Mary E. Frederickson – författare

In the United States, cheap products made by cheap labor are in especially high demand, purchased by men and women who have watched their own wages decline and jobs disappear. Looking South examines the effects of race, class, and gender in the development of the low-wage, anti-union, and state-supported industries that marked the creation of the New South and now the Global South.

Workers in the contemporary Global South--those nations of Central and Latin America, most of Asia, and Africa--live and work within a model of industrial development that materialized in the red brick mills of the New South. As early as the 1950s, this labor model became the prototype used by U.S. companies as they expanded globally. This development has had increasingly powerful effects on workers and consumers at home and around the world.

Mary E. Frederickson highlights the major economic and cultural changes brought about by deindustrialization and immigration. She also outlines the events, movements, and personalities involved in the race-, class-, and gender-based resistance to industry’s relentless search for cheap labor.

This volume considers how women are shaping the global economic landscape through their labor, activism, and multiple discourses about work. Bringing together an interdisciplinary group of international scholars, the book offers a gendered examination of work in the global economy and analyses the effects of the 2008 downturn on women’s labor force participation and workplace activism.

The book addresses three key themes: exploitation versus opportunity; women’s agency within the context of changing economic options; and women’s negotiations and renegotiations of unpaid social reproductive labor. This uniquely interdisciplinary and comparative analysis will be crucial reading for anyone with an interest in gender and the post-crisis world.