Globalising women's liberation
BY KATH O'DRISCOLL & NIKKI SULLINGS
Women make up 70% of the world's poor, according to the United Nations Development Program. And "globalisation" (read: global capitalism) is forcing on women ever greater inequality, in conditions of employment and standards of living.
The key facilitators of this process in the Third World have been the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Created in 1944, the two institutions loan money to member states for "development", but only after the recipients agree to implement a structural adjustment program (SAP) and restructure their economies. SAPs disempower Third World nations, and women suffer most.
The IMF's enforced policies are designed to ensure that Third World debtor countries make their repayments, orient their economies toward generating foreign exchange, drop protective trade barriers so as to allow the "free flow" of capital and goods and generally end restrictions on overseas capital. Third World nations have to compete amongst themselves for foreign investment by keeping wages low and safety standards to a minimum.
Such policies have handed enormous powers to transnational corporations and have drained wealth from the Third World to the First World.
Under the terms of some SAPs, cash-starved Third World countries like Sri Lanka have established "free trade zones" or "export processing zones", complexes in which even normally lax laws on labour standards are done away with.
There are now more than 1 million people employed in these "free trade zones", and 80-90% of their light assembly workers are women between 16 and 25 years of age, forced into these jobs by the destruction of local agricultural industries.
The exploitation of women's labour is many countries' most valuable asset — the women workers in these zones are generally paid 20-50% less than men. The corporations view young women as more compliant and less likely to organise.
Rising poverty and economic instability have forced hundreds of thousands of women from countries like the Philippines to seek work as household maids overseas, where they don't have the legal protections of citizens and often face sexual abuse and physical intimidation.
Of the 2800 Filipino maids who work in the US, 2000 are employed by staff at the World Bank and the IMF.
Others are forced into prostitution and the sex tourism industry. Around the world 1.2 million women and girls are trafficked for prostitution each year.
Structural adjustment, including cuts in government spending on health and education, has also ripped asunder the social fabric in many Third World countries. Women have been hardest hit.
A study by British aid organisation Oxfam found that IMF-enforced health care reforms have gone tragically awry. In Zimbabwe primary care costs increased six-fold; women delayed health care until absolutely necessary, often at the expense of their lives. In Nigeria, women must pay for blood and blood products and even bring their own candles to hospitals in case of a power shortage during delivery.
Such cuts in government spending and social programs have forced women to take on the extra burden of caring for sick parents and children, and have increased health problems and limited education opportunities.
Such conditions are not confined to the Third World. There are 300,000 super-exploited, mainly female outworkers in the garment industry in Australia, who receive as little as $1 an hour for 100-hour weeks.
In the United States, where the Catholic Church and other religious bodies have taken over many privatised health services, women can face restricted access to or denial of reproductive health services on religious grounds.
In the richest countries, women still spend two-thirds of their time on non-market activities — nearly twice what men allocate to these tasks.
But while capitalism has "globalised" women's oppression, it has also globalised women's resistance and struggle for liberation. In grassroots labour, feminist, environmental, indigenous and solidarity organisations, women are organising against exploitation.
In the Philippines, Piglas Kababaihan (Women Breaking the Chains) is organising urban poor women in campaigns for abortion rights, divorce law reforms, gay and lesbian liberation as well as against sex trafficking.
In Indonesia, where workers labour in appalling conditions for multinational companies, unions such as the Indonesian National Front for Labour Struggle (FNPBI) are uniting workers to fight for better working conditions and against the undemocratic and anti-people policies implemented by the government under directions from the IMF. Most of the union's 15,000 members are women.
In Iraqi Kurdistan, women activists have resisted the forced closure of the Independent Women's Organisation and the only independently run women's shelter in the Middle East by the US-backed Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and have spurred an international campaign in their defence.
Women are in the front line even of wars of liberation raging across in the world: in Colombia against the US-backed army and death squads, in armed Zapatista communities in Chiapas, Mexico, in military-controlled Burma and in occupied Tamil Eelam.
There is even one country where, despite a lack of resources and of development, women have tackled the feminisation of poverty and achieved a measure of liberation: socialist Cuba.
Blockaded by the US for 40 years, Cuba has refused to buckle to the rule of the IMF and the transnationals and, by charting another course entirely, has taken great steps forward in living standards, education and women's rights.
Approximately 66.1% of Cuban women are professionals and intermediate technicians, for example, and 32.2% of the political leadership are women, one of the highest rates in the world. Women's participation in governing society is also institutionalised by such mass organisations as the Federation of Cuban Women, which has fought long and hard against sexist ideas and practices in the country.
Capitalism, as a global system, depends on the oppression of women; so long as it remains, the advances we make will be minor and unstable.
But it has provided not only the motive but also the opportunity to end women's oppression, and all other forms of oppression, through "globalising" the revolution against it, the revolution which will place the needs of free people above greed and exploitation.