The Factory Wall Is Not a Wall: Social Reproduction Theory and Productive Sphere Struggles

• In Event: Anti-Capitalist Feminisms (Co-sponsored by Sociology of Sex and Gender Section)

Abstract

In spring 2020, Latina migrant women processing fruit in the Pacific Northwest struck for wage increases while building altars to honor workers who died from COVID, organizing vaccination clinics, and creating care infrastructure. This paper brings Social Reproduction Theory to productive sphere struggles, examining what becomes visible when we refuse the analytical separation between factory and home.
Drawing on 28 interviews and fieldwork in fruit processing, I argue that for place-bound industries resistant to automation, the encumbered worker becomes ideal. Social reproductive responsibilities, care dependencies, and undocumented status function as internal workforce discipline, not external constraints. Ideological formations constructing Latina migrants as "bad mothers" enable exploitation by delegitimizing protection claims. Second, the factory wall is permeable. Employers' decisions about working hours, mandatory overtime, and line speeds shape workers' lives beyond the factory floor. Work impacts continue at home: exhaustion, chemical exposures, and injuries that make caregiving difficult. Production and reproduction cannot be separated. Third, workers positioned at multiple oppression axes build organizational forms emerging from this intersection. What they enacted resembles Latin American huelga feminista, interrupting production and reproduction simultaneously. Mobilizing SRT as diagnostic illuminates productive sphere struggles while moving beyond false oppositions between intersectionality and social reproduction frameworks within Marxist feminism.

Author

• Lola Loustaunau, University of Wisconsin-Madison