Lead article
March 2000

Women shake up dominance of globalized capitalism

by Maya Jhansi

A new global women's movement seems to be teetering on the horizon. Women from the U.S. and from all over the world played a central role in the protests against the World Trade Organization that rocked Seattle last November. They made their presence known, not only by organizing, marching and participating in direct action, but by speaking their minds about the destruction that capitalist expansion is wreaking everywhere.

On March 8, 2000, in commemoration of International Women's Day, feminist organizations all over the world have called for a Global Women's Strike to draw attention to women's unpaid labor. In addition, women from 138 countries are organizing national actions for a World March of Women 2000, including a march on Washington in the U.S. on Oct. 15, 2000. Far from withdrawing into the dustbin of "postfeminism," the international women's movement is alive and strong.

None of this global activism should be surprising-women suffer the worst that so-called globalization has to offer. Women make up fully 70% of the world's poorest people. Although women produce 50% of the world's food, they receive only 10% of the income. Add to that the fact that 50% of women in Asia and Africa suffer from malnutrition and the irony becomes too raw to bear. Cornered by the "liberalizing" effects of capital expansion and the fundamentalism that it has spawned, women provide a unique lens on the global crisis today.

WHAT KIND OF LABOR?

Capital's search for cheaper and more "flexible" labor has brought more and more women into the global workforce. Women still earn 25%-50% less than men, and are assumed by corporate managers to be more docile, less prone to organize, and easier to fire for life choices like marriage and pregnancy.

Women, often teenage and younger, are supposedly more suited to repetitive, monotonous and meticulous work requiring manual dexterity. In a global economy in which contractual, part-time, seasonal and piece-rate labor is replacing long-term jobs with benefits, women are especially vulnerable to insecurity and greater exploitation because their labor is considered secondary and therefore disposable.

Ninety four percent of women work in the informal or unorganized sector, so they have less social and legal protection and less access to labor rights orga nizations. In the Philippines, women make up 70% to 73% of the work force in the economic zones where workplace conditions have sunk to an all-time low.

Likewise in the U.S. immigrant women make up the dominant workforce in such labor-intensive industries as the garment industry. Recently, the fashion designer DKNY was targeted for "creating conditions of forced labor" by the Center for Economic and Social Rights.

Another important trend in the globalization process is outsourcing and subcontracting which pushes more women workers into the unorganized sector, in jobs at smaller workshops or even at home producing goods for transnational companies. Working at home leaves women under the whip of patriarchal family structures.

Greater numbers of women now make up the migrant labor pool. In the Philippines, for example, over 60,000 women domestic workers are "exported" to Hong Kong alone for over a billion dollars annually. Others leave the country to join the burgeoning sex industry, an industry that is drawing girls as young as eight years into prostitution due to men's fear of AIDS.

Many feminists have called the "feminization of employment" a "double-edged sword." On the one hand, the ability to earn outside income and to move to urban centers has provided opportunities for women's independence and self-direction. However what has become reinforced in the last two years since the Asian economic meltdown is that such independence is fleeting at best, prey to the fickle, crisis-ridden nature of capitalism.

Women have been hardest hit by the Asian economic crisis. In Thailand, for example, women workers in the export-oriented garment, furniture and low-end plastics industries were the first to be laid off. In the Philippines, the unemployment rate for women shot up from 12.3% in 1997 to 15.2% one year later (overall the rate is 13.3%). In South Korea, 5,000 workers are estimated to be losing their jobs daily, many from the service sector which is dominated by women (Information from WOMEN IN ACTION, No. 2, 1999).

Large numbers of previously employed women have become a part of the Indonesian landscape as well. Unemployed women who left rural areas for work face great hardship. They cannot return to villages devasted by globalization, and structural adjustment has destroyed what few safety nets might have been available to them, like unemployment benefits or welfare.

UNWAGED LABOR

What accompanies "liberalization" are cuts in public sector spending, such as in welfare, healthcare and education, release of price controls, and reduction in food subsidies. This has shifted the burden of providing social necessities almost completely onto the shoulders of women, resulting in one overall gender specific trend: the growth of women's unwaged labor.

Far from technologically advanced capitalism reducing the amount of time women spend on such things as housework, water and firewood gathering, it has in many cases increased it. In northern India, for example, women are spending more time gathering firewood because of the devastation of surrounding forests due to "development." As one woman, Mohini Devi, told ISIS INTERNATIONAL, "Getting fuelwood and grass just required a short walk. Now we have to walk for an hour or more for fuelwood and we are usually fatigued" (WOMEN IN ACTION, No. 2, 1999).

Because more women are working for outside income, girls are often forced to perform unwaged labor at younger and younger ages, a reality not reflected in child labor statistics which count only waged labor. This leads to more young girls being kept out of school. In India, there are 54 million girls who are not in school, as compared to 21 million boys. The overall literacy rate for women in India is 39.4%, whereas for men it is 63.8%. The literacy rate for women drops to an appalling 4% in the state of Rajasthan and 9% in Andhra Pradesh.

In a world increasingly defined by the market, the unwaged work that women do is further devalued and often goes unrecognized. That is why the Global Strike for Women planned for March 8, 2000 and originally called by women in Ireland has gained support from women in so many different countries, including Spain, Australia, Chile, Peru, Mexico, Kurdistan, Netherlands, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and others.

In Peru, indigenous women and domestic workers are using their radio program "Soncco Warmi" (Heart of Woman in Quechua) to lobby for recognition of their work. They state: "Women of the Andes contribute more than 50% of the family income through agriculture-women sow, weed, harvest, take care of the animals-but the state doesn't take into account that we grow and prepare food. Our work is not included in the national budget. Women also take care of the children and do the housework, but this is not valued. We are the main producers and keepers of life and culture in the rural areas, and our economic and social contribution is ignored."

Cross-border alliances and organizing between women's, labor and environmental groups are exactly what global capital seeks to destroy through "free market" and "free trade" agreements. It is the drive of capitalism to extract greater and greater unpaid labor from workers. The "costless" transfer of social services from the "productive" economy to women in the "non-productive" economy is but another way of extracting more unpaid labor from women.

That the horrible working conditions of waged labor are coupled with the extension of women's traditional work, such as housework and care for elderly, children, and the sick, shows that capital domination seeks to undercut the potential for women's self-determination that inheres in the "new" global economy.

The central position of women in the global economy has opened up space for creative resistance. An important new element in the international women's movement are Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). Though many are funded and controlled by the World Bank, others do important work organizing women workers and fighting for reproductive and other women's rights that are being eroded by structural adjustment policies enforced by the World Bank.

Outside of NGOs, women are taking the lead in important grassroots movements around the world, from environmental to labor and indigenous rights movements. In the U.S. women lead the fight against the draconian welfare "deform." In New York recently, women from the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and other grassroots organizations around the world joined forces for the March of the Americas.

THE OTHER FACE OF GLOBALIZATION

It is precisely the potential for and struggles of women for self-determination that are being targeted by religious fundamentalists around the world. In reaction to the destabilizing trend of neo-liberalism, especially in gender relations, fundamentalists promise to restore the mythical order of tradition, often on the backs of women. Far from narrow nationalism being superceded by the borderless world promised by globalization, fundamentalism and right-wing nationalism are on the rise and often merely the mask designed to obfuscate neoliberalist policies.

Nowhere is the violence of this more horrifying than in Afghanistan where the Taliban regime has instituted an absolute gender apartheid on the 80% of Afghanistan that it controls. Not only are women required to cover themselves from head to toe in public, but they are forbidden to walk on the streets unaccompanied by a male relative. Women are categorically denied education, healthcare and the right to work.

The exiled women's group, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) is planning a rally of about 1,000 women in Pakistan on International Women's Day. Recently Women in Black wrote a letter of support to RAWA, and women around the world, including the liberal Feminist Majority in the U.S., have organized to bring the plight of Afghan women to light. This is another example of the important cross-border feminist organizing going on.

The importance of NGOs in the women's movement can be gauged in part by the reaction against them by right-wing governments. Pakistan, for example, de-registered close to 2,000 NGOs, including an important feminist group called Shirkat Gah. The current military regime continues the attack on women that deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had unleashed.

Recently, the parliament there refused to pass a resolution against "honor" killings, the murder of women by family members accusing them of "dishonor." Human rights groups say at least 286 women were killed last year in the name of "honor." Such vicious acts of murder carry little or no legal penalty.

In Austria, women's NGOs are calling for support because the newly formed coalition government, which includes the fascist, Nazi-sympathizer Freedom Party, has decided to abolish the Ministry for Women's Affairs that funds many of the feminist NGOs. They write: "We urge you to support the women's NGOs in their struggle to survive and all Austrians who are strictly against allowing racists and neo-fascists to govern a country in the European Union."

In India, fundamentalism attacks women in less obvious ways. Women around the world are rallying around the feminist filmmaker, Deepa Mehta, whose attempt to shoot her new film "Water" on the plight of widows in the holy Hindu city of Varanasi (Kashi) was thwarted by fundamentalist thugs. The government has kept an unprincipled silence on the issue, though the exiled Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasreen wrote a ripping condemnation of Indian politics in support of Mehta.

These are just a few examples of the growing force and reason of women around the world who are in the vanguard of struggles against globalized capital. Even under the threat of death and mutilation, women continue to make their voices for a more human world heard. The question is: will these new global acts of solidarity become an opening and starting point for a global revolutionary movement?