Global Policy Forum

By Elmira Nazombe,
Center for Women's Global Leadership

The opponents and promoters of globalization have one thing in common: undervaluing the role of women's labor in the process. Women and their labor are the unspoken factor in the globalization equation. As the policy makers of globalization make their decisions, women's presence as both paid and unpaid labor, as consumers, care givers and even as community activists is taken for granted and necessary to the "success " of free market strategies. Women's labor is the unarticulated ingredient in the World Bank/ IMF formula for the `economic success' that includes cutting subsidies to public services, shifting from food crops to export crops, and attracting foreign investment with a low wage labor pool. If women and their labor are central to the processes of globalization, are they not entitled to the fullness of their rights: the right to work, the right to social protection, the right to bodily integrity?

Women's Labor Attracts Investors

Transnational investment is a key strategy of globalization. Transnational investors demand a cheap and `flexible' labor force. Poor nations and communities recruit women workers in order to compete for investors by keeping wages as low as possible and safety requirements at a minimum. Women are very often temporary, part-time workers and/or home-based workers, with little access to benefits, no job security in a low wage service sector job. This is the sector of largest job growth in many countries. Where is a woman worker's right to a freely choose a job which pays equal pay for work of equal value? Where is a woman worker's right to safe and healthy working conditions and just and fair wages that will make possible an existence worthy of human dignity? Does globalization give her equal opportunity for employment and protection from unemployment? There appears to be little or no room for the rights of women workers under globalization. But can globalization work if women don't work?

Women's Work Key to Debt Repayment

Failed development strategies have resulted in huge external debts for many countries. The World Bank and other development donors make it clear that access to new development funds requires the repayment of that debt. Some countries have only human resources to export and therefore encourage hundreds of thousands of women to leave their own countries to work in other countries. The increasing poverty in their own country means that overseas work is the only means available to support their families. But taking this path to survival means living where one is denied the legal protectiongiven to citizens and often sexual abuse and intimidation. The remittances of these migrant workers help provide the much needed hard currency for the payment of external debt. Can the debt be repaid if women never work as migrants?

Women's Unpaid Labor Makes Up for Cuts in Social Services

The philosophy of globalization considers the market the supreme actor in the society, best able to deliver services for the public welfare. Therefore, governments must seriously cut back their role in social services. Structural Adjustment Programs mandate cuts in social programs in the Third World. In North America and Europe cuts in public assistance cash payments and subsidized public services like health care weaken and eliminate the social safety nets. The cuts are said to be essential to streamline the government costs so that the nation is better able to be competitive. These policies have a devastating and disproportionate impact on poor women and children. These services can be cut because it is assumed that women will walk farther and wait longer for health service. Policy makers assume that women will be there to take on the extra burden of sick parents and children.

What happened to the promise in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that each citizen can expect that the state will help them to survive in the times of adversity like unemployment and old age? That children are entitled to protection regardless of the status of their birth? Can communities survive if women are not around to supplement tasks of social protection?

Even Women's Bodies are Globalization Commodities

Ironically it is the excesses of wealth that globalization has generated in some parts of the world, especially some parts of Europe and Asia, the increased demand for a different kind of women's labor that has led to a dramatic and frightening increase in trafficking in women for prostitution and sex tourism. Women's bodies become just another commodity to be bought and sold. Intimidation and physical and mental violence and abuse are common place. Women have few if any legal protections or resources. How can the commodification of women's bodies be stopped and the right to security of person and the right to bodily integrity proclaimed in international human rights documents be upheld? Can there be a sex industry without exploited sex workers?

Valuing Women's Labor Requires Women's Rights

If women's labor is a critical factor in many of the mechanisms that make globalization work then the impact of those mechanisms on women's rights have to be taken seriously. The economic models that underpin globalization need to be transformed not just to ease women's pain but to give them full respect for the role they can play in a global system of well-being and justice. A global economic system in which women are central must be one in which women enjoy their full human rights.

[Editor's Note: We present this article both in honor of Women's History Month and as a lead-in for the upcoming anti-Corporate Globalization demonstrations in Washington, DC on April 16.]