Labour Market Segmentation and the Absorption of Female Migrants

One of the major features of proletarianisation is the movement of workers from rural to urban areas, typically involving a shift of landless and other marginalised rural workers to the centres of industrial expansion where they become what Marx called “the light infantry of industrial capital”, a pliable source of labour for a wide range of low-income, low-status jobs. In many countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, rural women have fulfilled this role in many ways, just as they did in the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Often the majority of rural-urban migrants have been women, typically young and unmarried, and often moving to the urban areas on their own. [1]