Factory as Home and Family: Female Workers in the Moroccan Garment Industry
The study of women's participation in factory labor must be focused on the specific ways in which women all over the world experience, interpret and give meaning to their work on the shop floor. Over the past two decades, garment manufacture has become a major export industry in Morocco and females have provided the labor power for the industry's growth. In conducting an ethnographic study of Moroccan garment factory workers, I found that workers sought to imbue the factory with their most cherished cultural values, thus transforming the factory rather than allowing the factory to transform them. Central to these values is each worker's identity as daughter, sister, and perhaps wife and mother in a patriarchal family. In their effort to preserve this valued notion of themselves as kinswomen, workers transform the workshop floor into an interior space, recast factory staff into family members, and operate in the factory as they would in the household. Thus, the factory becomes a uniquely Moroccan space, and workers find meaning in their labor there. However, in their perpetuation of treasured notions of self, home, family and gender inside the factory, workers render themselves more amenable to the factory's exploitation.