Life On The Global Assembly Line Summary

The article “Life on the Global Assembly Line” by Barbara Ehrenreich and Annette Fuentes talks about how women’s are being exploited in the Third World countries. It discusses that an American worker earns a large sum of money as compared to a Third World worker, doing to the same job. Women mostly occupy the boring and painstaking jobs in the factory. Ehrenreich explains that the working conditions for the factories are very poor; therefore twenty girls live together in one room at the some places. Work places are not just congested, but are also littered with hazards.

“In the U.S, an assembly line worker is likely to earn, depending on her length of employment, between $3.10 and $5 an hour. In many, Third World countries, a woman doing the same work will earn $3to $5 a day”. This is the major reason

Fuentes says that women’s have to do all the painstaking work that American business are exporting. On the other hand male don’t usually take this job, they rather threaten the in charge and get over with. “Young male workers are too restless and impatient to do monotonous work with no career value. If displeased, they sabotage the machines and even threaten their foreman. But girls? At most, they cry a little”. Living conditions for these girls are not what we think they are. In fact, girls are put into dormitories where twenty girls might have to live together. Working conditions are even worse . Women mostly work in one hundred degree weather, where textile dust is flowing in the air which can cause permanent lung cancer and eye damage. Management work is even tougher because at times they might have to work 48 hours straight. “Lunch breaks may be barely for a woman to stand in line at the canteen or hawkers’ stalk”. This clearly indicates how cruel women’s are being treated because they don’t even have an opportunity to feed themselves. Their life is rotating in a cycle everyday where work occupies 85% of the