Female redundancy in the garments sector : its impact on life and career

Abstract

Now that its forty-year history is about to come to an end, the role of the garments industry - female-labour intensive, largely foreign-owned and export oriented - in the social and economic development of the Maltese Islands needs to be reassessed. The gender dimension of this reassessment is critical: this industry brought women onto the labour market to an unprecedented and possibly unmatchable extent. They brought home wages: low enough to attract foreign direct investment and to ensure the competitiveness of their work in the world market but high enough to contribute substantially to sustaining local industries such as construction and furniture as well as increasing imports of consumer goods and a welfare state. They also brought back home with them elements of a changing culture. This paper is intended as a modest contribution to the exploration of this culture, now that these women are going home for the last time. Based on a qualitative study of twelve women aged 22 to 58 who were employed at Medwear Clothing Ltd with this now-defunct German-owned company, this paper focuses on their experience of redundancy. The two-step closure (Bulebel factory 2000, Kordin 2002) of 'their' company - occurring as it did in the midst of the terminal rundown of 'their' whole industry - provided a unique opportunity to explore their perceptions of and their reflections on their experience before and after impact. Utilising a hybrid theoretical and methodological approach (interpretive, critical, ethnographic and feminist) as well as the advantage of her own personal experience for the purpose of empathising with her interviewees, the author looks at the effect of their experience on their life at work, at home and in society. The findings are related to classic and current debates in the sociological and social-psychological literature, including the theme of the latent benefits of work and Bourdieu on the effect of spatial 'boundedness'.