MULTINATIONALS AND WORKING WOMEN 63
cheapest products in the market goes on. The outcome of this is the exploitation of the labour of women working in the labour-inten-sivc sections throughout South-East Asia. The dire poverty of the masses compels them to offer themselves in the labour market on employers' terms. There are 500 applicants per day for jobs in Indonesia, and 500 per week for 50 jobs in Philippines! So much so that protective laws prohibiting women from night shifts arc flouted in Malaysia and Philippines has reduced the maternity leave and other benefits.
Santa Clara, the Centre of Electronics
According to available reports, approximately 200,000 or one-third of the work force, are directly or indirectly involved in the electronics industries in the Santa Clara county and 120,000 people are directly employed in 175 major electronics companies-It will be noted that "satellites, computers, memory disks, light emitting diodes, kidney dialysis machines" and so on are made in these companies. This list of ultra-sophisticated products continuously grows in the Santa Clara county electronics firms. In these companies 85 percent of production workers are women, and 50 percent of these arc from the Third World countries. There is only one woman engineer in the whole place, and the entire technical staff is composed of men only. With more specialization and mechanization more women arc thrown out of work.
"The global corporations or transnational companies, because of their size, wealth and other things can locate their operations wherever new resources, markets, or labour forces can offer them a higher return on their investment". The IBM (International Business Machines) president explained once that "for business purposes, the boundaries that separate one nation from another are no moi*c real than the equator." The conscious workers in South-East Asia have now realized that the workers too have to cross these boundaries created by the employers to create an international organization to break the monopoly of the companies and therefore they have to understand the international structure if they arc to be successful in organizing across national and industry lines.
It is in their role as workers that women,are most strongly tied to global corporations. In 1980, we observe, women became Actually an integrated part of these global corporations. In the Third World countries ^women have become a prime source of 'cheap labour' essential to maintaining profits in industries which rely on large unskilled, expendable work force." In view of the corpora-