[Socialism Today, No. 9 June 1996]
Peter Taaffe reviews World’s Apart – Women and the Global Economy (1996), a report by Natacha David for the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU).
„In export processing zones throughout the world there is a marked preference for young unmarried women, and it is made very clear to them that marriage or worse, childbirth, is incompatible with their job. In some cases women have to undergo a compulsory pregnancy test before being hired, and from Honduras to China to Costa Rica, pregnancy means dismissal.
„To prevent the problem of pregnancy from the outset, some Guatemalan and Honduran maquiladoras distribute contraceptive pills to their employees. In the Dominican Republic some factories have distributed pills which have resulted in sterility“.
This is just one of the many damning facts in this excellent pamphlet, which details the brutalising effects of capitalist globalisation on the lives of working women in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
The pamphlet does not deal exclusively with conditions in the ‚third world‘. But it does provide the raw material to shatter the myths, which are as prevalent there as in the advanced industrial countries, about the alleged benefits of the ‚free market‘ and globalisation.
The venal character of the landlord and capitalist regimes in the so-called developing countries is shown by the fact that „some Asian countries, such as Thailand or Malaysia, do not hesitate to boast in their publicity brochures of the ’small hands and dexterity of the Oriental women and traditional attitude of submission‘ – a mixture which is supposed to work wonders on the assembly lines of potential multinational investors“.
In Dominica, women workers in the export processing zones are 19 times more likely to suffer from complications linked to menstruation, and are two and a half times more often the victims of miscarriages, than women outside the zones. They give birth to underweight babies twice as often and are three times more likely to give birth to children with congenital defects. Without any health and safety protection, and with trade unions officially or unofficially banned, workers in the zones often have to work long hours or compulsory overtime; and often work with carcinogenic solvents, acids or toxic fumes, which are commonly used in the electronics factories. Young women in the electronics and microprocessor factories generally have perfect eyesight when they are hired, but after a few years have to wear glasses from having to spend days on end staring through microscopes.
This booklet’s description of conditions in the zones reads almost like Karl Marx’s famous report on the workers of 19th century capitalism, in the first volume of Capital. But at least the British workers had some defence in the form of courageous factory inspectors. Today’s enterprise zone workers have no such protection and are often totally at the mercy of their employers.
This can have terrible consequences, as in the case of Esperanza Quintallina, a 24-year old Salvadorean worker, who died in March 1995 after a severe attack of gastroenteritis, which her employer refused to allow her to treat in time.
Natacha David points out: „Anti-union repression is an integral part of the export-processing zone conception. Potential investors see the absence of trade unions as a major advantage of the zones, and the preference for women workers is a deliberate part of their anti-union stance. The cultural conditioning of these young women makes them less likely to rebel“. Most are also recruited from the rural areas and therefore are without union experience.
Another feature of globalisation is the colossal increase in migrant labour. Migrant labour has always been a part of capitalism. Emigration from the rural areas to the towns, and from the ‚old world‘ to the new world of America, were part of the very process of forming modern capitalism. Today many emigrant workers go from one third world country to a slightly more prosperous country in the same region. When it involves spending long periods away from their families the human consequences are tragic.
Look at the devastating effects on the families of migrant workers in South Africa. In Lesotho, 40-60% of married women are separated from their husbands, who on average spend 15 years away from home, working in the South African gold and diamond mines.
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A study of migrant workers going from ultra-poor Bolivia to Argentina, shows that two thirds of women do not receive any money from their husbands. When women emigrate, „although on average women earn less than men migrants, they send a larger proportion of their earnings to their family, and on a more regular basis“. There are three women Indonesian migrants for every man. There are three Sri Lankan women who go abroad looking for work, for every two men. Sitting at Karachi airport, a stopping-off point from the Middle East to Sri Lanka, it is common to see groups of women returning from what is in effect domestic slavery, to sometimes broken families and broken dreams back home.
The Sri Lankan press recently featured the case of a Sri Lankan maid employed in the Gulf states to look after the baby in a rich household. One day, in the presence of the Sri Lankan nurse, the wife of the head of the household dropped a baby, which subsequently died. Naturally the Sri Lankan maid was held responsible, and after a trial in which she was found guilty of murder, she was executed.
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The Sri Lankan press regularly features another consequence of married women spending their working lives in the Middle East and leaving their children at home – the growth within the family of sexual abuse and incest.
Another consequence of this mass emigration of women is prostitution. The report points out that „sometimes prostitution is a deliberate choice … more often, however, prostitution was not a deliberate choice, but rather a last resort“. Many women, lured with promises of jobs in offices, restaurants or as domestic servants, find themselves locked up in a brothel, their papers taken away, and their earnings held back to repay their ‚debts‘ for accommodation and the services of ‚agents‘.
Many Thai and Filipino women are attracted to Japan by recruiters promising them well-paid jobs. They usually fall into the clutches of prostitution networks, their papers taken away and deprived of all contact with the outside world. Any attempt to escape is threatened with denunciation, which would lead straight to prison. The most horrible aspect of the trade in women is when young women or even young girls – more and more sought after on the international prostitution market because of the threat of Aids – are sold by their parents, crushed by poverty. As the report comments: „This is yet more evidence of the close link between prostitution and poverty“.
Every month 120-150 women leave Bangladesh for Pakistan, or sometimes for the Middle East, where they are sold to brothels or private individuals who force them to work as prostitutes. Upward of 200,000 women have been supplied for this market. Any attempt to book the traffickers runs into vicious Pakistani anti-women legislation, which bans adultery, rape and prostitution but assumes that whenever these take place they are the responsibility of women. This includes rape, where a women’s witness is not equal to a man’s and therefore successful prosecution is almost impossible. More than two thousand Bangladeshi women are in Pakistani prisons convicted on such charges.
Quite correctly the pamphlet proposes that „the trade unions should adopt a trade union social charter for migrant workers, organise campaigns to combat racism and xenophobia, organise migrant workers, with particular support for women migrants who are at a greater disadvantage, and organise women who work as prostitutes, as well as helping them find alternative employment“.
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The weakness of the pamphlet however is the apparent acceptance of the ‚reality‘ of the ‚free market‘. Every page is a searing indictment of the brutalisation of women workers, through unrestrained capitalism, particularly in the so-called ‚developing‘ countries. And yet the report declares: „For a country seeking to gain a competitive position in the global market, there appears to be no solution for the time being, other than the recommendations of the international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF, whatever the social cost for the most vulnerable groups, such as women and children“.
Tell that to the workers and farmers of India, or to the children in a Punjab village who recently demonstrated with placards with the slogans ‚Down with the IMF, Down with the World Bank, Down with this cruel system‘!
The ideological offensive for the market and against socialism, has been just as strong in the third world as in the advanced industrial countries. The two main arguments used to justify the idea that growth can only come through free market capitalism in these regions are a) globalisation and b) growth of the informal sector.
In fact, the jobs provided by globalisation and the informal sector are the slave-like, sweated labour detailed in Natacha David’s report. On a recent trip to the Indian sub-continent, I encountered the argument, on a number of occasions from even radical intellectuals, that the ‚informal‘ sector now provides a stable crutch for the development of capitalism. Allied to increased ‚homeworking‘, a massive development of sub-contracting of home-based ‚teleworking‘, capitalism is guaranteed a rosy future. Yet as Natacha David says: „Poverty and the informal sector form a vicious circle in the sense that it is often poverty that leads women to undertake informal activities. These activities undeniably enable them to survive but at the same time place them in a precarious position that prevents them ever really overcoming their poverty“.
The huge growth in the informal sector is itself a product of the trend towards massive privatisation, deregulation and sub-contracting, one of the aims of which is to drastically weaken the trade union movement.
Large textile factories in Bombay have disappeared as a result of sub-contracting, to be replaced by smaller enterprises which often employ informal workers in Gujarat and elsewhere. The result is that isolated individuals, families, workshops or groups of workshops and even whole villages have become dependent, through sub-contracting, on a middleman working for a multinational company.
The ILO estimates that 200 million workers worldwide are employed through sub-contracting, in most cases with no cover for accident, maternity leave, sickness or disability. Some large firms have even gone to the extreme of contracting everything out, becoming ‚hollow‘ companies which no longer produce anything; even the packing is sub-contracted. The only activities they now carry out directly is sales and marketing! The growth of the informal sector can be directly linked to the crisis of world capitalism.
Until the end of the 1970s, „the informal sector was shrinking, both in the industrialised and the developing countries. With the onset of the crisis in the 1980s however, in particular the debt crisis and the effects of structural adjustment programmes, it grew rapidly, to the extent that it employs half a billion people, or one quarter of the world’s working population, making an essential contribution to economic and social life“.
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Faced with this new reality the trade unions must adapt and formulate policies to deal with the problem. The report gives many good examples of the way women in the informal sector in India have organised trade unions which have fought against police harassment and exploitation by middlemen. In Mexico domestic workers, despite the huge obstacles, have recently become organised. The same is true of domestic workers in Columbia, Namibia and South Africa. Women home workers are also turning to trade unions to help fight against the exploitation of which they are so often victims. This is taking place in India, and in Hong Kong through the Women Workers‘ Association which is fighting for childcare facilities, higher pay and better working conditions.
Also in the advanced industrial countries, for instance in Italy, the unions have taken up the challenge of organising, particularly in the clothing industry, those in the informal sector. In truth home working developed as a precursor of the industrial revolution. The gradual industrialisation of society meant a decline in home working, to a ‚marginal form of production‘. It has now returned in a big way for a combination of reasons. One factor is the development of technology, the miniaturisation of production, and the development of information technology in particular, which now allows greater scope for working from home, particularly in the advanced industrial countries.
In the US already 10% of the working population works from home. In Europe there are some eight million teleworkers. But the bosses deliberately use sub-contracting, deregulation etc. to weaken, scatter and isolate the workforce. Women constitute 90% of homeworkers.
Homeworkers are much more easily denied social protection, the provisions of labour legislation, and decent pay through home working. Natacha David gives many graphic examples of the way the employers relocate relatively expensive tasks done in the advanced world to southern and south-east Asia or to the Caribbean through ’social teledumping‘. Data processing is a classic example.
Seventy per cent of the world’s poor are women, 1.25 billion people, despite the huge proportion of the work they do. Natacha David spells out the colossal ‚invisible‘ economic contribution of women. For instance, if household tasks were considered as productive activity this „would increase the value of world GDP by 24-30%. The rate of women’s participation would be equal to, if not higher than men’s“.
While women have benefited more than men from new jobs created, it has been at the cost of heavy sacrifices. Women have to bear the heaviest share of the costs of globalisation. They make up the majority of the army of ‚flexible‘, cheap workers which are sought after by employers anxious to increase their competitiveness.
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The facts and figures in the booklet on the still big differences in the advanced industrial countries are extremely useful. What we have seen in the past 20 years is the world wide feminisation of the labour force and employment, but this has gone hand in hand with also a feminisation of poverty.
The basic weakness of this pamphlet, however, is its lack of credible proposals to change the situation of women. For a body whose General Secretary is Bill Jordan, late of the Engineers‘ Union in Britain, who does an introduction to this pamphlet, it would be too much to expect class solutions to a class problem.
The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICTFU) demands a social clause in international trade agreements, including the demand for equal treatment and non-discrimination in employment. No one could sensibly oppose this demand or the many proposals for legislation by national governments to ameliorate and improve the conditions of working women. The very good examples of what the unions are already doing should also be built on.
But an organisation which implicitly and explicitly accepts capitalism is organically incapable of drawing all the conclusions from its own analysis. The report proposes that the trade unions should pressurise governments to „provide more assistance for the economies of developing countries and to help create jobs in those countries so that the workers are not forced to emigrate“. King Canute would have had an easier task in turning back the waves! The ILO has pointed out that over 800 million people, one third of the labour force, is presently unemployed or underemployed. Government action to ‚create jobs‘, particularly in the third world, is like taking a thimble to empty the ocean. It is primarily through class action that the brutal conditions of the masses in the impoverished world in particular will change.
Globalisation means closure of factories in the advanced industrial countries and their relocation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Sweated labour, social dislocation, and impoverishment are the results for the masses in the third world. It is in the mutual interests of the working class internationally to come together to combat international capital.
This is what the dockers in Liverpool are doing at the present time. The ICFTU, instead of issuing pious appeals to the multinationals and to their client governments in the Third World, should be proposing concrete class action to organise those workers presently outside its structures, particularly women workers. In spite of the extreme brutality meted out to them, women workers continue to organise and try and fight back. For example, in Guatemala Deborah Guzman, a trade union leader in a Korean textile company, was kidnapped in an effort to intimidate her. Flor de Maria has been beaten and raped but still they, and thousands of other women, continue to fightback. After a three year struggle workers at the Korean Bibong company in the Dominican Republic won the first ever collective bargaining agreement in 25 years of export processing zones. In those three years they’d had to withstand sackings, violence and sexual harassment.
It is difficult to organise the workers in the ‚enterprise zones‘. But it is not an impossible task and it is in the interests of the workers of the advanced industrial countries to provide support, political as well as organisational, including finance, to strengthen and enhance the working class and particularly the trade unions in these countries. The ICFTU piously declares for a „world market based on the respect of fundamental workers rights“. It claims that this can only be achieved „through an international social clause“. Yet even if it was conceded, as far as the multinationals are concerned it would not be worth the paper it was written on.
Unless backed up by a powerful and organised trade union movement, such clauses would remain a dead letter. The rapacious multinationals must be combated at all levels. It is time for a new international organisation of the working class on the trade union level. Over and above this it is necessary for the world working class to see that capitalism can never offer a solution to their problems.
The trade union struggle must be combined with the idea of changing the world, of eliminating the power of the three hundred companies who hold a majority of humankind by the throat and whose world is that of the unspeakable horrors spelt out in the pages of this publication.
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