A/HRC/11/6 page 24 documented in some of these free trade zones in developing countries.75 The liberalization of industries may also involve importing foreign male workers.76 If the local economic context is impoverished, their presence may encourage the development of prostitution and sex trafficking as well as gender-based violence.73. The demand for women’s cheap labour, low-wages and flexible labour under globalization is not limited to the EPZs but spans over a wide range of forms and space, including trafficking of women and children for sexual and labour exploitation, emigration for employment in unregulated, informal and domestic sectors, as well as regulated service sector occupations such as nursing. The former has become a lucrative business with high profits for both legal and illegal contractors, while the latter is an important source of hard currency for migrant sending countries. “The overall outcome is a significant feminizing of global survival - not just of the women themselves but of their households, of governments and of economic actors.”77 74. It has been argued that, “(t)he same set of processes that have promoted the location of plants and offices abroad also have contributed to a large supply of low wage jobs” in global cities that facilitated women’s migration.78 The growing presence of women, immigrants, and people of colour in large cities along with a declining middle class has facilitated the operation of devalorization processes. The fact of gendering, e.g. the devaluing of female-typed jobs, facilitates the devalorization of a broad range of jobs executed by the growing and mostly female “serving classes” in global cities.79 75. With respect to the impact of migration on migrant women themselves, existing evidence reveals both empowering and disempowering tendencies. By and large, due to the highly unequal power relations of the work situation and the fact that women concentrate in sectors which escape regulatory mechanisms, migrant women find themselves in abusive environments based 75 See the reports on my missions to El Salvador (E/CN.4/2005/72/Add.2), Guatemala (E/CN.4/2005/72/Add.3), Mexico (E/CN.4/2006/61/Add.4). 76 For example, the presence of multinational companies in the fisheries and forestry industries in the Pacific Islands which import foreign male workers has been linked to the sex-trade, child prostitution and HIV/AIDS. See Sullivan, Nancy and Ram-Bidesi, Vina, “Gender issues in tuna fisheries: Case studies in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, and Kiribati”, Honiara, Solomon Islands: Forum Fisheries Agency & Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 2008. 77 Sassen, Saskia, “Strategic instantiations of gendering in the global economy: the feminizing of survival”, Unpublished paper prepared for the Expert Consultation (see paragraph 10 of the present report), p. 1. 78 79 Sassen, Saskia, Globalization and its Discontents, NY: The New Press, 1998, p. 112. Sassen, Saskia, “Strategic instantiations of gendering: Global cities and survival circuits” (http://portal.unesco.org/shs/en/files/7374/11090837201SaskiaSassen.pdf/SaskiaSassen.pdf), see also The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton University Press, 2001, chapter 9.