Labour Market Adjustment and Women in the Service Industry: A Survey

Abstract

The celebration in 1993 of a century of women's suffrage in New Zealand has brought even more sharply into focus the uneven impact of the Employment Contracts Act on the workforce. From the outset, debate about the effects of the Employrnent Contracts Act had focused for some on the likely impacts on women workers. This study is located firmly within the tradition of national and international literature front a range of disciplines including economics, industrial relations, sociology:- law and history, which describes a segmented labour market and labour process. One aspect of labour segmentation theory is gender segmentation, that is, the location of women and men in the labour market and their comparative situations. Much theoretical work and empirical research has been done to describe where women are located in the labour market, why they are located there, and that effects that location has upon them. Even within this field of study there is a wide range of subjects for analysis. For example, the subjects can range from the gender earning gap (Blau and Kahn, 1992) and occupational structures (Terrell. 1992) to the challenge of "flexibility" and the pool of labour women traditionally provide (Walby, 1989). Even the concept of skill itself has bad to be revisited by the gender segmentation theorists (Bervoets and Frielink, 1988). Much of the theoretical framework within which these scholars cited have written, along with numerous others, was codified in the 1970s and 1980s in response to Harry BravetJnan's classic mould-breaking \Vork Labor and Monopol)' Capital published in 1974. Writers such as Phillips and Taylor (1980), Cockbwn (1981, 1983, 1985) and Beechey (1982) remain some of the leading contributors to the discussion and ongoing analysis about women in the vvorkforce. As industrial relations regimes and bargaining structures have altered in the 1980s and on into the 1990s, the changes have been observed to impact differently upon different segments of the labour market