Globalization’s gendered nature drives a race to the bottom

If the worldwide infrastructures, and the systems built on top of them, facilitate legibility of outputs and processes, the labor within those systems becomes a highly tradable com-modity in a planetary system. And with a network linking together billions of people, most of whom live in low-­ and middle-­ income countries, we have a system of planetary competition. In a variety of ways, this book shows that the fact that capital and labor can operate out of and command different scales is a fundamental driver of exploitation. In his study of the offshore outsourcing industry, Jamie Peck (2017, 10) notes that the logic of cutting and suppressing costs is the “elemental rationale” of the practice. Busi- nesses can tap into workforces with ever-­ lower labor costs. At the same time, for almost all types of digital work, there are fewer digital jobs than there are workers able and willing to do them, creating an oversupply of labor that drives an international race to the bottom (Graham and Anwar 2019). Workers are naturally rooted to the places in which they live. “Labour power has to go home every night,” as David Harvey (1990, 19) famously notes. However, while workers stay rooted and embedded in their local contexts, the lead firms that buy their labor do not have to be—­ they can search for the cheapest and most accommodating labor markets and regimes in any location across the whole surface of the globe. Despite the intense competition arising between workers suddenly thrust into a planetary market, the chapters in this book show that there is no “global homogeneous work- force” that is alienated from the fruits of its labor in one, standard way. There are instead a range of factors, including racialized and gendered inequalities, that shape why par- ticular workers in particular places are attracted to and enrolled into planetary networks. In chapter 18, Payal Arora and Usha Raman examine how the gendered nature of global value chains complicates the struggle for fairer supply chains. They specifically focus on the potential of digital storytelling campaigns to leverage the creative power of worker collectives, arguing that “we need to ask who and what determines how women workers are represented and reproduced on the Internet, how communities are formed and sustained, and whether and what kinds of change are possible.” As they remind us, race, gender, cost, language, and culture all shape how people connect in the planetary market.