be a little bit careful of the stats, but also very importantly. And that goes back to the example I just gave. What we have seen in value chains is with the expansion of value chains is a massive growth in the role of services, particularly linked to trade. So just to give you an OECD number, the services in trade or trade services rose from 23% in 2008 to 45% in 2013. And that's not just the kind of example I gave. There are many, many other services that that if you're if you've fragmented production across a whole range of countries and suppliers, you then have to bring in to help coordinate and manage those relationships. And women are in services. Over half of service employment is female, and the types of jobs that are needed are often kind of soft jobs, as they call them. I don't. Others do. So I think, again, we have to be a bit careful in that there might be a decline in the narrow sense of the sector, but you also have to look at the broader value chain and what else is going on elsewhere to fully assess what the gender implications are. Very difficult because we don't necessarily have the data. I should add, Walmart has the data for its own value chain because they monitor it all, just that private data. So data does exist. It's just we don't have access to the next big issue that clearly impacted value chains is Covid. And that was quite interesting. I was involved in quite a bit of research around value chains in Covid and just again, just highlighting a few key things. First, is it really varied by value chain, the impacts really very big time by value chain in garments. It was really a horror story. Initially it roughly around 70% of global. Garment production is undertaken by women, it varies between countries. But what some of the big buyers or many of the big buyers, when all the shops are closed, they just suspended orders and some even suspended. Mark Anna has done an excellent work from Penn State University. Illness. They didn't just suspend orders, they suspended orders that were already in the process of delivery. So I could have been the garments have been produced, they were already in shipment and then they cancelled the order. So it was a disaster. There was a big campaign. So the society campaign over that and some of that cutting and running was ameliorated. But but even without that, garment workers really suffered as a result of Covid. And many of the micro workers in India, for example, Bangladesh, they were forced back to the villages, they lost pay, etcetera, etcetera. Agri food was much more complex story because food remained in virtually every country, remained a necessary products. People still had to eat to live despite Covid, so it was much less adversely affected. But it did have implications because most food producers still now had to meet restrictions. So, for example, you had to cut spacing between workers or you you couldn't you couldn't bus workers in in the same way as you used to because you couldn't put them all together. So there were a lot of complications. And certainly it did affect workers in in food and also very importantly, in many of the food shops and supermarkets, they remained open the majority of employment in most countries, if few exception. But most countries in the global north and global South of of retail. Service industry. The majority is female. And of course then they were highly exposed to to Covid and the risks that came with that. And for those that lost their jobs, sudden loss of income and loss of pay for those that didn't lose their job. Covid, particularly for women, the problem of juggling care work when the children were often out of school now, but you were still having to go to work. The risk of you bringing Covid back into your household, etcetera. So, so quite, quite problematic issues. Transport logistics was also interesting. Logistics is primarily male. From all everything that I've seen, it's primarily male. It was heavily disrupted. But you also got some very weird things like Kenya Airways who didn't used to, who couldn't fly any passengers, converted many of their passenger planes to. Carrying fresh produce. If you go on a passenger plane, often underneath you, there will be in the hold. There will be a lot of fresh produce and other goods that are being air freighted. What they did was to bring it up into the seats so that they had retained the pallet, so the pallet would fit in the seats, and that each seat had a pallet rather than it being well as well as being underneath. So there were some very interesting things that went on. Many, a lot of workers were affected by it. But as I said, that is primarily male. And that's interesting right now. So just in terms of sort of the gender impacts of Covid, what I think Covid really did was highlight some of the fault lines in global value chains that I was identifying earlier. I mean, one of the most obvious was that cutting and running the purchasing practices. Here we go again. The buyer purchasing practices. The essence of it is they control everything that goes on, but they offset all the risks down to suppliers and they offset down to workers. Covid hit. What do we do? We cut and run. As I've said, a lot of variations across sectors and also across countries, but it was particularly temporary, casual, informal workers who were the worst affected. They didn't have labour contracts. They were the most likely to be laid off first. The majority of those workers are female in virtually every country, including the UK. The second also, and this was what a lot of the research we were being asked to look at was issues around data and how do we monitor what the gender impacts are? Out of sight, out of mind is what we call that companies do on the whole do not. If they do, they do collect gender data. I should be very careful I said this. They don't tend to they certainly don't publish it, and they often don't analyse it unless it's in their interest to for commercial reasons. So there is a lot of gender data out there in, in global value chains, but it wasn't being monitored. And a lot of the, the decisions that were being made with no consideration of what the gender impacts were, but certainly what Covid did was to to, I would argue, to set back a lot of the gains that had been made by women workers in many countries. And, well, we can there was a whole talk about building back better. I'm really not sure that we did build back better, but what I should also say, of course, Covid was almost immediately followed by a whole series of other global shifts and geopolitical tensions that are going on. I'm not going to go into all those big geopolitical tensions. I'm sure you're very familiar with the US-China tensions being lost from the value chain perspective, the most relevant, because a lot of that is tensions over how outsourcing went from North America to China. And China has now become an expert in the production of goods previously produced in North America. So, of course, what Donald Trump are looking for was reshoring. Bring the jobs back home, bring the production back home. And to some extent, that has begun to happen. But from a gender perspective, from a worker perspective, what's been brought home has been highly, highly advanced technology, technological investment, with very few jobs associated with it. So although Trump has had that policy, that strategy has had some impact in terms of reshoring. It hasn't had that much effect in terms of job creation. And I think it's unlikely to as well. Near shoring is another one. How do you cut the cost? Because Covid was so disruptive and value chains and getting goods from one end of the world to the other end of the world is very expensive. So a lot of of big multinationals and retailers move much more towards near shoring sources as much as you can, as near as you can. So if there's a disruption, you'll be less disrupted. So that shifts production around a bit. And then of course, the latest one is friend shoring only only source from your friends, not from your potential bursaries. I'm not going to go into that, but that there is a sort of reconfiguration going on. In terms of my own research, where we've really been focussed on the last few few years is what is South-South trade and the rise of South-South trade. What we call the regionalisation of value chains and South-South trade has really increased. If you just to give you a bit of data, you've got it's not up there, but this is according to Unctad, the. In 2018, there had been a shift trade between countries in the global South, and that includes China. There is a, you know, what is the global South, but including China went up from 39. To 57% by 2000 and I can't remember. Sorry I haven't got it done. Exact date, but there's been a significant increase. So now the majority of trade of exports from the global south go to other countries within the global South. But also what we've got is regionalisation of value chains. So within Latin America, within Asia and within Africa, increasingly with growth in consumption, growth in jobs, urbanisation, you're getting rising middle classes in those regions, you're getting companies within those regions becoming the lead firm. So the lead firm are increased. Firms are increasingly not American and European. They are Asian, African or Latin America. And I've been involved in a big research project in in Africa, which people look more at Asia and Latin America in terms of those trends. But that trend is also happening in Africa. I've got just two examples up there. Shoprite is a major supermarket, South African supermarket. It operates in 14 countries across sub-Saharan Africa. Pacini is a is a South African garment retailer and also operates in the exact number of companies, but is also an international brands, so they also are Pacini own whistles, Hobbs and one two others in the UK. So. So the kind of that idea that it's all companies in Europe and North America controlling what goes on in global South, there's shifts taking place here and those shifts are multiple and they're taking place within Africa as well as in Asia and Latin America. Well, I research also looked at was this. So if that happens, if you do get the regionalisation and domestic value chains in Africa, Asia, Latam, the labour standards matter in those value chains. So our research was looking at that in Africa and we found mixed outcomes. It's going to be my appetite. It makes outcomes. So certainly in both Africa we found Rita which is is the one in Agricultural Ethical Trade Association in South Africa. They use the equivalent of the Ethical trade initiative in the UK, very similar fair trade talks about fair trade in that it's fair trade Africa. That's not fair trade here. And one of their biggest goals is the expansion of fair trade certified products within Africa, Asia and Latin America, i.e. within the global South. But also what we found is the US value chains have become more explicit within African countries. So governments, which previously tended to say, this is nothing to do with us. This is what the European and the North Americans are up to. Have also become more engaged in issues around value chains. So an example of that is in Kenya, a little known standard introduced in 2019. So just as Covid was hitting just after just before, it's basically 1758. It's a horticulture and floriculture standard, which is a straight A, basically it's a synthesis of all the private standards that operate in the global fund chains. And they've just taken them and turn them into national law to apply for both export value chains and domestic value chains. It doesn't matter. And right the way through the value chain gender implications of that. We're not sure I mean that really to to wait and see what we found in the case studies. We've done that was in Kenya, South Africa. Swati and Soto is we've found mixed outcomes and it's not straightforward. So for example, this is an example of when Covid hit. Whilst the big multinational brands were cutting and running, the South African retailers didn't cut and run from there. The suppliers in this alternative 15, they had a much closer relationship to them. And so the impacts on workers were not as adverse. And of course, the majority of those workers, again, are females in terms of the kind of the local social standards, the public governance. I've been doing a lot of work on, on smallholder production in Kenya. And what we're seeing potentially are opportunities for women at smallholder level, because to be certified the standards and it's now law that you are going to have to do that. You have to be organised in small producer organisations, cooperatives, etcetera. And what our research indicates is that a lot better gender outcomes. So it's still very much work in process progress, difficult to know the exact. SPEAKER 4 So there is a final slide. So just I'll give you two without going into it. So just a few concluding remarks on first is. It's disempowering for women. I would have we we need a more nuanced approach because you can find examples which are good or bad. You know, for me, isn't the answer. What we need to understand is who benefits, who loses. And that then gives you who you have to protect. Those that lose on, say, from the weakest to the strongest, focus on the weakest, and then the stronger workers will de facto be looked after. The second issue I think that's absolutely critical and Covid has really highlighted is firstly, as argued earlier, that global value chains are built on systemic gender inequality. That's been critical for the sort of value capture by the big retailers and brands. And what Covid really has done is to highlight that that is not gone away and is unlikely to go away, and particularly with these kinds of geopolitical shifts going on at the moment, a lot of retailers are really clamping down on their suppliers in terms of cost and price. But the other side of the same is that what we also see, and I haven't had time to go into it, but we are also seeing with the shifts that are going on, is an increase in public regulation of value chains. I gave an example from Kenya, but I know the UK has left the European Union, but the European Union is in the process of introducing human rights and environment due diligence legislation. I can give you the details later if you want, across a range of dimensions, but one of them is on corporate responsibility. Sorry, corporate sustainability due diligence, which will come in in 2026 for all big multinationals selling in the EU or operating in the EU. And that will apply not only to their own operations but across their whole supply chain, irrelevant of where they source. Now that's going to be a big ask for those multinationals, even though the UK is outside the EU de facto that those companies will be operating in the UK or the vast majority will, so they'll be following EU legislation irrelevant of whether they, the UK follows or not. And then the other big shift or the other big issue. Sorry and such a shame. I don't know why it's frozen because I've got a picture of it. But anyway, the other big my argument is that gender equality never came about because governments or. Companies just gave it to us. It's frozen. But I'll just finish off here. The. It's always come about through contestation. I'm from the University of Manchester. Women's rights in the UK. The result of the suffragette movement and brilliant. You know there it is. So suffragette movement. Equally, a lot of the gains that we're getting have only come about that women have ever got come about through contestation. So the societies played a key role. If you're following the news at the moment, the Bangladesh, in Bangladesh, there's the major uprising going on by garment workers, primarily led by women garment workers, because arguing for higher wages at the minimum legal minimum wage should be much higher if you're going to have a living wage. They haven't had any increase in wages in Bangladesh for over five, five years, or about five years, even though the cost of living has gone up. So that contest and some of the multinational brands. Of porting them, but the problem and arguing they should have an increase in living wage. The problem is they're not committing to increasing the prices they pay to the suppliers who supply those garments. Purchasing practices hits again. So ultimately this is contestation continues to be. But I'll finish there because I think it's still it's still opens up the value chains provide this kind of channel for these. Okay. So a lot to think about there. And thank you very much to Stephanie Barrientos. SPEAKER 2 For that real tour de. SPEAKER 5 Force compressing 250 300 page book into a few PowerPoint slides and a really interesting presentation. So I want to start with just my my sense of how how this comes together. What I really liked about this book was the whole idea of using a gender lens to examine how global value chains reconfigure the boundaries between commercial production and social reproduction. And we've talked in DV 400 a lot about how the economic and the social come together in various different ways in the, the, the coming together of states and markets and the shaping of development processes. So the idea of seeing women's paid work and unpaid work, the profit motive and the motives of care and well-being, production and social reproduction. There's a kind of Polanyi sense there that we're looking at how the economic and the social interface, through the process of global value chains and how that reshapes economic directions. And there was an interesting engagement, I thought, between feminist economics and conventional economics, to try to tease some of these things out. I also very much appreciated her her critique of what's been called the benign escalator view of global value chains, that you just get on the chain at the bottom and it will pull you up to prosperity within the global economy. And I thought it was very useful to have this idea that work at the bottom of the chain doesn't necessarily lead to better paying conditions, and that these are things that have to be fought for. And the third thing that I thought was really useful was the whole idea that not only is it the case that decent work outcomes are not inevitable, but gender equitable outcomes are also not inevitable. Okay, but they can be opened up by particular patterns of policy intervention and contestation, either individually or collectively, or in in concert with a number of other organisations, civil society organisations, public governance, etcetera. And in understanding the way that upgrading and downgrading come together and trying to understand how the dynamics of the chain help us to work out how to improve the way that chains function, rather than just to get trapped in the machinery and dragged down in the race to the bottom. So all of those I thought were really, really useful ways for looking at global value chains in a deeper and more dynamic way to try to get a sense of what their wider gender implications were. However, I think that there are a number of issues that don't. That we need to sink our teeth into a little bit more, starting with the whole idea of embedded tensions, which is discussed in the book. The idea that there are tensions between global value chains is something that exploit women's cheap labour and global value chains as a source of opportunity for women that could lead to no jobs, income, economic autonomy. The whole idea of increasing women's labour force participation as liberating, enabling empowerment has really been challenged. And this is mentioned in the book, really been challenged by, you know, decades ago by guy standings work on in formalisation and feminisation that idea that globalisation has created a dynamic that creates more women's jobs but more informal, downgraded jobs in the process. So this idea of supermarkets is expanding into Africa. You have a sense that that that access to food, clothes, household goods in the context of low income countries is somehow something that provides no convenience or makes life better off for women. But this is not being viewed clearly in the context of the entire dynamics of the chain. Who produces who consumes these things? And the reality is, in developing countries, it is time poor income. Poor women in low income countries often who are producing at the bottom of global value chains, so that women in developed countries or middle class women in developing countries can buy from these supermarkets, can buy these convenience goods for women. So there's a kind of situation in which low paid women produce low value convenience household goods, which they export so that the branded version of those things can be imported back again at a higher cost. There's a kind of unequal exchange between the labour being carried out at the bottom of the chain and the consumer goods being consumed at the at the other end of the chain, which are often imported and often too expensive for the workers themselves. The female workers themselves to afford. So I think there's a question here of how do we ensure that the boundaries between women's paid and unpaid work, between production and reproductive work, are shifted in a positive direction, when the producers often are unable to buy the goods that are being produced, and when household incomes are often depressed rather than increased by working at the bottom of value chains. The second issue that I want to raise that connects with a core theme in the book is the whole idea of gender articulations. How do the linkages between production and and social reproduction, between paid and unpaid work? The dynamics of upgrading and downgrading. How do these come together in ways that either improve or fail to improve women's opportunities and their potential for empowerment? It's argued in the book that is a central issue is the undervaluing of women's skills in the sphere of social reproduction household work, cooking, sewing, that kind of thing leads to the underpaying of women when they enter the labour force in global value chains. Now, if we look at the actual historical process through which women's. Women became a cheap labour force in global value chains. We actually see a situation in which it has much less to do with women's undervalued skills, and a great deal more to do with the repealing of labour regulations that might have protected those women from being undervalued and paid low insecure wages. So it's not so much that societal norms are key to undervaluing women's work, but more about the use of liberalisation, structural adjustment to repeal the regulatory frameworks for labour that used to protect workers back in the era of ESI when they were working in local factories, led to deindustrialisation and now has brought in the global value chains where regulation is happening, happening at the level of the lean firm. And you have a situation where women are carrying out both female types of jobs food production, garment production, but also the production of electronics and their undervalued female labour in all of those situations. So it's not so much whether this is women's work, it is the dynamics of the chain that tends to undervalue women's work when there is nothing to protect those women. And I mentioned structural adjustment and the deindustrialisation, the undermining of local industry, the repealing of labour regulations, the creation of special economic zones which in fact remove labour protections as part of the deal of these special economic zones, remove minimum wage legislation. ET cetera. And you have a situation in which work is fragmented, not by women moving between paid and unpaid work, but actually by the dynamics of the chain. And Stephanie Barrientos mentioned the whole dynamic of price, speed and quality. So within the value chain, all of the firms involved have to produce at a particular quality at a very rapid speed, meeting a particular price point, which is often set so close to the actual cost of production, is very difficult to make any money out of it. I'm at five minutes. Okay. So you. It's really important to think about the ways in which those dynamics of trying to meet the price points that are set so tightly at the speed and the quality required, actually lead to a continuous layering of outsourcing, using labour contractors to bring in cheaper labour that is kept in a different site. There's a nice phrase from an article on global value chains in Houseware by Orlando Workman, who says off site, out of mind, those who do the auditing and global value chains, they go to the factory, the audit, what's going on there? If you outsource to labour contractors and have workers in another place, or you outsource to informal firms elsewhere, nobody looks at those. Nobody knows what's going on in those lower tiers that are well under the radar of various types of codes and standards. And in fact, Stephanie Barrientos, in her own work, has declared that labour contracting is the Achilles heel of codes and standards because they carry out forms of informal downgraded management of labour that codes and standards can catch so of just 1 or 2 other things. Just to to mention the issue of. UNKNOWN The whole importance of the ways in which upgrading. SPEAKER 5 And downgrading come together. So upgrading, as was mentioned, has to do with firms moving into better processes or higher value products, or even into higher value chains. But the way that upgrading. Sorry, that's economic upgrading but also social upgrading which is about improving the the conditions of work, the pay, the capacity to organise. But often up economic upgrading happens without social upgrading. And it's more often women that are left behind as the flexible labour force, as firms upgrade, say, from apparel cutting and trimming to textile production. ET cetera. Moving up the chain with higher value types of activities, but leaving women in the flexible side of the the packing, the seasonal labour, the filling in when you have a big border side of things. So upgrading economic upgrading can take place. But women are often on the side where they get downgraded. And in fact, Stephanie mentioned the ways in which upgrading often pushes women out of the value chain. As you have higher capital, higher skilled types of activities maybe, which require higher levels of education that women don't have. But it also happens at the other end of the value chain as unemployment increases, even in things like garments that are inhabitants are dominated by women, men start taking over those jobs if they're the best jobs around. So women get squeezed out whenever these jobs begin to become good jobs. Okay. Just one one final thing I think is really about the whole issue of governance and contestation. The whole idea of social, of, of public governance, private governance and social governance, trying to improve the way that firms operate. Looking at the way that social and private governance work, the way that firm regulations, certification codes and standards work often try to tidy up and improve the reputation of the value chain. But there's a certain type of a certain level of ethical washing that often goes on, so often in the context of of value chains in which women work improving, say, gender rights, or having training on social reproductive health, but not improving the wage, or not ensuring a living wage, or not improving the ability of women to organise in ways that can create frameworks of decent, decent work. So the whole idea that attending to gender necessarily improves the lot of women. I think we have to chip away at that a bit more, scratched the surface and say, in what way are they attending to gender? Are they attending to the kind of things that make it look like they're caring about women, thinking about whether women are being abused by their employers or whether they're have child care or improved assistance with reproductive rights, or are they actually ensuring that women have decent work that is ensured that they have the right to organise, that they have ensured protection against inappropriate overtime and decent, decent pay? So the process of making value chains really attend to improving the lot of women, I think, is about more than creating jobs, because if there are lots of really terrible jobs, it's not necessarily something that makes women better off. And it's about more than economic upgrading. Because if women are constantly pushed into the informal dimensions of the chain, again, it doesn't help women very much. And it's about more than bringing in public governance and codes and standards. Because if the public governance is states that are in thrall to the value chains because they need the exports and they need the improvements in their GDP, and the world Bank and multilateral organisations that are focussed on growth and improving GDP and enhancing market operations, not on ensuring decent work and adequate labour regulation, then the outcome is a is a problem. So I think that we want to be looking at these processes more in the round, and I think Stephanie has done a great job in creating a framework for us to think about these things, to look at the real complexities under the surface, and to really dig into the question of global value chains and gender and decent work in a way that we do something more than scratch the surface. Thank you. SPEAKER 2 So thank you both for these wonderful comments and wonderful things to think about. Do we have any? I'm going to take a couple of questions. And then if you want to respond to some of the comments. Do you prefer if I can take maybe three at a time? Stephanie. Yeah. Okay, so I think there's one over. And that's the gentleman. UNKNOWN Thank you so much for your talk. It was very insightful. I was wondering, since a lot of the focus was. On women as leaders in the labour force. I'd like to ask about women as employers or women own them. And whether or not efforts to integrate them into the value chain. Hence increasing their sizes and growth would improve the work conditions for women. Because empirical evidence has always shown that women employ women, they provide better conditions for them to live in the workforce and so on to provide transportation. All of these things that usually maybe in a lot of other places they wouldn't provide. So should there be more focus as well on how to ensure women owned business? Sorry. Integrated and expanded. SPEAKER 2 To thank you. Okay. Thank you. And the gentleman down here. SPEAKER 6 So I was just wondering, like the feminisation of labour in the Global South. Does he need to? Doesn't really need to figure association. Do the local club. Do the governance allow that to happen. Does this play the ground? And broader international. With this movement I was thinking about regarding the reshorin or like sometimes de-risking kind of policy towards China. What does it mean for women in China, for those women workers who have been working in the industry? What does it mean for those for women in, for example, Southeast Asia or Mexico, who may start working in similar industries that have moved to those countries? And also similarly, what does the EU legislation do? You know, how does he affect women working in India, China and those industries does. SPEAKER 2 Hey, can you pass it back to the lady here? SPEAKER 0 Thanks for the talk. I'm curious. You talked about how the global value chain makes women have more agency and makes them more productive, but I was wondering if this ever came up in your research in terms of the micro-level? To what extent did these women have more decision making power or bargaining power in the household? SPEAKER 4 All things I think are important issues. Did you want me to respond at all to. SPEAKER 2 Yeah. If there are things that you want to respond to, you probably try. SPEAKER 4 And I'll start with the questions. See, the first thing I think is as women owned businesses, yes, there is stuff going on on that. Yeah, yeah, I got into trouble. I was asked by an organisation I'm not sure I should name and ization to do a report on women and gender invalid chains, and it was an international organisation which isn't the world Bank, but it's not far off the world Bank. And I got into a lot of trouble because I didn't talk about I was talking about workers and worker rights and things like that. And they said, well, what we really wanted was to know about women owned businesses. I stuck to my guns. I think I put a couple of paragraphs in, but I said, look, there's vast majority. If you want to look in terms of numbers and development, it's women who are wage workers, who are the vast majority of women and businesses. But there are some actually really interesting examples. Wal-Mart ironically had a strategy. I think it's still they have to source X amount of the type of sourcing has to be from women owned business. That was it was a bit of an anomaly because. For promoting gender on certain issues was good. There are definitely examples. So the I've done quite a bit of work. On and off and on. Trying to. That were mine, but one of them was a garment factory owner. Don't forget, a lot of it is passed through the family. So a lot of it is a factory. Owned and a father have passed on and. She she become the owner of the factory, and the vast majority of workers, supervisors and managers in her factory were women. So all this argument that I kept hearing in Bangladesh about. Women call these supervisors, they don't have enough authority. They can't manage all of that mess. Was clearly and very successful. She became. Very unfortunate, a very short period of time. The head of the EMA, which is the Bangladesh export. In fact, you and I have been very successful. So. So yeah, there are examples. On the whole they tend to. I wouldn't say. I haven't done enough research specifically on. A lot of people in business schools who've done that do that. But definitely some. She said. In relation to the feminisation of that, there were three questions that you asked, actually, and I think some of what you asked relates back to, to Kate's kind of points. And I think, does it lead to more freedom of association. And that really goes back. I mean, I do agree with that context in which global value chains are. And I didn't go to the talk. I think I put it in the minutes in the book, but it's more dealt with as context. Global value chains arose as a result of deregulation of trade. In particular trade, finance and labour markets, not deregulation of the movement of people. That's the only bet that didn't get deregulated in most countries. And there is no doubt that the whole outsourcing shift that took place, that was facilitated by that at all levels, the trade, finance and and I think you have to take the three together. And the outsourcing was to get cheap labour and the cheapest labour was female labour. And the reason? One of the main reasons it was so cheap is because women hadn't traditionally. And this is where I would take issue a little bit under import substitution industrialisation. More of my work was in Latin America on that early on under ISI. These were male jobs. It was protected. There were much stronger unionisation, but these were primarily seen as male jobs earning a family wage. And of course. And I didn't go into that in the book because a lot has been written on it in relation to structural adjustment programs. ET cetera. So another dimension of women being brought in. I'm in those countries wars to undermine those. The dominance male organised jobs. But the problem was those trade unions and it's still an issue, tend to not organise women workers. And they don't organise them, particularly if they're informal or casual because they just. They just so. Has it helped the organisation of women on the whole, no it hasn't. But you also. Some really good examples of women. In themselves. The big obvious want to say something. Association in India, which is and which has interestingly has long had a very strong value chain lends to its work both domestically but also in terms of the exports, and that is specifically the organisation of women in the informal economy in India. So there are examples. The Bangladesh strikes going on at the moment. I mean I'm only really picking it up through the press. So you'll have as much information as I do. But there are a lot of women in those strikes. So those strikes would not be going on if it weren't for women. But there is an issue that women are on hold, with some very strong exceptions. There are some organisations in Bangladesh that have a very strong gender lens. But a lot of the more traditional union. I don't tend to organise women. So it's it's a mixed issue. I think a lot of the civil society campaigns. So I mentioned Oxfam. Is Christian Aid or want. There are many of them. Often they actually there are many of them. Often they have a gender focus because they focussed in on the more exploitative conditions. And those tend to be more likely. In terms of EU legislation, we don't know. And the it's still early stages. So the CSD corporate sustainability. Due diligence, which is basically human rights and environment. All companies are going to have to show due diligence on that, not only in their own operations, but. The supply chain comes out of the UN Guiding Principles. On human rights. That's the three elements of that. One is that states a duty to protect human rights. Um. The second is that the private sector companies have a duty to respect human rights. If you leave it to states and companies. I would say. Not sure how far we're going to get on this one. Then it's a very top down. Starting with the UN and now it's in the. Turning it into legislation. The third is remedy and remedy. Is that Civil society. They're still working out the detail but if you are subject to some kind of human rights abuse. You. You can make a. In it once it becomes law, which will be in 2006. They're working on the directive at the moment. So. They've passed the basic principle of it. I'm working on the directive and that will come into effect in 2006. It's still very, very early days. But the issue of remedy, which means technically, at least on paper, trade unions, NGOs, civil society organisations, individual workers. Will be able to to. Thanks. I should add to that if you are a company at the moment, at the moment, and this has a very, very strong gender dimension, and I start to ask you about what do you think of the day, which I don't have anyone in this room knows of? It's a firm of solicitors. Um, which has been taking up pro bono. You in the UK against UK owned companies for abuses that have been taking place in their supply chains in Africa lately. Those happened to be the cases they've done them. T they've got the case going through at the moment with Del Monte in relation to pineapples, and they've done it on horticulture as well. SPEAKER 5 They also did Uber and Shell in the Niger Delta. SPEAKER 4 They've also taken the Niger Delta very big and they do it pro bono. So the complainants don't have to have any money. If they win the case they don't get a proportion of the winnings. That's that's the payoff. But if you lose it, you don't have to pay a penny. If I asked a company about it, they'd go, what? Because they're really scared of dying. Now, when that legislation comes in. For the EU, cause that's an issue. Many more firms of solicitors will be in a position to take those kinds of cases. So it's a long way to go. I think it would be another ten years and I should imagine so all of those cases, the ones I mentioned, not the Niger Delta. But the other ones are based on sex discrimination and sexual harassment. So all of them have a very strong gender element to them. And then just the final one agency very difficult. I don't work at household level. There are. That my research. There is some brilliant research done particularly Economy that is on a household level and a lot of discussion about bargaining. Whether having an independent this goes back and back to. Points. I mean, there is a lot of. Eight about whether paid work. Is empowering or disempowering, and particularly at a household level.And I mean interesting, really interesting debates. I tend to kind of go with the artist. The view, which I think can also also. Generally gone with that argument that if you've got an independent income, it gives you more bargaining position within the household. I think I've seen very kind of mixed household levels. I've not done systematic research. SPEAKER 2 Do you want to respond to something? SPEAKER 5 Yes. If I could just come in on the first one and the last one. The first one about the women's business. It's important to remember that if you incorporate a woman's business. Into a value chain. They are then subject to the same pressures of cost, speed and quality. That is, can you produce this thing at the speed we want it at the quality we? At the very tight price point we want. And those pressures will be asserted on these female businesses as well. And if large suppliers are struggling with those kinds of pressures, you can imagine what small female businesses. To experience and. The second thing about the idea of whether being involved, having work in a value chain, gives me an agency. I think it's important, again, to put things in the wider context when women's work is replacing the male breadwinner. That means that a woman's income working in a value chain is not on top of the men's incomes in the household. It becomes the income in the household. So a lower, weaker, more unstable income becomes the household income. And being in a situation in which you earn less and are the only one earning in the household, or just small, informal, unstable income. Is not a position of empowerment. It means that you are making decisions about not having enough to make your household work, and often in those situations, rather in empowering women, you have rising levels of domestic violence or struggles within the household about how money will be allocated. It's not an enviable position for many of these women who are at the the real bottom of the value chain. SPEAKER 2 Okay. So we have three questions sort of in a row at the back. So let's let's do gentlemen first and then the two ladies. So the gentleman here with the moustache. SPEAKER 7 Thank you for the presentation. My question. I'm trying to think how to articulate it. You spoke of the value capture and intentional devaluation under. When thinking about to what extent would you assess this as essential into the system of capital accumulation, the intentional devaluation of organised labour? And to what extent would addressing that disrupt the whole this whole system of capital accumulation? Often then the last point you mentioned of addressing that often I think where that that value can be extracted would be the higher up to the, to the retailers. But the retailers often try to push this off to be a debate between the workers and maybe the factory owners. And when there's actual questions of maybe capturing Walmart's super profits, it's why the US government wants to capture those profits and not actually value the labour that's being produced. So how how would we go about dressing these guys? SPEAKER 5 So try to keep your question short so we can have a lot of time. SPEAKER 0 Yeah. So you touched a bit upon the idea of using stations to cover. That's the difference in the rise of the South Coast chain. Do you see this kind of. And is it going to be a case for more, perhaps a favour of use of policies. Or more sexual harassment? Restrictions. And is related. So the numbers.That you mentioned in the very first slides are quite high for the patient and particular industries. So what are the social factors that are being quite attractive for women to be part of this kind of manufacturing? SPEAKER 2 And the lady next to you. UNKNOWN Hi. I wanted to ask about Bangladesh. And how? Since there are no plaza canopies, there's been a lot of Fire safety. but there's been less progress. Gender based by the. Thank you. So. ACLs, so that was being used. So I wanted to ask, how can we get over the deadlock between the Bangladeshi state? Implement frameworks. Retailers in the North. Yeah. Gender based violence. SPEAKER 2 I'm hoping we'll have one more grand. SPEAKER 4 I mean, that's just such a critical question I've not got a quick answer to, it is actually something I'm working on right now because it's not my area of expertise isn't finance. But, you know, I think to understand. What I mean, and I talk a lot about purchasing practices. I've done work on that for a long, long time. And you look at the retailers and the way they put pressure. But of course, what you also have to ask is why? On what part of it is tied up. It depends a little bit on the company. But a lot of it is also tied up with who the who, the shareholders, who are the owners of these companies, of these retailers, at the end of the day, they've got to produce in terms of dividends. They've got to. Market share, the the top CEOs, etcetera, on enormous payouts. Payments, as long as they can deliver their debt in the. Water as they can't. So it's very tied into the kind of financialization of global capitalism effectively. And that was really tied up with what happened in the 80s as well with structural adjustment. Liberalisation kind of enabled that financialization. And I from my perspective, and I would accuse myself of that very much as well. Value chain analysis doesn't look at that dimension sufficiently. Some do. There are some people that do.But I think it's really a critical thing, a dimension. It's not something I have expertise in, but it is something I'm looking at right now, so I wouldn't want to. Have you any quick and easy answer, but you raised it. It's key. And particularly now with all this restructuring that is going on, what's the implications of that for the financial? Wisdom. I mean, I would leave others to do it. I'd be very interested. Trying to understand that interaction between the value chain financialisation capital accumulation. Who accumulates the capital? China is a large amount of the US debt is actually. Join us. I leave it to others with much more knowledge than me, but obviously value chains. Role play. I think the next question is on the shift to the global South. It's very, very early days. I've just finished the project to. Looking specifically at that. I mean, I think it's a great idea. But one of the sort of pioneers of change in this kind of.Years ago since me, you know, of Stephanie, you know, as soon as it gets, as soon as the production the buyers are that nobody's going to be interested in the stuff you stuff you do. I mean, I got on very well. I we have these debates. You know, I do keep reminding him. I work with him for a long time. Ideas. And I first worked with him. He's why why are you interested in fair trade. It's 0.000000, 0%. I said well it might be, but I think it's important and I'm committed to it, even if it doesn't go anywhere. I do remind him of that now that in certain commodities it's sort of 10% or plus or whatever of international trade in those commodities. And then he says, well, we'll get it right. And so anyway, I think it's just too early to tell. One of the things that really did come up is some of the I really focussed in on Africa. You're getting the same going on in Asia and Latin America. That's one of the things that really did come up though, is that the majority of them, with some exceptions, Woolworths for shiny. There are some exceptions in the the majority of the African retailers and the African brands rely on public legislation. Now, public legislation is quite good depending on where you're sourcing. South African retailer and you're sourcing from the South. It's got much lower levels of legislation and you've got all the issues of cheaper labour. So it's complex, it's not straightforward, but one of the things the suppliers always said to us is that now.Now we said these are the export suppliers, the people that produce for export. In the past we we were under the, you know, we really under the clamps of the big retailers. What they told us to do, we had to do. Now we've got options. So many of the companies don't have private standards.But we can decide to sell to them instead. The issue, though, is this quality issue, because even if they don't have formal standards, what suppliers also say to us is they struggle to get workers that will meet quality and even the regional value chains.The buyers will quality to get quality. You do need workers with a certain level of literacy, a certain level of numeracy, and a certain level of ability to. It's not just that you produce a good, but how you produce it. And to get better. If they have to pay more. So it might not be through the social standards, but to other pressures that we did. So. So it's not straightforward what the actual outcome is very difficult to tell. But it wasn't all bad news. So rightly saying oh, not a bit. Two of the big South African retailers are in the UK ethical Trading. Which is a lower end middle limited clothing retailer, and Woolworth's, which is the top end, both of which operate across all of Africa. Two. Two. I need to tell. Iran. Bangladesh. I mean, it's it's. Yeah. Rana plaza. So what do they do? I mean, there was an audit going on. If you want the failure of voluntary codes. Rana Plaza was audited about a month, six weeks before social audit, before the collapse. Perfect. No problems. Ticked off. 1000 workers plus were killed about six weeks later and then all the brands moved in big time. Some denied sourcing from Rana Plaza. Others accepted it. By markets do, which has gotten into a lot of trouble, had previously got a lot of trouble. They immediately said yes, we were sourcing from that factory and immediately got involved in a compensation fund and setting up the kind of programs that were then established which focussed on fire safety.But have they increased the wages? No.And now look what's going on in Bangladesh as we speak. Literally 3 or 4% already been shot. Women workers, I think they were all women. Certainly the last two were women. And and who's opposing pay increases? It's it's the government and what they're trying to set in a pay increase, which is way below the living wage. That's what the fight is over. And the Bangladeshi factory owners are opposing the increase in the living wage. And but of course, there's a very close relationship there because a lot of the factory owners are linked to employees. So the there is a very close connection there. But what is interesting is some of the brands H&M, Zara, I think, I think that it's double check. It's in the Guardian to read. The Guardian have said they do support the increase in the living. Can they have a policy of working towards a living wage? Yes, absolutely. Fine. Brilliant. Are you going to pay the price increase to the suppliers? Because if they paid the price increase, I don't think you'd find the Bangladesh garment factory owners would be so. Opposed to it because at the moment, if its current system, the only people the way to do go up. Moment, they're the ones that are going to get even even more squeeze. So ultimately, and this is where I think the civil society, the international civil society campaigns are critical is to put the pressure on the big brands and say, you've got to pay a living wage. And I think that's where it is now. I mean, we could go further into it. Pretty competitive because I don't get a lot of this is sourced from the US and any agreement to between the brands. Is risk at risk of violating competition law in the. But the only way of making it pre competitive is the government puts a legal minimum up to a living wage. So it's a complex situation, but the brands at least could come in and say. We will pay. The higher price and they've not committed to that as far as I'm aware. But that is when you really got. The campaigns are. SPEAKER 5 Do you want to say anything? Just one very quick thing about south south trade. It's also important to think about how women's work in value chains and the expansion of south south value chains affect things beyond the value chain. And I just want to give an example of Shoprite in Nigeria. So Shoprite came into Nigeria. 510 years back. But one of the core effects it had was because it sells a lot of household goods, is to put all of the women who were selling household goods, tinned tomatoes, small soup ingredients, etcetera, out of business. And they hated it because all the profits that Shoprite made went back to South Africa, whereas local women made profits that supported households in that area. So thinking about how value chains also recirculate the profits of things and may take, even if it's women working at the bottom of the value chain, may take money away from other types of jobs outside the value chain. SPEAKER 2 Okay, so I know we have one question from this lady here. Are there any other burning? Okay, maybe very, very quick questions. SPEAKER 8 Thank you so much. I think I have two questions, but one is a yes or no. So on this one first is about traceability in global value chains. And the question is do you buy it. Do you believe it? And the second is to do more with like the pathways to upgrading for workers and especially at the bottom of the chains, because you mentioned sort of the same sort of this is the actual resistance by the workers, but also the fact that upgrading is possible through potential NGOs or civil society through your institution on that. And I was wondering if you could reflect on. SPEAKER 2 Okay. The lady at the very back in the white scarf. And do try to be quick because we don't have much time. UNKNOWN Thank you so much for your presentation. I just want. In the value chain because I think. To what extent women see themselves as. That is because of things like marriage. SPEAKER 2 Okay. And one last question. I know I'm being very unrealistic. SPEAKER 0 Yeah. I just wanted to ask what measures can be taken to redistribute the risks in the global value chain. And do you see it possible for a national level or measures to be taken from international organisations? SPEAKER 4 You only really have full traceability for fresh produce right the way down. And that's because if you went to supermarket now and bought some fresh produce, consumed, it was done in the morning. So long as they've got the barcode of the product, they could trace it not only down to the farm, but also down to the plot. And if they wanted to, down to the individual workers who were involved. All us doing stuff. So yes, on some products. On a limited number of products on the right now. Basically this is going to be a major issue for this. EU human rights to diligence and diligence law. So I think traceability can be particularly as soon as you start mixing products together, like cocoa or cotton and central. On the pathways to upgrading. Yeah, a bit difficult to to I mean and it kind of goes back as well to the next question, which is the cultural norms. I mean, one of the things that I really work. So and that's why in the end of the book is a lot of different case studies, is that the variation is so enormous. And you can even within a country, you can get very different outcomes in one location versus another location. Between countries you get very, very different in Africa to Asia, especially in America. So cultural norms really vary.The context is really important in terms of outcomes.Strategies work in one place. They don't work in another place. Civil society organisations have played a critical role. But ultimately, if you want to get into these value chains case, then that goes back to that earlier point about women SMEs entering them. You know, you play by the rules of the game or you just won't survive. And those rules are that you drive costs down, drive price down. Take as much as you can. The only way in which some firms really do circumvent that is when they can get into leash and protect themselves. And then that goes on to that final question. Quick measures to redistribute risk. Let's expand that slightly. Risk and value. Individual buyers, suppliers. It's very hard to do. In certain circumstances, governments can. And there is a massive fight going on at the moment.