Assignment # 12
In Saskia Sassen’s essay, “Strategic instantiations of Gendering,” she argues that the media and policy circles believe that the leading narrative of our current global economy is based on the factors that place and distance are no longer relevant and that the main key players are the highly educated professionals. Sassen argues that with the emphasis on this particular narrative the information outputs are missing other key factors. As the fact that global migration of maids, nannies, nurses, sex workers and contract brides play a major role in globalization. As the information outputs are neglecting to acknowledge that these low wageworkers have been in existence way before our current economic globalization and are now major players.
Globalization does create the demand for high-level professionals; which then require heavy demands on their lives with long work schedules. This in return generates the need to have the household task to be taken care by the “ serving classes,” which are mainly composed of immigrant and migrant women (5). With the demand of service workers, these low wageworker are incorporated into global markets and play a major part to its growth, but unfortunately they go unnoticed. They are not seen as viable members of globalization.
Globalization has created global growth but has placed many countries in great debt that in return has created a great deal of unemployment. As governments find new creative ways to shrink their debt to be able to compete with the global markets they have implemented exporting workers and permitting mail order brides, as ways to coping with their unemployment. Unfortunately the exportation then gets tied in with global sex trade as criminal organizations look for the means to cash in as they start trafficking in migrant workers. As the workers go over to other countries for employment they tend to send remittances to their families back home. Which then becomes a major source for their government.
As the world economy grows so does the demand for the low wageworkers. Consequently we can see how globalization helps to promote the exploitation of the migrant women who tend to suffer the most without any recognition or without the opportunity to grow. Sadly the mass media and policy makers don’t’ believe that they are not considered to be major contributors to globalization, as the serving class workers tend to hold jobs with limited growth opportunities and the ones that face the most exploitation.
