COMPANIES are increasingly adopting strategies of flexible production relying on sub-contractors who can employ workers only when there are orders. It has been calculated that 200 million workers are employed internationally in sub-contracting chains.

Using sub-contracted workers has allowed companies to circumvent unions and avoid the higher costs of negotiated wages, as well as other overheads. For example, virtually 100% of Nike's products are manufactured by subcontractors in Asia. The company headquarters in the US now only houses the research and marketing facilities. This pattern is being repeated among many other TNCS. The subcontracting system depends essentially on price bidding, therefore successful contractors are the ones who can offer the lowest costs, mainly based on extremely low wages for workers.

There is an increase in industrial homeworking on a global scale

The relocation of manufacturing production around the world has not simply been a shift from the relatively high wage countries of the North to the cheaper countries of the South. Within the south TNCs have also shifted production looking for cheaper labour costs - some manufacturing industries have shifted from Europe to Korea and then to countries such as Indonesia and Vietnam. Garments which were made in Hong Kong are now sub-contracted to factories in southern China.

Home-based workers provide an important element in this chain. There is a rise in industrial homeworking on a global scale. In the Philippines, many thousands of women home-workers are engaged in production for export. The work is distributed to women in rural villages and urban slums by middle-men and traders who exploit home-workers, pay low piece rates, penalise them for late delivery - often not paying them at all for various reasons. Homeworkers often bear other costs of production such as workspace and electricity. and often do not know who their principal employers are. Their homes become extensions of factories but they lack the legal status of workers and do not benefit from the minimal legal protection afforded to women factory workers.

The same conditions apply to the million plus homeworkers in Britain. A survey by the National Homeworking Group showed that women did a variety of jobs as homeworkers: sewing garments, packing, soldering wires and circuits for less than one pound an hour. UK homeworkers also have to bear all the other costs and dangers of production.