| |
Economic and Social Security Cluster, 8 Sept. 2004 Asia-Europe People's Forum.
WOMEN'S EMPOWERMENT AND EMERGING NEW CHALLENGES POST BEIJING +10
Structural Adjustment in European Welfare States and its Implications for Women
by Christa Wichterich
NRO Women's Forum, Germany
It’s quite a bizarre situation to come from Europe to Asia and tell you: finally we
joined the club, structural adjustment has reached western Europe, now we are in a
catching up situation.
Our ongoing SAP are a neoliberal response to a threefold crisis which one European
country after the other experiences in the backdrop of the globalised competition of
shareholder values and the race to the bottom at the world market
- a crisis of the labour markets and employment,
- a crisis of the welfare state, and its policies,
- a crisis of social reproduction.
EU politicians – be it the social-democrats and greens in power in Germany or the
conservative nationalists in Italy – all of them baptise these SA policies "reform" and
tell us that there is no alternative.
The reason given for the neoliberal structural adjustments is exactly the same like in
the South: states are indebted, national and local budgets have to be stabilised,
public spending disciplined and public institutions privatised, markets deregulated
and liberalised. This is supposed to be the only way out of the manifold crisis.
I would like to recall that each and every of these "reforms" are gendered processes
and policies.
- The guiding principles for the restructuring of the labour market and employment
is minimising costs and maximising efficiency. Trade unions and collective bargaining
for wages are under tremendous attack. One significant strategy is informalisation
and flexibilisation of labour. There is a strong tendency to split up full time and
permanent jobs into part-time and temporary jobs while cutting down wages, social
allowances and social security. Due to subcontracting, outsourcing and
informalisation, contract labour, sweatshops and home-based work are making their
way back into European economies - kind of third-worldisation of European labour
markets. In Germany e.g., more and more so called mini jobs are created, low paid
jobs on an hourly base. It is planned to establish deregulated, low wage sectors like
free trade zones. And people who receive some welfare allowance from the state will
be forced to take up so-called 1 Euro jobs. In this downgrading of labour, wage
dumping and rights dumping go hand in hand.
Women and the so called feminisation of employment are highly instrumental to this
restructuring. More women are integrated into the labour market and the cheap
female workforce make for the reduction of labour costs and the introduction of
flexible, irregular, unprotected and under-valued types of employment. Low payment
is justified by defining women as "secondary earners" not as breadwinners of the
households. Additionally, women are supposed to be a kind of natural pool for
flexibilisation because they attempt to combine job and care work in the family. While
labour participation of women is on an steady increase but the wage gap between
men and women doesn’t shrink in Europe: women earn only 75% of the male income
due to their concentration in informal and low-paid jobs although they are often even
better qualified than men.
Women have been pioneers in the new flexible modes of labour, as temps, just-intime-
and home-based workers, as own-account workers and small-scale or so called
one-person entrepreneurs assisted by a micro credit. Presently in Europe, 81% of
part-time workers are women, with part-time jobs on the increase. In Germany,
where the state doesn’t provide care facilities for babies, the re-entry of women into
waged work after the baby break is often based on flexible employment pattern. In
the Netherlands 66 % of employed women work part-time compared to only 16 % of
the male workforce. In Ireland, Wales and Scotland unemployed men outnumber
unemployed women by three to one after many transnational companies from
Europe, the US and East-Asia invested in these regions and use flexible employment
patterns on a large scale. The concentration of women in informal and flexible jobs
results in women accounting for 60 % of the working poor, as the ILO stated recently.
Europe experienced a female led informalisation in the 90s – analogue to the female-
led industrialisation in export-oriented Asian economies in the 70s. Now, this
informalisation of labour doesn’t spare men any more and increasingly affects high
skilled labour alike.
Pushed and pulled into precarious employment women are rendered highly
vulnerable and at risk. Being integrated in the labour market on an irregular, informal
and low paid base only, results in a low degree of entitlements for unemployment
allowance or social welfare and leads up to small pensions. In future in Germany,
women won’t get any unemployment allowance in case their husband earns some
income - no matter how long the woman were employed. The risk of old age poverty
is particularly high for women.
Similar to women workers, migrant workforce is relevant for the strategy of cost
reduction and deregulation of the labour market: particularly illegal and
undocumented migrants have no choice but to accept poor working conditions and
low payment. That’s how they continuously are filling up the labour hierarchy from the
bottom, and put a downward pressure on wages.
The labour market for migrant workforce is highly gender segregated. Female
migrants make for a restructuring of reproductive and care work as housemaids,
cleaners, nurses, care takers of old aged people, and as sex workers. The profession
of the housemaid which had vanished to a large extent from the labour market in
Europe has reappeared. Professional middle class European women transfer their
reproductive work to low-paid undocumented migrant women. This results in a new
division of labour between well paid and poorly paid women, between women from
different ethnic communities.
Thus both, the gendered as well as the ethnic division of labour are instrumental for
the minimising of costs and the minimising of rights in the neoliberal restructuring of
the labour market.
Neoliberal globalisation entails a transformation of the role of the nation state and
the establishment of new regimes of governance. The post-war welfare states in
Europe are in the process of being dismantled. Now the prime role of the nation state
is to ensure competitiveness of the countries in the world market. While trying to
maximise their comparative advantage in the globalised competition in particular by
minimising the costs of transaction, the states abandon their responsibilities for social
security and the redistribution of wealth.
The reforms of fiscal policies which reduce the tax burden of capital and property
owners and companies, is part and parcel of this competitive strategy. Reducing
taxes for the corporate sector or allowing them to transfer their profit to tax free
islands leads to budget constraints and public debt. Most of the highly profitable
german corporations like Daimler or Siemens manage not to pay a single penny tax
in Germany.
The regulatory governance by the so-called Maastricht criteria of the European Union
which restrict public indebtedness, force the governments to strict saving measures
and to stabilise their budgets. Municipalities and governments try to do this by
reducing public spending, downsizing of essential services, and withdrawing funds
from projects run by NGOs e.g. in the sector of violence against women, health and
reproductive rights. At the same time, they attempt to fill their empty pockets by
selling out government-owned assets, by privatisation of public institutions, and by
commercialisation of services through the introduction or increase of users’ fees in
the health and education sector.
This withdrawal of the state and the privatisation process converge with the
neoliberal policies which deregulate the labour market and delink employment from
legal and social security. They "liberate" markets from their obligations for social
security and allow companies to shift risks to the people by employing them only on a
irregular, informal and just-in-time base and to cut their wages. That ‘s how markets
externalise their social and environmental costs and leave them to the individuals.
We have to be aware that deregulation is not only doing away with tariffs and rules,
and curtailing social and economic rights of the people. It is at the same time reregulation
by establishing another regime of rules and regulations for the sake of the
corporate sector and giving trade and property rights to shareholders and companies.
The disempowerment of people regarding rights and resources goes along with the
empowerment of the corporate sector and the free trade regime.
Needless to say that these are not democratic processes and not democratically
decided policies. In this transformation of policies, people’s rights, environmental
protection, consumers’ protection etc. are identified as constraints to competition and
trade. Affirmative actions and equal opportunity measures for women which were
introduced by the states and implemented in public institutions are now defined as
comparative disadvantage and as distorting competition.
Additional to the internal pressure on governments to commercialise essential
services, the external pressure by the GATS agreement to transform public goods
and services into commodities in the market is on an increase due to efforts by the
EU Commission and the lobby of the big European multi utility corporations. The
General Agreement on Trade in Services provides a multilateral legal framework to
privatisation: it promotes foreign investment in the public and essential service sector
and gears at the leaning of the public sector and government-run utilities.
This is a crucial step forward in the neoliberal transformation not only of
economies but of the social reproduction and the whole social fabric of societies.
Social services become subjected to the three main principles of neoliberal markets:
efficiency, competition and rentability. They get transformed into commodities where
each item has a market price and is valorised according to market criteria. In the
post-war European welfare states it was the concept of collective responsibility and
horizontal subsidising which cushioned the individual risks of life such as diseases,
accidents, and old age, and provided essential services and resources such as
education and health, water, electricity and waste dumping. Now these risks and
responsibilities are individualised. The logic of the market torpedoes the moral
obligations of social relations, the market price takes priority over human rights and
civic entitlements, individualism undermines solidarity,
Commercialisation and privatisation of essential services means that they are
channelled to where money is and not where needs or a legal claim exist.
Increasingly, there is a social stratification in access to education, health, culture,
information, social security etc. according to income and purchasing power.
Like in the South the majority of the poor and the working poor in Europe are women
– single mothers and elderly women - who can’t afford to pay a private insurance and
to buy expansive services offered by private providers. Women rely to a high degree
on an affordable public service system. Therefore they are the first to suffer from cuts
in public funds, the corresponding deterioration of public services and the increase of
user fees.
When all services are submitted for the sake of rentability to the neoliberal norms of
efficiency and productivity, care work appears to be slow and expensive. Therefore
private as well as public service suppliers devalue care work and pay less for it, (e.g.
the 1 Euro jobs people are forced to take up in Germany in order to get their
unemployment allowance are predominantly care work in the service sector) or they
try to catapult it out of the paid economy. It is mostly women doing this kind of care
and service work who earn less or loose their jobs when it comes to leaning of
services.
And again it is women who render unpaid services to kids and other relatives in their
homes when nursing and other care services are kicked out from the labour market.
One example is the standardised stay in hospitals after surgery. Patients are sent
home no matter how much care and nursing they need. Thus, efficiency imposed on
social services shifts work from the paid sector into the unpaid sector. Women end
up with having fewer secure jobs and more unpaid work. Some women face a
lifelong care career with a bitter end: first they take care of their kids, then of their
elderly parents, then of the old husband and in the end, when they are old and need
care there is an appalling lack of care and social provisions.
Wherever states cut down expenses for running public institutions from child care to
care for the elderly, for public swimming pools, libraries or houses for battered
women, you find predominantly women taking over the work either individually into
their unpaid household economy or collectively as self-help or voluntary group in the
community. Around 80% of the voluntary work in the social sector in German
communities is done by women. Actually, they cushion the demolition of the welfare
state and function as social air bags in the neoliberal restructuring of the nation state.
Presently, this kind of voluntary or civic work is highly praised by politicians because
the governments count on women’s unpaid work as social capital and flexible reserve
for social reproduction. This reaffirms the gender specific division of labour and the
female role of care taking.
Both, the transformation of the labour market and the transformation of essential
services and public goods, result in strong tendencies to polarisation, and social
inequality. Competition and individualisation undermine cooperation, reciprocity and
solidarity which are the base of social reproduction. They result in a fragmentation of
class as well as of gender interests and weaken unification. The neoliberal policies
torpedo democratic mechanisms and submit them to the market regime.
Great sections in European societies feel to be subjected to a process of neoliberal
restructuring of the whole life and to the globalisation of insecurity. In France, Italy,
Spain, Austria and presently in Germany people protest against the so-called reforms
of the labour market, and rally against wage and social cuts. A prevailing feature of
European societies has become "angst", fear of insecurity, fear of impoverishment,
going along with a growing lack of confidence in all political parties and regimes
because of their neoliberal consensus.
Unfortunately, feminist critique of the ongoing "reforms" is hardly articulated. The
social category ‘gender’ seems to be less relevant. After the women’s movement of
the last century has been partly integrated into political institutions while its
autonomous sections are weakened, there is an urgent need for another, a new
women’s movement based on a feminist and an anti-racist critique of the neoliberal
transformation of our lives.
From Beijing to Cancún, women’s organisations and networks reacted to the
neoliberal globalisation and did a tremendous lot of advocacy work on the
international level. They challenged global governance regimes, and multilateral
policies. No doubt that global answers are needed in terms of transnational
cooperation and coordination of social movements and civil society activities.
At the same time, there is a growing need to resist at the local and national level the
assault on our livelihoods and social reproduction, and to counter the myth that there
is no alternative. We have to develop alternatives to privatisation, and link ongoing
struggles against privatisation in European and Asian countries. We have to
overcome the frenzy competition, develop strategies towards solidarity instead of
being put into competition against each other, and bridge the gap between women
from different ethnic, cultural and economic background.
We need to strengthen our struggle against the intransparent and undemocratic way
governments in Europe and Asia and the EU commission operate. For this we should
- reinforce our common position that the provision of basic needs and essential
services must be subordinated to democratic decisions and to the subsidiary
principle which implies that they should be realised at local or national level
as far as possible. Communities and societies must be enabled to decide in
an autonomous way how to organise their public services.
- reclaim our political concept of empowerment of the powerless in the sense of
transforming asymmetrical power relations between north and south, social
classes, gender, the dominant population and migrants etc.,
- reclaim the concept of coherence by which we demanded that the
multilateralism in the trade regime should be in compliance with the human
rights regime of the United Nations. Social and gender justice, the provision of
basic needs, environmental protection, human women rights must be given
preference over free trade and commercial rights.
By challenging existing power relations we have to increase the pressure, make
ourselves more visible, and reclaim political spaces in the public, in the streets and
by direct and spectacular actions e.g. the declaration of GATS-free zones starting
with particular institutions like kindergardens and universities,
For transnational women’s organisations and networks the nineties were a very
successful decade in terms of getting visibility and recognition as transnational
democratic actors articulating claims for social and gender justice, for rights and
resources, and for the democratisation of the economy and of policies. In order to
overcome our present weaknesses we have to adopt a multi-layered approach,
strengthen both, our transnational links and our local resistance, and re-invent
solidarity at and between all levels of political agency while building alliances and reradicalising
our approaches.
|
|
