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Date: Wed, 6 Sep 1995 00:06:13 EDT
Reply-To: Forum on Labor in the Global Economy
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Sender: Forum on Labor in the Global Economy
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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Report from Women's Conference
/* Written 4:41 PM Sep 5, 1995 by jagdish in igc:labr.global */
/* ---------- "Globalization: An Intense Political" ---------- */
From: Jagdish Parikh <jagdish>
Subject: Globalization: An Intense Political Issue
/* Written 1:55 PM Sep 3, 1995 by wcw:hercilia in igc:women.unwcw */
From: Hercilia Camargo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Globalization: an intense political issue
By Maria Elena Hurtado
The globalization of the international economy, which is tying countries
through trade, communications, and global finance, is benefiting only a
small minority.
That was the conclusion of three of the four speakers at the
plenary on Globalization of the Economy. The audience seemed to agree.
One of the longest applause was when Helen O'Connell of Women in
Development Europe (WIDE) told the full packed auditorium that despite all
the hype about the benefits of globalization, "many are in a worse
position economically and politically than before".
With every single country encouraged to join the global rat race,
globalization had become an "intensely political issue". It started with
colonization. After independence it went on with the push for
modernization.
Then in the 1980s, it took a quantum leap with the debt crisis
when countries went into an export drive in order to repay their debts.
The Uruguay Agreement on the GATT, which has increased the
concentration of power in the hands of transnational companies which are
now into finance, production, transport, credit and communication, proved
to be the "icing on the global cake".
Hundreds of thousands of women all over the world are working for
the same company, but not for the same wages. A computer operator in the
Philippines is paid 12 times less, on the average, than in Europe.
The problems of globalization, according to O'Connell are:
* countries could not choose their road to development;
* the ethos of the global economy is to accumulate wealth, not to
distribute wealth;.
* poverty is increasing all over the world, which entrenches
existing inequalities of race, gender, groups within and between
countries.
The challenge for women, O'Connell told the plenary, was for
organized women to fight for the sharing of wealth and the democratization
of the international economic institutions, including the World Bank and
the International Monetary Fund.
Duan Cunhua of the Sumster Group Corporation of China was more
upbeat about the benefits to women from globalization. Chinese women
working in township enterprises earn two to three times than the average
worker, she said.
The number of women workers had grown dramatically in South East
Asia in the last few years, thanks to the export successes of those
economies.
She recognized, however, that "the level of development of the
productive forces did not determine the number of women in employmentS.
Many countries were restructuring their industries as a result of
globalization. A tiny percentage of women had made it to top management.
The intellectual development of women was insufficient and retraining was
needed.
Esther Ocloo, a Kenyan woman entrepreneur and founder of the
Sustainable End of Hunger Foundation, spoke about how poverty in Africa
had increased due to the global economic recession and as a result of
structural adjustment programs linked to Africa's debt crisis.
To survive, many men were turning to the informal sector,
displacing women who could no longer compete. At the same time, due to the
globalization of communications in urban areas, parents were losing
control of their children.
Technology, though welcome, was displacing women from traditional
work such as manual harvesting. Occlo pleaded for more funds from UN
agencies such as the UN Fund for Women so that NGOs could help African
women cope with the economic crisis.
Finally, Marcia Rivera from ECLAC, a federation of 100 research
institutes in Latin America and the Caribbean, spoke about the
contradictory signs involved in globalization. Technological changes such
as computing, telecommunications, new materials and genetic engineering
was leading to increasingly rapid changes and to ethical dilemmas, she
said.
Workers were increasingly unprotected as a result of market
changes which required 'flexibility' of the labor force. All these were
happening with less and less government regulations and no international
controls on transnational power.
Rivera advised women to use the new technologies for their own
ends, demand discussions in Parliament on anti-monopoly legislation,
liaise with trade unions to stop the erosion of workers' benefits, and get
women into power so that they can argue for a more human and equitable
development model.
