|
|
Women's Paid Labor Keeps Door Open to Poverty
By Bojana Stoparic,
Women's e-News
World
September
5, 2005
Lucy, a 38-year old supermarket manager in South Africa, used
to have a full-time job with health and retirement benefits. She was in line
to be promoted to middle management. Most important, she was able to save
money for her children's college education.
Then her mother-in-law had a stroke. In order to care for her, Lucy--whose
story is included in a report on women and poverty released last week by the
United Nations Development Fund for Women--shifted to part-time work, not
only cutting her salary but also losing her pension. To make things worse,
the loss of income reduced her children's education prospects, making it
harder for them to look forward to a decent livelihood and build a better
life for themselves.
For the authors of the report, Lucy's predicament illustrates both how
women's employment can help keep a family out of poverty and the precarious
nature of the jobs women in both the developing and developed worlds hold.
As the United States celebrates Labor Day today, the report's authors
emphasize that too many of the world's women are ending up in low-paid,
insecure jobs that don't keep them or their families from poverty.
Last week, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that despite economic growth, an
additional 1.1 million Americans fell into poverty during 2004. The number
of women in poverty increased for the fourth consecutive year since 2000,
reaching 14.3 million in 2004, according to an analysis of Census data
released by the Washington-based National Women's Law Center. Meanwhile
another 800,000 workers were left without health insurance.
Women's wages in the United States also continue to lag behind men's. In
2004, women who worked full-time earned 76.5 percent as much as men. The gap
would be even wider if part-time workers were included in the analysis,
since more women than men hold those jobs, according to the Institute for
Women's Policy Research.
The U.N. report points out that because women in most societies are still
expected to combine paid employment with unpaid caretaking of family
members, they frequently take flexible, low-paying jobs, often in the
informal sector.
Women's unpaid work in the home also often channels them into insecure and
frequently unregulated occupations such as domestic work, child care and
garment manufacturing work. As a result, women face a greater risk of
poverty than men despite participating in the work force.
Focusing on Quality of Work
The report's authors argue that while many efforts to alleviate poverty
promote the entry of more women into the work force, it is perhaps more
important to focus on exactly what kind of work women are finding and
address the gender inequality women experience through work.
"Globalization has created more jobs, some of them preferable to more
traditional opportunities such as domestic work, but it has also created new
forms of informal and insecure employment," says Martha Chen, one of the
U.N. report's authors and coordinator of Women in Informal Employment:
Globalizing and Organizing, a global research policy network at Harvard
University.
She adds that companies often seek out female workers because they perceive
them to be a source of cheap, unskilled labor, more docile and less
organized than men.
Marked by small or unregistered enterprises, lower wages and work agreements
that lack formal contracts or social protections such as Social Security,
paid leave and health benefits, informal employment carries a greater risk
of poverty than formal jobs with stable incomes and protections.
Official economic data on informal work is still hard to come by, but
international organizations in recent years have started to pay more
attention to the role that sector plays in development. Chen, however, says
that women's role in the informal economy has not received much attention.
Without accurate information on the costs and benefits of women's work in
the informal economy, Chen argues that economic policies will be uninformed
and misguided, undermining women's economic security.
Female Work Force Grows
Between 1993 and 2003 the number of women in paid employment around the
world increased by 200 million. Women represent 40 percent of the labor
force in East and Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the
developed world.
Women still make up a third or less of the labor force in North Africa,
Western Asia, and Southern Asia, as well as Central America.
Latin America has seen the largest increase in women's labor participation,
from little more than 25 percent in 1980 to 33 percent in Central America
and almost 40 percent in South America by 1997.
The U.N. report questions whether the increased numbers of women in the
labor force translates into women being better off.
Workforce statistics, say the authors, fail to measure the kind of work
women engage in, what they earn and what benefits they receive. Policies
that focus on economic growth, they say, don't necessarily create jobs that
will help lift people out of poverty.
The authors argue that what workers need--particularly low-wage female
workers--are policies to help people in the informal economy, which has been
growing in both the developed and developing worlds. In developing countries
between 50 percent and 80 percent of nonagricultural employment is informal.
When farming work is included, that figure can be as high as 93 percent.
As an example of salutary policy, the authors herald a 2003 labor law in
Ghana that provides temporary and casual workers with the same medical
benefits of permanent workers and requires any temporary worker who has
worked for the same employer for more than six months to be treated as a
permanent worker.
Working for Low Pay and Less Security
Sixty percent or more of women in the developing world who work outside of
the agriculture sector are concentrated in the informal economy, where jobs
such as domestic work, street trading and sub-contracted production of
consumer goods tend to be low-paying and lacking in security, benefits and
legal protections, the report found.
Women in the developed world also dominate part-time or temporary
jobs--often doing clerical, industrial, or medical work--and receive less
income and benefits as a result.
In the United States, self-employment, part-time work, and temporary work
account for 25 percent of all employment. This informalization of employment
around the world has been attributed to companies preferring a flexible work
force to help them compete globally.
In order to cut labor costs and maintain a work force that can adapt to
fluctuations in demand, private companies are hiring workers under insecure
contracts or subcontracting work to individuals, particularly women working
at home who have to bear the brunt of production costs, such as paying for
their own sewing machines, electricity and water.
Within the informal sector there is a hierarchy as well, with employers who
run small informal enterprises and their employees earning more than
self-employed workers and workers who carry out sub-contracted work at home
for garment, textile and electronic companies. Among these, women are
disproportionately represented in the lowest-paying categories, and even
within those categories they earn less than men, further increasing their
risk of poverty.
"Whatever the causal factors, this pattern of feminization of the labor
force is not conducive to reducing poverty or enhancing equality," the U.N
report concludes.
Bojana Stoparic is a New York-based journalist who often writes about
international women's issues.
|
|
