Global capitalism against working women
Girls are beating boys in the exam leagues; more women than ever before are in the workforce; women are picking up jobs fast in the new hi-tech industries.
Does that mean the new global economy producing a fairer world for women?
No, these facts are only part of the picture.
There are certainly changes going on, but for many women an increase in work outside the home means an increase in the "double shift" and in super-exploitation.
And for the millions of women living in countries with a debt burden, the International Monetary Fund’s policies mean an increase in poverty and exclusion.
Worldwide, women head one third of all households, are responsible for half the world’s food production yet own just one per cent of the world’s property.
In the last three decades, as industry expanded worldwide and moved to find new cheap labour forces in poorer countries, women have been drawn into production in virtually every part of the globe.
In developed countries like the UK, women now make up half the labour force. In areas like south Asia, 44 per cent of women work outside the home compared to 25 per cent twenty years ago.
But as the International Labour Organisation (ILO) puts it: "The bottom line is that, while more and more women are working, the great majority of them are simply swelling the ranks of the working poor".
Women’s wages are on average between 50 per cent and 80 per cent of men’s. They earn less than men in every single country of the world.
They earn less per hour on average even when in full time work: in Britain, for every
£1 a man earns, a woman earns 81p.
For many women, their situation is made worse by precarious employment status. They work part time or in temporary jobs or they are clustered in lower paid jobs like textiles and domestic work.
Employers often seek out women workers, knowing that their position in the home means that it can be more difficult at first to organise for better conditions and wages.
Eighty per cent of the workers in some of the special export zones in East Asia or the sweatshop factories of Latin America, are women.
Women work longer hours than men worldwide, devoting extra hours to unpaid houshold tasks in every single region of the world.
Women in rural communities fare no better. In many areas they do the lion’s share of the agricultural work as well as many other tasks within the household.
Neverthless, the changes in the world economy aren’t all bad news. They can be turned to the benefit of women. As women are drawn into paid work, into work outside the home, this can give them independence.
In Singapore, one study noted that "an increasingly egalitarian relationship" between husbands and wives followed on from women working outside the home.
The tens of thousands of young women who leave home every year as migrant labourers face dependence and exploitation in their work – but many will be able to break their dependence on home and their voice will carry greater weight in the family. Old patriarchal structures are breaking down.
Most importantly, the new workplaces and the new communities in the cities make chances for working class women to organise and fight together.
Young women working in US call centres join the union; women campaign for better education in Zambia; girls lead the children’s campaign against the debt in Peru.
Women are in the march world wide. And in taking up these fights, they find they are up against a whole connected system of business, profiteers and governments.
The problem for global capitalism is that it wants women’s labour power at its disposal but doesn’t want to pay for the consequences. It needs an educated workforce – but doesn’t want to increase education spending.
It would like women to go on doing their traditional task, child rearing and unpaid housework, while boosting the supply of cheaper labour.
All this happens not just because of sexist politicians, ruthless individual bosses and oppressive husbands and fathers. It happens because, without women’s oppression within the family, capitalism could not exist.
The "double shift" of low paid work and unpaid domestic labour is key to the system that generates profits for the employers.
In Britain, the Labour government’s "family friendly" policies are a classic attempt to keep women in the workforce while getting the family looked after cheaply.
We get parental leave in line with European law – but it’s unpaid. Employers are told to encourage flexible working – but this turns out to mean shift work to maximise the bosses’ profits.
Right across the globe, the services that employ women, health, education, municipal work, are being cut or privatised. The services themselves get pushed back onto the shoulders of women who are supposed to perform them unpaid.
This is because the world’s big companies and the governments they influence have decided to cut the amount they pay for state spending.
The "Washington consensus" – the policies pursued by the international capitalist clubs like the World Bank, the IMF and the World Trade Organisation – means slashing public spending and turning services over to the profiteers.
The results for health services can be seen from Dudley to Dar-es-Salaam: closed hospitals, wage cuts, job losses and falling standards of care.
Inside the developed countries, these policies have resulted in an increase in the difference between rich and poor. Welfare payments are slashed – and in the richest nation in the world, 52 per cent of the single mothers are officially categorised as poor.
The wave of privatisations and contracting out of services has had a detrimental affect on earnings and conditions of thousands of women workers across Europe. In Norway, for instance, this meant that whereas in the early 1980s, womens wages in the public sector were better than in the private sector, by the mid-1990s this was reversed.
In the Third World, women’s plight is much worse. The debt burden has weighed down on the budgets of poorer nations and the Structural Adjustment Policies imposed by the IMF mean less public spending.
This applies too to the new packages offered to the heavily indebted poorer countries. In schemes ironically labelled "poverty reduction" the countries are told to – carry on cutting public spending.
This produces the craziest, most contradictory and most tragic results with regard to education. Even the World Bank itself acknowledges the importance of girls’ education.
The vice president of the bank in 1992, Lawrence Summers, put it straighforwardly: "Expenditures on increasing the education of girl…appear to be far more productive than any other social-sector outlays".
Educating girls leads to lower maternal and infant mortality rates, passing on education to the next generation and later marriage. The level of female literacy is the factor most closely associated with overcoming poverty. Every year of education raises a woman’s earning power by 15 per cent
Yet despite these clear benefits, women’s education is still way down the list of priorities. Worldwide women still make up two-thirds of the one billion people who are illiterate and 60 per cent of the 100 million who have no access to primary education.
Tanzania’s debt interest payments are to be reduced by 20 per cent over three years, but it will still be paying around $146 million annually while the basic education budget is $85 million.
Tanzania’s literacy rate, once enviable even by western standards, is now falling, especially for girls. Nowadays it has to charge for education.
This is how 12 year old Amina Hassan in Tanzania describes her day:
"I wake up very early. I sweep the compound, wash last night’s dishes. Then I go to the well but I have to walk very far and wait in a long queue. I go to the farm to dig or pick cashew nuts. If I am lucky I can play for a few hours in the afternoon. I prepare food for the evening and next day. Later I can listen to the grown-ups’ conversations then I go to sleep.I would like to go to school but it’s too expensive."
In Zambia, where parents have to meet 80 per cent of education costs, the World Bank itself has observed "serious drops in attendance, disproportionately affecting girls".
In Pakistan, 55 per cent girls do not attend primary school. Yet Pakistan spends twice as much on defence as on education and health put together.
We will never overcome these terrible inequalities while government’s and the big companies that back them are able to carry on enforcing poverty on the world’s majority.
Of course there are women who belong to the ruling class who can escape the effect of being second class citizens. When women go on the march in Red September and on the Women’s World March in October, we must remember that not all women have the same interests.
Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, can sit back in comfort in Washington enforcing sanctions on Iraq while ordinary Iraqi women watched their children die of malnourishment and preventable disease.
Unlike these privileged women, the majority of women have to fight for every improvement. For them the claims for the new global economy ring hollow – yet it does in fact bring the chance of a better future, because it brings closer the day when working women can unite together, and with their brother workers, to get rid of the whole profit system.
Women health workers across the world identify with each other’s struggles. Women in the richer countries are active in trying force big companies to employ decent working practices overseas. Young women have been drawn into camapigning against the debt in huge numbers.
As we build a new working class movement against global capitalism, we need to bring together all the women struggling against oppression and exploitation into an international working class women’s movement.
Women’s march against poverty and oppression
As part of the World March of Women 2000, women marchers will converge on many cities around the world for mass demos
• For more details go to http://www.ffq.qc.ca/marche2000
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