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Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work
in Globalising India WHEN Thomas Friedman declared that the world was flat, implying a level field in terms of global policy, he gave scant consideration to the consequences that rapid economic growth would have on the third-world women. Although history as an archive belongs to the race of humans, it has been rather one-sided and partial in this regard. While women’s history may exist as a fragment within the larger patrocentric historiography, it is clear that women have not been represented evenly and, to say the least, adequately.
The discrepancy with the local that global capitalism has bred has led to rapid changes in the lifestyles of women in developing economies, many of which affect them adversely. If one looks at the employment base, transnational corporations employ far more women workers than men, primarily because they accept low wages and long hours in adverse work environment. The tendency towards what Ghosh mysteriously calls "feminisation of employment" is spurred by their unconditional availability and the arbitrariness of the market to hire or fire them at will. They are thus regarded as easily replaceable, even redundant in the global market. Outside India too, immigrant women bear the brunt of capital accumulation in the hands of a few. The large numbers of Asian women who work as domestic help in the rich households of developed countries give evidence of the pressures of globalisation permeating into the circulation of labour. Global capitalism may have favoured female employment on the one hand, but the temporary and part-time nature of such employment has bred insecurity among women on the other. Very often, this leads to a rejection of modernity as well as its promotion under forms of economic liberalisation. The changing relations and negotiations with the State are reflected in the lives of these women. Women who found themselves swept into the vortex of labour participation in the 1980s owing to globalisation are a case in point. Such circumstances, Ghosh alleges, though evidently negative, are also of considerable advantage for women. As women become better established in their particular sectors, the pressure of gender discrimination tends to diminish, and women begin to demand fair wages as well. But then, again, this is precisely what the employers do not bargain for when they hire women. Although Ghosh addresses the adverse pressures of globalisation upon women, a question she does not raise is: Is globalisation a male discourse? Debates about globalisation involving the growing distance between North and South have become so dominant that feminist analyses of globalisation have been virtually neglected. This is particularly true after the September 11 events when the "clash of civilisations" thesis marginalised women altogether in view of the discussions on fundamentalism, markets and globalisation that followed. Anti-corporatist movements must include the women’s movement since women are severely affected by its agendas. Movements against globalisation tend to be narrow in their pursuit rather like Marxist ideology, which subsumes all other ideologies, or the nationalist struggles in colonised countries that appropriated all other revolutions within it. But suffice it to say that in the corporate system, women, especially those of the developing world, are earning less than men. In the agricultural sector, particularly, women are finding themselves removed from traditional ways of functioning in an agrarian economy. To take just one example, women’s age-old occupation of treating, sorting and preserving seeds has fallen into disuse owing to the imposed practise of purchasing new hybrid seeds and growing genetically modified crops. Other global pressures come from the over-use of fossil fuel and the cutting down of trees. This has led to the unavailability of fodder and the drying up of "female" skills such as gathering natural herbal medicines and even singing and storytelling which have always been women’s traditional concerns. Not only should greater
attention be paid to the framing of economic policies to prevent the
neglect of women, but the mainstream feminist movement should not
sever itself off from women’s grass-roots problems. Simply to
witness an enormous increase in women’s employment in a world
rapidly sold to globalisation should not become the yardstick of
discovering ‘feminisation".
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With
the advent of feminist theory into the third world—what we might
call "postcolonial feminism"—new worlds, contexts and
cultures have "worlded" mainstream feminist theory. Jayati
Ghosh’s book may be placed in this genre. Ghosh’s particular focus
is upon women of the developing world who have been severely affected
by the onset of globalisation. It is well known by now that the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade
Organisation impose legal obligations upon the developing world in
return for investment in industrial programmes initiated by
multinational corporations. In order to embrace modernity and
development in their willingness to stride ahead, developing countries
succumb to a continual subordination under the "structural
adjustment programmes" of the West.