BY SUE BOLAND
The quality of the majority of women's lives in the next few years will largely hinge on the success or failure of the international movement against neo-liberal globalisation.
Neo-liberal policies such as privatisation of government services, axing of welfare provisions, removing food and fuel subsidies, weakening unions and introducing consumption taxes while cutting company tax have increased poverty massively around the world over the last 20 years. Because women's economic position in capitalist society means that women tend to be economically dependent on male partners or parents, or work in lower paid and insecure jobs, increased poverty hits women harder.
Women are also particularly affected by government withdrawal from the provision of services such as hospitals, health clinics, schools, child-care, nursing homes and disability services with the rationale that the market is a more "efficient" provider of services than governments.
Regardless of whether the government provides these services or not, children and sick people as well as the elderly still need to be cared for. The dominant sexist view is that women are the ones who should take on the extra burden. Women's life choices then become severely restricted.
The tiny minority of wealthy women aren't affected by this. Their families can afford to employ cleaners, cooks, nurses and nannies and afford private hospitals, exclusive nursing homes and exclusive schools.
While the protest movement against neo-liberal globalisation is not an explicitly feminist movement with feminist demands, it is, objectively, fighting for women's rights by fighting against economic policies which destroy women's rights. The goals of the women's liberation movement and the anti-corporate globalisation movement are inextricably linked.
Neo-liberalism
What is the origin and cause of neo-liberal globalisation?
Faced with a long-term collapse of corporate profit rates beginning in the early 1970s, the dominant sectors of the international capitalist class decided to restructure the world economy through trade liberalisation, deregulation of financial markets, privatisation of profitable state enterprises, and systematically attacking the historic post-war gains of the working class, that is, the social wage.
The election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980 marked the beginning of the corporate ruling elite's global offensive against working people in the developed countries and against the peoples of the underdeveloped capitalist countries.
Within a few years, all capitalist politicians in the developed countries, regardless of whether they called themselves social democrats, liberals or conservatives, began following Thatcher's and Reagan's lead. In Australia, it was Prime Minister Bob Hawke's federal Labor government which led the charge to introduce these policies.
In the 1980s, neo-liberal austerity measures were justified by governments with the claim that they would produce jobs and prosperity in the future. Public acceptance of this claim was shattered by the 1990-93 recession and increased unemployment. Years of austerity policies had proved to be no guard against unemployment.
Despite public opposition, big corporations and governments were dedicated to continuing their neo-liberal austerity program, but they had to find a new way of selling it to a suspicious public. The term "globalisation" began to be bandied about to legitimise the continuation of the neo-liberal austerity drive which had begun in the early 1980s.
"Globalisation" is now used by governments as a handy excuse when they cut company taxes, introduce consumption taxes, lower workers' wages, cut welfare, deregulate industries and privatise. The refrain from governments is that they have no alternative, otherwise transnational corporations will shift investments to more "profit-friendly" countries.
The term "globalisation" also refers to the intensified push by imperialist governments in the 1990s to force all countries to adopt neo-liberal policies.
Howard government
The situation for women in Australia worsened under the impact of neo-liberal policies. In developing countries where there never was a welfare net to begin with, the situation is dire.
Coalition Prime Minister John Howard does not deny that the policies of his government increased the burden on families. In June 1999 he declared that "A stable, functioning family still represents the best social welfare system that any community has devised."
This comment says it all. Governments all around the world are dismantling social welfare systems and expecting formerly government-provided services to be provided by families.
When most people think about the domestic work which women do, they think of housework and child-care. But this is only part of it. Severe cutbacks in accommodation and services for people with disabilities or psychiatric illnesses, drug and alcohol detoxification services, and the introduction of fees for nursing homes have all had a severe effect on women.
Nursing home fees are an average of $4380 up front for an elderly person who has not been a full pensioner for a maximum of five years. Now that more people are ineligible for the aged pension because they receive stipends from superannuation funds, you don't have to be a wealthy person to be liable for nursing home fees.
On top of this, the case management method of hospital funding in most states gives hospitals an incentive to discharge patients as quickly as possible. This means that a big proportion of discharged patients still need extensive care and assistance after discharge.
Tough luck if you live on your own and have no family to care for you.
In the late 1980s, state governments began closing down the big institutions for people with severe mental illnesses and intellectual disabilities, replacing them with half-way houses and community care. However, governments never funded enough community care places, leaving many discharged patients to be cared for by families, or else to live on the streets. Since the late 1980s, charities which provide homeless shelters report that there has been a steady increase in the number of homeless people suffering from mental illness.
Seventy-six percent of those who care for people with a mental illness and 72% of those who care for people aged over 75 are women.
A 1998 report funded by VicHealth, the Victorian health promotion foundation, found that one in 20 households contains a person, usually a woman, caring for a disabled or elderly relative. Despite the fact that 25% of the 1000 carers surveyed were looking after a disabled family member 24 hours a day, only 12% had had any respite in the past 12 months.
Almost half of the carers of working age had given up work or were unable to work because of their carer role. Twenty-five percent of the carers had difficulty meeting the costs of daily living and yet relatively few received government benefits. Half of the carers received no services such as transport or general home help, and 54% reported an unmet need for at least one service. Many of the carers suffered from ill-health, anxiety and isolation.
For parents, child-care is becoming more difficult to afford. The June 7, 2000 Sydney Morning Herald reported the results of a departmental census of the commonwealth child-care program which had been released the previous day. Children from 8500 low income families had been withdrawn from child-care. Child-care fees increased by 56% between 1991 and 2000, while government fee relief only rose by 29% proved too much for these families.
However, the Howard government didn't stop there. Since coming to office in 1996 it slashed funding to before- and after-school care programs, resulting in the closure of many programs.
Household work
There have been several studies of the amount of time that women and men spend involved in household tasks. An Office of the Status of Women report, Women in Australia 1999, found that women spend twice as much time as men on household chores and three times as much time caring for children.
A 2000 Melbourne University study led by Duncan Ironmonger found that a mother's average weekly workload includes 24.8 hours of domestic activities, 18.1 hours of child-care, two hours of voluntary work, seven hours of purchasing and 12.8 hours of paid work.
However, these two studies probably underestimate the burden because they don't take into account the responsibility women often have to care for parents and sick or disabled adult children and other relatives.
The Howard government has also changed the welfare system to make young people financially dependent on their parents for longer. It introduced the youth allowance to replace unemployment benefits and Austudy. The strict parental means test means that young people are only eligible for the allowance if their parents' combined income amounts to little more than government benefits. Parents are forced to support their children until the age of 21 if they are unemployed and 25 if they are students.
In 1998 the federal government introduced the Family Tax Initiative which discriminates against low income families in which both parents work.
The tax-free threshold for single income families was increased by $1000 for each child up to the age of 16 or a student up to the age of 18, where the breadwinner's income is $65,000 or less. The tax-free threshold increased by $2500 for single income families where at least one child is under the age of five.
In contrast, a dual income family where the husband earned $30,000 and the wife earned $15,000 receives no tax break, despite having a lower combined income and higher expenses as a result of both parents working, such as child-care, transport and work clothes.
While the federal government's policies are designed to lump more social responsibilities onto families it doesn't intend to drive women out of the work force. In its drive to cut the welfare budget, sole parents will be forced to look for work when the youngest child reaches school age. There are no government plans to reinvest in before- and after-school programs. If your child gets into break and entering after school while you are still at work, guess who'll cop the blame for not supervising your child.
The labour market deregulation (restrictions on union rights), which the capitalists and their governments so love, has a disastrous impact on all marginalised workers, but particularly women.
Curtin university academics Geoffrey Crockett and Alison Preston published research in 1999 which showed that the earnings gap between men and women was largest in Western Australia, which was the state with the most deregulated industrial relations system in the country. The earnings gap between men and women increased from 17.5% in 1991 to 23% in 1998. This represented a fall of more than 30% in female pay relative to male average earnings, resulting in WA women earning $20.50 less per week than women workers in other states.
The earnings gap between men and women is also increasing throughout Australia. In March 1999 the ACTU released research which showed that the wage gap had widened since 1996 and widened for the first time in 30 years in several key female-dominated industries.
The hospitality industry showed the worst reversal of a 30-year trend of narrowing gender pay gaps, with a four percentage point decline in women's average weekly earnings compared with men's. In the education sector, the pay gap widened by two percentage points, while the gap remained the same in the manufacturing and retail industries.
The ACTU report also found that female full-time workers who were union members earned 24.5% more, and part-time female union members 27% more, than women workers not in a union. The problem was that women were disproportionately represented in low-paid, poorly unionised sectors of the work force.
If the Labor Party had been in government federally over the last five years, the situation would not have been substantially different. You have to remember that federal Labor governments between 1983 and 1996 led the charge to introduce neo-liberal policies. The Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, the Commonwealth Serum Laboratory and part of Telstra were privatised.
It introduced the national competition policy which is driving state governments and local councils to privatise and outsource. It pushed state governments to implement severe austerity programs by cutting federal grants to the states. This led to a decline in hospital and education standards, and the closure or reduction in many community health facilities. Many of the services which impact most directly on women are provided by state governments.
When it came to women's rights, the former federal Labor government was always better at reforms which didn't cost much money, or which amounted to glossy window dressing.
The Sex Discrimination Act, which Labor introduced, was of real benefit to women. But it was cheaper for the Labor government to introduce anti-discrimination legislation than to spend the millions of dollars which would have been required to make child-care affordable for all. It wasn't that the government didn't have enough money. As soon as the Gulf War broke out in 1991, the Hawke government was quick to show its loyalty to the US alliance by spending millions of dollars on sending a warship to the Gulf.
The affirmative action legislation which was introduced by Labor was pure window-dressing. Unlike US legislation, it didn't force employers to increase the employment of women, Aborigines or marginalised migrant groups.
Support for neo-liberal policies is a bi-partisan affair for the Liberal, Labor and National parties. The only difference is over how to implement these policies without arousing active public opposition.
The only guarantee of reversing these policies is to build a powerful people's movement of opposition which ensures that governments pay an enormous political cost if they don't make concessions. Feminist activists need to be part of such a movement. It's in the interests of the vast majority of women.