Introduction:
Women and Economic Integration
Discussion
Text for 1995 14th World Congress
These theses result from a discussion in the IEC
Women’s Commission. The members of the Commission would like to see the general
ideas presented here integrated into the document on the World Situation,
obviously in abbreviated form. This is an initial attempt to develop this
analysis; suggestions, reactions, and further contributions are welcome.
Restructuring and integration of the global capitalist economy —
including the recent imposition of so-called structural adjustment policies
involving austerity measures, privatization of the economy and deregulation of
the market — and the current moves toward establishing formal trade blocks
through NAFTA, the EEC and MERCOSUR, have particular impacts on women in both dependent
and advanced capitalist countries.
Equally important, these economic transformations and their role in
undermining the political strength of the international working class depend
precisely on the continuing oppression and exploitation of women. This latter point must be grasped to
adequately understand the fundamental dynamics involved.
Broadly speaking, the formal trade blocks, with their goals of
downward “harmonization” of economic and social policies to remove barriers to
the free movement of capital, the search for cheap labour and the maximization
of profits, simply codify and deepen trends already well underway.
While there are regional variations, we can point to some general
implications for women and some gendered aspects of integration. We have grouped them in the areas of work,
health and welfare, social gains, sexuality, and ideology:
Women’s Work. The
overall implications of economic integration for women’s work has been to
promote contradictory proletarianization of women on a world scale, forcing
them into the work-force and at the same time using their role in the family
and society to justify job insecurity and casualization and the return of many
private services to the “private”sphere of the family, to be shouldered by women.
Today’s international capitalist restructuring involves the
development of export-processing industrialization by multinational
corporations whereby parts of the production process (usually those that are
low-skilled and labour-intensive) are located in free-trade zones throughout
the Third World. These zones represent
localized models of what the new trading blocks will create on a broader
regional basis. Industries in these
free-trade zones depend on the particular exploitation of women’s labour to
provide the increase in surplus-value and in profits that is the goal of global
restructuring. As a result, a
significant layer of Third World women are brought into industrial production
and in fact into some of the most modern sectors of the economy, though under
very exploitative conditions. However,
this development has also been accompanied by a huge expansion of the informal
sector into which most women workers, including those who have been laid off
from multinational industries because of age or pregnancy, are channelled. In fact, women’s work in the informal sector
is used to underwrite the “cheapness” and “flexibility” of both male and female
labour in the industrial sector and to provide a safety valve for periodic
retrenchments in that sector. This
trend toward informal-sector work is accelerated by the increasing
commercialization and export-orientation of local agriculture, a shift which
frequently undermines women’s role in the more traditional farming
economy.
In the advanced capitalist centers, there has been a shift of the job
market away from industrial work toward service-sector employment, drawing
large numbers of women into the low-paid “pink-collar ghetto”. This shift has been accomplished without
massive disruption by building off of the gendered division of labour in the
family. Thus it was women who played
the key role in holding families together through periods of unemployment and
economic stress, and also women who more readily took up the new low-wage jobs
in response to their feelings of responsibility for family survival. This expansion of the service sector has
been combined with a new phase of industrial development in the U.S., Canada
and Western Europe, depending largely on the labour of immigrant women. These women, vulnerable because of the
combined factors of gender, race and immigrant status, often work in small
workshops or at home, signalling the revival of turn-of-the-century sweatshops
and the putting-out system. Such
fragmentation and casualization of women’s industrial work, which is
parallelled by the trend toward temporary and part-time employment in the
service sector, is a central component
of capital’s strategy of creating a “contingent” or “flexible” work-force.
Structural adjustment policies, and the resulting rise in
unemployment, have served to drive women disproportionately out of the formal
economy while also increasing their need to find some kind of income-producing
work. They thus turn to the informal
sector where women are increasingly forced to take jobs as day labourers,
street vendors or prostitutes. In some
Third World countries, unemployment has reached such proportions that men and
women are now competing over informal-sector jobs, thus removing even this
safety net for women.
The establishment of formal trade agreements will most certainly
accelerate these developments, leading to a further “maquiladorization” of
women’s work in both advanced capitalist and Third World societies. One of their basic aims — aside from
ensuring certain rules for capital flow and investment, while highly regulating
other things like patents — will be to generalize the elimination of certain
regulations of working conditions and labour relations which have not already
been eliminated, using the argument that their maintenance would constitute
“unfair trade practices”. Undoubtedly,
then, we would see challenges to rights such as:
• the right to safe, decent working
conditions. Hazardous conditions in
both industry and services where women are concentrated already exist — for
example, danger from the use of toxic chemicals in electronics factories, fires
in garment sweatshops, and the rise in stress-related injury for clerical
workers using computers.
• retirement age requirements may be
“harmonized” as is already being foreseen in Uruguay, where MERCOSUR could
raise women’s retirement age by seven to nine years to jibe with Brazil’s
higher age.
• maternity leave with pay, as well
as child care, both legal rights in Mexico, could be eliminated formally by
NAFTA.
• affirmative-action programmes, a
hard-won right for both people of colour and women in the U.S. and Canada,
could be challenged as an undue burden on capitalists in both countries,
“prejudicing” their competitiveness.
In the agricultural sector, NAFTA and the EEC will promote the
domination of agribusiness, leading to peasant women’s further loss of this
economic base.
Health and Welfare.
These changes in conditions and security of work directly affect women’s
health and general well-being as well as the welfare of those family members
(especially children and the elderly) for whom women are primarily
responsible. Rising prices and
unemployment put stress on women’s own ability to provide for basic needs,
while cut-backs in public spending and the dismantling of social welfare
programmes decrease state support for services such as education, health care
and child care. This development is
particularly deleterious to women because of their perceived role in both
social and biological reproduction. At the same time, the state depends on
women to “take up the slack” and provide on a private basis services that were
previously provided by the government, thus furthering the process of
structural adjustment.
NAFTA in particular threatens to unleash new health hazards for women
as it opens the way to challenging existing environmental laws as “unfair trade
practices”. For example, in certain
communities on the U.S.-Mexican border, the problem of toxic wastes is already
linked to cancers of the female reproductive system and to severe birth defects
such as anacephalic children. With the
general weakening of environmental regulations, such problems could become more
widespread throughout North America. At
the same time, NAFTA will pose a challenge to the national health care
programmes of Canada and Mexico while making it more difficult to establish a
comparable programme in the U.S. While
this affects the whole of the working class, women, as primary consumers of
health care services and as those mainly responsible for family health, will be
particularly hard hit. In the case of
the EEC as well, health care and other components of the state welfare system
could be gradually chipped away.
Social Gains and Basic Rights.
Closely related to the question of health and welfare is the effect of
economic restructuring and the new trade policies on the social gains women
have fought for over the past quarter-century, and in relation to which they
have won at least partial victories.
These include the right to reproductive freedom (including the right to
abortion), the right to equal pay, and the right to freedom from sexual
harassment and violence.
While the general economic crisis has already generated serious
attacks on women’s rights, formal trade agreements have the potential to
undermine these rights in a more formal and thorough-going way. This is largely a result of the
supranational and corporate-dominated decision-making structures proposed in
these agreements, which will supersede regular legislative and executive
actions. This, combined with the focus
on “unfair trade practices”, sets up a situation rife for the challenging of
measures that help equalize women’s role in the economy. While the reason for attacking these rights
may have a primarily economic basis, we should note that the rights themselves
help ensure women’s position in many areas of society. Their significant weakening would, in fact,
bring into question women’s basis status as citizens. The possibility for such a development is particularly clear in
North America, where NAFTA provides no guarantees for such rights. In Europe the situation is more uneven, in
that the Social Charter that accompanies the EEC proposal provides common
European principles on these matters, thus promoting stronger measures in
certain cases (e.g. Ireland and Portugal) while watering down existing laws in
others (e.g. Sweden).
Sexuality. The
manipulation of women’s sexuality is one of the primary ways in which
capitalist restructuring uses and builds on women’s oppression. This happens in several ways. First, there are the attacks on sexual and
reproductive rights discussed above. In
this sense, such attacks can be seen as not only an effect of economic change
but also as preparing the way for further restructuring by making women more
vulnerable in both economic and social terms.
Second, we can find numerous instances where the entry and dismissal of
women from the wage-labour force, as well as the conditions of
super-exploitation under which most women work, are justified by images of
female sexuality. This, for example, is
very common in factories where women are alternately represented as “sexually
loose” and thus “free” to be exploited, or as requiring stringent controls —
including the physical organization of the workplace using the threat of sexual
violence — to maintain their sexual purity, thus limiting their autonomy and
mobility. Finally, there are particular
instances — such as the expansion of the international sex trade in Europe,
Asia and Latin America, the incrase in dowry deaths in Inda, and the imposition
of class-based population policies, for example in Singapore — in which women’s
sexuality is both commodified and controled in ways that directly further the
economic strategies of individual men or of capital as a whole.
Ideology. The ideological transformations that accompany global integration also have an impact on women. This too has several aspects. There is, for example, the manipulation of sexual images and norms we have just discussed. Also of importance is the ideological emphasis on individualism and privatization that parallels recent changes in economic relations. Because of women’s traditional role in the family, such an ideological development affects them differentially — and also depends on their often unconscious collaboration to carry out such broad cultural change. Finally, there is the possibility that NAFTA and the EEC will play a role in undermining both memories of and aspirations for progressive national struggles. This in turn could have special implications for women, since it is through such struggles that women’s demands are frequently raised and secured. For example, to prepare the way for implementation of NAFTA there are already pressures to revise the official histories of the Mexican Revolution. Such revisions would serve to weaken the collective memory of the gains of the Revolution, including those of particular importance to women such as rights to maternity leave, child care and health care. The Irish struggle provides another example, in that the dampening of its vigour because of the renewed ideology of a common Europe could also dampen aspirations for women’s emancipation connected with the goal of national liberation.