This excerpt, taken from the article "Integrating Women into Multinational Development" by Marilee Karl, is published in the ISIS Resource Guide on Women and Development (1982). Via S. Maria dell'Anima 30, 00186 Rome, Italy or P.O. Box 50 (Cornavin), 1211 Geneva 2, Switzerland: (Price: $ 10.00).

The article gives an overview of the impact of multinational corporations on the economies and lives of people in both industrialized and developing countries in the field of electronics, as well as in the textile industry and in agribusiness.

It provides an extensive list of resources of groups and organizations engaged in ongoing work on multinational corporations; periodicals, books and pamphlets, and audio-visuals concerned with multinational development.

We have reprinted the following section as it summarizes the impact of the multinational corporations in terms of the types of problems that are being created in the health and safety conditions of the workers, as well as the effect it is having on employment.

Electronics is a relative newcomer to the multinational scene, and one of the most rapidly growing. This industry produces the components — the integrated circuits - which are used in computers, calculators, digital watches, electronic games, military systems, word processors and the like. The production processes involved are carried out literally on a "global assembly line", stretching from California, USA, halfway around the world to East and Southeast Asia. In the United States in 1975,
40 percent of the 11 million electronics workers were women and women made up 90 percent of the production workers. It is estimated that nearly half a million women are employed by the same industry today in East and Southeast Asia, comprising more than 85 percent of all electronics workers in this region. Many of the largest corporations have their head offices in the United States, in the Santa Clara Valley of California. The trend to move the labor intensive part of the production process to Latin America and Asia began in the 1960s and increased in the 1970s, to take advantage of the large and cheap labor force. The management, engineering and highly skilled processes remain in the industrialized countries.

Production processes are allocated in such a way that the factories in the various countries perform only a part of the process. This is possible in the electronics industry because the component parts are tiny, lightweight and easily transportable. This global assembly line enables the multinationals to make use of their workers at will. When workers in California, for instance, press for safer working conditions, the companies can threaten simply to move to Malaysia, and in fact have done so. Today electronics plants are found in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia and Mexico. The early 1980s, however, have begun to see some movement back to the richer countries because of the increasing automation of some of the formerly labor-intensive production process.

Electronics factories create a high number of serious health and safety problems for their workers, in spite of the superficially "clean" appearance of neat rows of uniformed workers and air conditioning — which are provided for the protection of the equipment, not the comfort of the workers. Workers peer through microscopes the whole day attaching hundreds of minute wires to silicon chips. After several years of work, many of them find their eyesight deteriorating, at which point they are no longer capable of performing the job and find themselves out of work. Other workers are occupied in dipping the chips into toxic acids, or coating them with silicon which can cause a fatal lung disease. High work quotas force women to work under intense pressure, and under the threat of losing their jobs to the thousands of other women looking for employment or to another plant of the same multinational. Workers are often set in competition with workers in another plant of the same company. Breaks are short and sometimes insufficient to eat properly and even visits to the toilet are often considered privileges.

The management of multinationals have devised a number of subtle techniques to control workers. Companies foster a paternalistic family spirit and encourage women workers to take up western consumer habits and values, by such things as promoting beauty contests and selling cosmetics and western-style clothing on their premise. They try to sell women the idea that "freedom" or "liberation" from traditional societies can be gained through spending earnings on western-style consumer goods.
Many women, however, have been driven to seek employment in the cities because of the decline of the rural areas and are a major means of support for their families left behind in the countryside. They are caught between two worlds.

In some places companies house women in dormitories, with several women sharing the same room and even the same bed, taking turns sleeping during the different shifts.The company becomes virtually their whole world. On the other side of the globe, microelectronics is having a great impact on the quantity and quality of jobs, especially those which traditionally employ many women, such as office work. Women are finding themselves replaced by computers and word processors or moved from secretarial positions to the more alienating word processing pool.