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By Jessica Moore | |
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Women in the workplace suffer from longstanding sexist ideas and traditions. Even though in the US most people accept the idea that women and men should earn equal salaries, women still make less money than men do. Therefore, many women are economically dependent on men. One result of that dependence is that if a women's husband leaves her or dies, she is left in poverty. A second result is that women are frequently forced to remain in abusive or unfulfilling relationships for financial reasons. Inequity of pay begins before a woman's first job interview, as women are not encouraged to pursue many areas of skilled labor. But even when a woman is hired for a position, she is likely to be promoted more slowly than a man whose performance is similar to hers. And in low wage jobs where employees are forced to work overtime hours in order to bring their incomes up to a living wage, women are often unable to do that because of domestic responsibilities; around the world, women still perform the vast majority of unpaid household labor (such as cooking, cleaning, raising children and caring for the elderly). One of the most dramatic examples of low-income work for many women is sweatshop labor. Some Asian governments advertise "small, dexterous hands" and "submissive attitudes" of women in their countries to attract investment! Sweatshops require female workers to take pregnancy tests before hiring, and many are forced to take birth control pills with horrible side effects. Getting married or pregnant usually means getting fired. Sweatshop workers are often sexually harassed and abused at work. It is a growing trend for sweatshops to utilize "home-working," which requires workers who do not complete their quota during regular hours to finish the work at home, with no extra pay. Currently, 90% of home-workers are women.(2) Not only is this work unpaid, but it isolates workers and lengthens the workday. Another result of IMF/World Bank-assisted exploitation of poor countries by corporations is the growing number of women who migrate to other countries to work. Until very recently, most immigrants from the semi-colonial world were men who worked in mining, manufacturing and construction. But with the dramatic growth of the services in many economies, traditional "female" jobs such as maids, waitresses and sex workers have also increased. The latest figures from the International Labor Organization indicate that women now make up more than half of all migrant labor.(3) In Indonesia, female migrants to the Middle East increased from 8,000 in 1979 to over 100,000 today.(4) The economic collapse that resulted from the reintroduction of capitalism in the former Soviet states caused a dramatic increase in emigration of women from those countries. This migration destroys the families and communities who remain in the country of origin. The majority of female migrants are service workers, primarily domestic and sex workers. To pay off their travel debts, many migrants are forced to work for years without pay. Many female immigrants become victims of sex traffickers who sell them into forced prostitution, where they are held against their will with little or no pay. "Across the Balkans, tens of thousands of women have been caught up by the traffickers and have suffered rape, extreme violence and slavery at the hands of criminal groups renowned for their brutality and greed."(5) Even women who are not physically forced into sex work usually choose that route because it is the only way they can survive. Poverty is the main fuel of prostitution. Women in the sex industry are doubly exploited. They are exploited as workers, often forced to work 12-18 hour days in horrible conditions, subjected to frequent violence and abuse, and almost always without any benefits or sick leave. But they are also exploited as criminals to be harassed by politicians and policemen as immoral lawbreakers. Women who work in the sex industry need the protection of labor laws at least as much as other types of workers. But the only way for labor laws to protect sex workers is to legalize the industry: criminalization means that sex workers are controlled by their pimps, cannot organize in unions and aren't protected by safety standards. Internationally, women are taking action to fight back against unjust and oppressive conditions. In India, women in the service sector have organized trade unions to fight police harassment and exploitation by middlemen. Domestic workers in Mexico, Namibia, South Africa and Colombia have organized unions despite threats, beatings and worse. Sweatshop conditions are created by big business, but the policies of the IMF, WTO and World Bank help to perpetuate the domination of those big businesses in the governments of imperialist and semi-colonial countries. Therefore, one way to fight women's oppression in the US is to protest the IMF and World Bank in Washington, DC this September. Women need solutions that will truly improve our living and working conditions. Social and political reforms are positive steps forward, but it is important to address the economic roots of women's oppression. An example of the relevance of economics to women's struggles is abortion rights, which are under attack by George W. and his fundamentalist allies both in the US and internationally. We need to step up our defense of legal abortion, but until abortion is both free and universally accessible, it is still out of reach for poor women, no matter how legal it may be. Even a truly livable wage is impossible for all women under the current economic system, because capitalism will always drive down the cost of labor in order to increase profits, and will always depend on women's unpaid domestic labor. Fighting for payment for household work performed by both women and men would go a long way to change the perception of this labor as a useless chore. It is in fact socially necessary and productive, and should be recognized as such. Under socialism, domestic labor would be socialized so that it is no longer a burden carried by women alone, but shared by all of society. To successfully achieve true social and economic equality for women, we must replace the inherently exploitative capitalist system with democratic socialism.
(1) The Committee for a Workers' International, "Women Workers of the World: Fight for a Socialist Future," Feb. 1998 p.5 Justice #26 September 2001 |