Rethinking employment opportunities on the periphery

Employment opportunities of Mizrahi women in low status positions in a southern Israeli development town

תקציר

The neo-liberal global economy has dramatically changed the ways in which workers are employed. Research in Israel and throughout the world has revealed the exploitative elements inherent in the new forms of employment, and has shown that the main victims of non-standard employment are women. In the current article, I seek to demonstrate how women without formal education and trapped in peripheral space derive meaning from their work, notwithstanding the exploitative elements inherent in their non-standard employment. The article is based on interviews I conducted with nine1 second-generation Mizrahi women in Israel, women with little formal education and no occupational skills; they are employed in cleaning, caretaking, manufacturing and minor clerical duties, without employment or social security, in a southern development town. The analysis reveals that the devaluation of women's work, which in previous research has been shown to be a way of extracting more unpaid work, enables women with initiative but without formal credentials to enlarge the sphere of their work responsibilities, and to experience the empowerment of autonomy, influence and contribution to their local communities. In consequence, I suggest some preliminary thoughts that challenge existing research on the intersecting categories of gender, work and identity in peripheral space.