This book presents a broader framework to analyse gender and labour in the context of globalisation. It examines the mutually constituting linkages between workplace and household and brings the experience of women workers into the ongoing debates on the effects of globalisation. Economic restructuring throughout the world has led to increasing vulnerability and insecurity for workers. In the context of crumbling social protection systems and increasing job insecurity, the key issue today is the undermining and ensuing fragility of the conditions that ensure the reproduction of labour power. In India, as in most developing countries, the near absence of citizenship-based entitlements to social protection has meant an extreme dependence on selling one's labour power as the only means for survival and security. Changes in the conditions for these employment-based entitlements have immediate consequences for the survival of workers, households and communities. This book highlights the gendered nature of labour regimes and domestic regimes, and also the linkages between households, labour markets, factories and the state, to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and economic/industrial restructuring. It examines how women workers experience and deal with gendered structures of control in different labour regimes and domestic regimes, and the changes resulting from industrial and economic restructuring.

The author argues that despite limited access to social protection women workers have been engaged in struggles about their work, wages and service conditions and in their personal lives. These assertions of citizenship in practice' highlight the significance of agency and public action in ensuring legal entitlements as well as a consciousness of rights among workers. This book makes an important contribution to the growing literature on gender and globalisation.