ploy at low-wage and low-skill jobs. Barndt explains that this reorganization of work by capital interests has resulted in the creation of new flexible labor strategies, which builds on an already established sexual division of labor and institutionalized sexism and racism. By employing these Mexican women on a part time basis, corporations are placed in a position to have them work shorter shifts without any breaks and no benefits at all. The notion of flexibility and sexism in Del Monte food processing plants in Irapuato, Mexico continues to create wealth for company principals who are presumably male, while leaving women in their destructive wake. Because the picking time is such a brief period of harvest, part-time women workers are brought on for this peak season only and for less skilled tasks. Mexican women workers are exploited for their low-wage labor and ample supply. Although they are enticed and encouraged by the promise of part time labor allowing flexibility, the devastating cycle continues to persist leaving Mexican women as a low priority of the labor force, enveloped in poverty.Women are treated as a commodity in a business of hard labor based explicitly on supply and demand. Flexibility reigns in a context where there is an oversupply of cheap labor, so companies can make such decisions on the spot, hiring and dismissing workers on a daily basis (Barndt, 1999, p. 69). These womens lives are dictated seasonally and often sit in waiting rooms of a plant in hopes of a few hours of work, which is determined day to day. The Del Monte food processing is an example of such lean production dependent on the supply of female labor, which is ultimately, is highly disposable. Some employers use gender ideology as a means to justify the employment of women in regards to sexual division of labor. A company owner explains that he hires women because they can see better than men in distinguishing colors while treating produc...
