By Grace Chang
"Our governments are surrendering to these multinational corporations and Western agencies. These magnates and mafias, in the name of globalization, want to exploit our workers and resources. Our real concerns are food, water, clean, sanitary conditions, health, shelter, and no exploitation. These are the human rights we want. All these governments are telling us to talk about human rights. What are they doing?"
- Labor organizer from India at 1995 Women's NGO Forum in Beijing
Both in their indebted home countries and abroad, women suffer the most from the dismantling of social programs under structural adjustment. While structural adjustment policies (SAPs) are ostensibly intended to promote efficiency and sustained economic growth in the "adjusting" country, in reality they function to exploit developing nations' economies and peoples.
Since the 1980s, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions (IFIs) based in the First World, have routinely prescribed structural adjustment policies (SAPs) to the governments of indebted countries as pre-conditions for loans. These prescriptions have included cutting government expenditures on social programs, slashing wages, liberalizing imports, opening markets to foreign investment, expanding exports, devaluing local currency and privatizing state enterprises. While SAPs are ostensibly intended to promote efficiency and sustained economic growth in the "adjusting" country, in reality they function to exploit developing nations' economies and peoples.
SAPs strike women in these nations the hardest, and render them most vulnerable both at home and in the global labor market. At the Fourth World Conference on Women and the Non-Governmental Organizations Forum in China in 1995, poor women of color from Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia spoke of increasing poverty and rapidly deteriorating nutrition, health and work conditions which have emerged for women in their countries as a result of SAPs.When wages and food subsidies are cut, women as wives and mothers adjust household budgets often at the expense of their own and their children's nutrition. As public health care and education vanishes, women suffer from lack of prenatal care and become nurses to ill family members at home, while girls are the first to be kept from school to help at home or go to work. When export-oriented agriculture is encouraged, or indeed coerced, peasant families are evicted from their lands to make room for corporate farms, and women become seasonal workers in the fields or in processing areas. Many women are forced to find work in the service industry, in manufacturing, or in home work producing garments for export.
When women take on these extra burdens and are still unable to sustain their families, many have no other viable option but to leave their families and migrate in search of work. At the NGO Forum in Beijing, Asian women organizers in particular pointed to the massive migration from their countries as a result of SAP-driven poverty. Asian women migrate by the millions each year to work as servants, service workers and sex workers in the United States, Canada, Europe, the Middle East and Japan. Not coincidentally, the demand for service workers and especially for private household caregivers and domestic workers is exploding in wealthy nations of the First World undergoing their own versions of adjustment.
In the United States, domestic forms of structural adjustment, including cutbacks in healthcare and the continued lack of subsidized child care, contribute to an expanded demand among dual-career middle-class households for workers in child care, elderly care and housekeeping. The slashing of benefits and social services under "welfare reform" helps to guarantee that this demand is met by eager migrant women workers. The dismantling of public supports in the United States in general, and the denial of benefits and services to immigrants in particular, act in tandem with structural adjustment abroad to force migrant women into low-wage labor in the United States. Migrant women workers from indebted nations are kept pliable not only by the dependence of their home countries and families on remittances, but also by stringent restrictions on immigrant access to almost all forms of assistance in the United States. Their vulnerability is further reinforced by US immigration policies, designed to recruit migrant women as contract laborers or temporary workers ineligible for the protections and rights afforded to citizens.
In the Third World, women absorb the costs of cuts in food subsidies and health care by going hungry and foregoing proper medical care. Ironically, these same women continue to take up the slack for vanishing social supports in the First World, by nursing the elderly parents and young children of their employers for extremely low wages. Thus, there is a transferral of costs from the governments of both sending and receiving countries to migrant women workers from indebted nations. In both their home and "host" countries, and for both their own and their employers' families, these women pay most dearly for "adjustment."
Grace Change is working on Gatekeeping and Housekeeping: The Politics of Women's Labor Migration. Reprinted with permission from Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire, Edited by Sonia Shah (South End Press, 1997) Call 1-800-533-8478 to order.