Female work in fishing industries: perpetuating work exploitation

Abstract

Work in the food transformation industry has been historically carried out by women all over the world. This activity has been characterized by the position they hold in the patriarchal society which (re)produces the sexual division of work that results from gender relations and stigmatizes these women in the world of paid work. The case of the female workers in the fishing industries in Rio Grande, a city located in the south of Brazil, represents a universal situation of female work exploitation. This paper aims at analyzing the discrimination and the resistance strategies this group of women uses from the perspective of feminist geography. This study has shown that, on one hand, female workers have been submitted to exploitation and prejudice that make it hard to develop a collective resistance process. On the other hand, their work has enabled them to get financial autonomy and improve their self-esteem; the latter, paradoxically, perpetuates work exploitation.