Gender and Gendered Working Time Rights

Abstract

Our interest in the relation between women’s labor rights and working time can be said to have sprung from two different sources. One source was the concern over female migrant workers (known as dagongmei in Chinese) in the beginning of the reform period. Some scholars claim that the post-colonial exploitation of female migrant workers was perpetrated by stealing these women’s “golden time”— the young-adult stage. Scholars like Pun Ngai (2005) have defined this group as a new class and have analyzed their resistance from a class point of view. The other source is the ongoing public discussion and scholarly debate related to the retirement age for women. One major point of argument is that the current labor law infringes upon women’s working time by forcing them to retire five year earlier than men. What has received less attention in the previous research, however, is how the law serves to undermine what we might call the working-time rights of women by channeling women into short-time labor contracts and squeezing the total length of time women stay in the labor market. This is the topic of this chapter.