The New International Division of Labour and Women’s Work

Ever look at the tag on your shirt, the back of your phone, or the bottom of your coffee mug? You’ll see a map of the modern world: “Made in Vietnam,” “Assembled in China,” “Product of Mexico.” It feels simple, but it’s the end-point of a mind-bogglingly complex journey. The cotton for that shirt might have been grown in India, woven in Pakistan, dyed in Thailand, and finally stitched in Vietnam before landing in your local shop. This global scramble for production is the defining feature of our economic era. It has a formal name: the New International Division of Labour (NIDL). And as it turns out, this new system isn’t just about geography; it’s deeply, fundamentally about gender.

The NIDL is, at its core, a story about who does what, and where. It’s the story of how our global economy was rewired, and how that rewiring came to rely on one specific group: women in developing nations.

First, what was the ‘old’ international division of labour? 🔗

To understand what’s “new,” we have to peek at the “old.” For centuries, the global economy ran on a fairly simple, and deeply colonial, model. This “old” division of labour was straightforward:

• Colonies and developing countries (the “Periphery”) exported raw materials: cotton, rubber, tea, tin, cocoa.
• Imperial and developed countries (the “Core”) used these materials to manufacture finished goods (like textiles, tires, and processed food) and then sold them back, often to the very colonies they sourced from.

Production was clear-cut. Manufacturing happened in the “rich” world, and raw material extraction happened in the “poor” world. But starting in the 1970s, this entire system was turned on its head. This brings us to the “new” division.

The new model: Designing in the north, assembling in the south 🔗

The New International Division of Labour describes the relocation of manufacturing processes, particularly the labour-intensive parts, from developed countries (like the US, UK, and Germany) to developing countries (like China, Bangladesh, Mexico, and Vietnam).

In this new system, the “Core” countries didn’t give up control. Instead, they cleverly kept the most profitable parts of the business:

• Research & Development (R&D)
• Product Design
• Branding & Marketing
• Finance & Corporate Management

What did they “offshore” to the Global South? They offshored the manufacturing and assembly-the parts of the process that require the most labour but generate the least profit in the supply chain. A smartphone is designed in California, but its components are made across Asia, and it’s finally assembled in a massive factory complex in China or India. That’s the NIDL in action.

The hunt for ‘cheap and flexible’ labour 🔗

What sparked this massive shift? In a word: profit. By the 1970s, corporations in the West faced rising labour costs, stronger unions, and stricter environmental regulations. To protect and grow their profit margins, they began a global search for a cheaper, more “flexible” workforce. They found it in the developing world.

This search was spearheaded by Multinational Corporations (MNCs). They set up vast global production networks, becoming masters of the global supply chain. They could pit countries against each other, chasing the lowest wages, the biggest tax breaks, and the weakest regulations. This pressure to cut costs became the driving engine of the NIDL.

Why ‘flexible’ so often meant ‘female’ 🔗

Here we arrive at the central, human part of this story. When MNCs went looking for their ideal “flexible” worker, the profile they settled on was overwhelmingly female. Why? It was based on a set of deeply ingrained, and deeply convenient, stereotypes:

• “Docile and subservient”: A harmful stereotype that women, particularly young women, would be less likely to complain, form unions, or strike for better conditions.
• “Nimble fingers”: A persistent myth that women were biologically better suited for the repetitive, detailed work of textile and electronics assembly.
• “Secondary earners”: The assumption that women’s wages were just ‘supplementary’ to a male breadwinner’s income. This was used to justify paying women significantly less than men.
• “Temporary”: Employers often preferred to hire young, single women who, it was assumed, would work for a few years and then leave to get married and have children. This meant companies didn’t have to invest in them, offer promotions, or pay for maternity leave.

This “flexibility” was a corporate euphemism. It meant a workforce that was cheap, temporary, and easy to control. Women’s labour, seen as unskilled and disposable, became the foundation for a new model of global production.

From the factory floor to the living room 🔗

This restructuring didn’t just create massive factories; it also fueled a massive shift toward informal and precarious work. As corporations squeezed their suppliers for ever-lower prices, those suppliers had to find ways to cut their own costs. The easiest way? Subcontracting.

Imagine a large American retailer places a huge order for 100,000 shirts from a factory in Bangladesh. That factory, running at full capacity, takes on the order. But to meet the deadline and the low price, it subcontracts 30,000 shirts to a smaller, unregulated workshop. That workshop, in turn, might subcontract the work of sewing on buttons and labels to local women who are paid per piece to do the work from their own homes. This is the shadow economy that props up the formal one.

The rise of the informal, home-based worker 🔗

This move to subcontracting and home-based work leaves millions of women completely vulnerable. When a woman is working from her home-whether she’s stitching shoes, assembling electronics, or rolling cigarettes-she is invisible to the state and to the law.

She receives no social security, no health insurance, no pension, and no sick pay. She is not protected by minimum wage laws. If she gets sick or if the work dries up, she has no safety net. According to Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), home-based workers are among the most insecure in the global economy, facing low and irregular pay for long, uncertain hours. This is the ultimate “flexibility” corporations were searching for: all the labour, with none of the responsibility.

The geography of production 🔗

The NIDL is not just a labour story; it’s a geography story. It’s about how production was fragmented and where it was concentrated.

Fragmenting the assembly line 🔗

The new model relies on “fragmentation.” Instead of one factory building one whole car, the production process is broken into thousands of tiny pieces. The microchips come from Taiwan, the leather seats from Mexico, the engine from Germany, the tires from South Korea, and the final assembly happens in the UnitedS. Each routine, low-skill task is offshored to whichever country can do it cheapest.

This allows corporations to keep the high-value design and R&D in their home countries while “shopping around” for the best deal on every single component, driving down global wages in the process.

Spatial concentration and its local impact 🔗

This fragmented production doesn’t get spread out evenly. It gets clustered in specific areas, often called Export Processing Zones (EPZs) or Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These are designated industrial areas where governments offer MNCs special treatment, like tax holidays and exemptions from labour laws, to attract their factories.

The result is “spatial concentration.” A single region, or even a single town, can become entirely dependent on one industry, like garment manufacturing or electronics assembly. While this might look good for the country’s national GDP, the local effects can be severe. If the MNC decides to move production to an even cheaper country-a process known as the “race to the bottom”-it can hollow out the entire local economy, leaving thousands unemployed overnight.

The ‘feminisation of the labour force’ 🔗

When you put all these pieces together-MNCs seeking cheap labour, the use of gender stereotypes, and the rise of precarious work-you get a phenomenon that economists call the “feminisation of the labour force.”

This term describes the massive influx of women into paid manufacturing and service jobs, especially in the “Newly Industrialised Countries” (NICs) of the 1970s and 80s, like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The rapid “economic miracles” of these “Asian Tigers” were built, to a significant degree, on the shoulders of their new female factory workforce. This trend continues today across Southeast and South Asia. In India, for example, the textile and apparel industry is one of the largest employers of women, forming a critical part of the country’s export economy.

An engine of growth, but at what cost? 🔗

This phenomenon is complex. On one hand, these jobs, however flawed, were the first time millions of women had access to an independent wage. It gave them a degree of economic freedom and social mobility their mothers never had. It challenged traditional patriarchal structures and contributed to falling fertility rates and rising education for girls.

On the other hand, this “liberation” was built on a new form of exploitation. Women were hired precisely *because* they were seen as a cheap and controllable labour pool. They were segregated into low-skill, low-pay, dead-end jobs with little to no chance of advancement. Their participation was conditional and often temporary, fueling growth without fundamentally challenging the power structures that devalued their work in the first place.

The New International Division of Labour isn’t just an abstract economic concept. It’s the human story woven into the products we use every day. It’s the story of a global system that was redesigned to find the cheapest, most “flexible” worker, and finding that worker in the form of millions of women in the developing world.

What do you think? Now that you know the story behind your gadgets and clothes, does it change how you view them? What steps do you think consumers, corporations, or governments could take to make this global system fairer for the women who are its primary workforce?

References

1. https://www.wiego.org/what-we-do/our-focus-areas/home-based-workers
2. https://www.adb.org/news/features/how-empower-women-and-boost-gender-equality-asia-and-pacific