Liberating Economics: Feminist Perspectives on Families, Work, and Globalization

Chapter 6. Globalization Is a Feminist Issue

6. Globalization Is a Feminist Issue The Barbie dolls, soccer balls, and stuffed animals that ‹ll toy store shelves in the United States and Europe were probably manufactured in other, less prosperous countries. In fact, many of the clothes, shoes, appliances, and housewares sold in the United States and Europe are produced by workers in the global South—Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America— speci‹cally for export to the rich industrialized countries. This is one of the most visible manifestations of economic globalization. Workers on this global assembly line,1 the majority of whom are women, are subject to hazardous working conditions, poor pay, and long hours. Understanding the link between globalization and gender requires a vision of the process that is multifaceted and goes far beyond export production to its effects on cultures , identities, and politics. Even so, these aspects of change are rooted in the growing integration of national economies as people, goods, machines, and ‹nancial capital ›ow across national borders. Relations of trade and exchange have long had signi‹cant international dimensions. Venetian merchants, for example, facilitated trade between Europe and the Middle East during the Crusades. Marco Polo’s travels led to trade with China, and Dutch merchants plied their wares between northern Europe, Indonesia, and Africa. In 1600 Queen Elizabeth granted a monopoly charter to the English East India Company to secure the rights of English merchants to exploit India. These examples highlight the long global history of commerce. But international trade today differs in both qualitative and quantitative ways from the global trading of earlier eras. Electronic technologies make global communications instantaneous, and new methods of handling cargo (containerization) have drastically reduced transportation costs. As a result, transnational corporations are now able to relocate their manufacturing operations to parts of the world characterized by low wages and business-friendly political regimes. The geographic mobility of capital 95 limits the ability of national governments to protect their citizens and undermines the power of workers to organize for better working conditions . At the same time, an increasingly conservative political rhetoric has emerged that champions free markets and rationalizes the dismantling of progressive labor legislation, health and safety standards, environmental protections, and social welfare programs. Globalization creates winners and losers, exacerbating relations of dependency and exploitation. Critics of globalization argue that unfettered global trade causes greater inequality within and between nations. Income, wealth, health, and education are concentrated into fewer hands, while an ever larger share of the world’s population is consigned to poverty, disease, and illiteracy. The proponents of free trade argue that narrowly circumscribed government regulation, combined with the free mobility of capital, will, in the long run, bene‹t everyone everywhere. In this view, free markets have the potential to bring prosperity, via Western-style economic growth, to the impoverished peoples of the world. As feminist economists we are suspicious of the claim that national and transnational markets will meet everyone’s social needs. As demonstrated in earlier chapters, markets often fail to value caring labor, they do not eliminate discrimination, and they do not, on their own, reduce poverty or unemployment. Globalization is a feminist issue precisely because it plays a central role shaping labor markets by reinforcing the status quo gender division of labor and undermining the ability of states to enact progressive social policies. What’s in a Name? The terminology used in any taxonomy of the world’s peoples and economies reveals quite a bit about the various ways of understanding global hierarchy and privilege.2 The term the Third World has its origins in the Cold War. In this taxonomy, the capitalist economies of the industrialized world were designated the First World, while the centrally planned economies of the Soviet Union and its satellites were designated the Second World. To assert their independence from the superpowers, leaders of countries in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Latin America formed an alliance they named the Third World. Initially this alliance re›ected their common interests stemming in a shared agenda for economic development. But by the end of the 1980s the Third World nations were more different than alike so that today the name no longer designates a cohesive geographical group.3 Liberating Economics 96 The terms center and periphery are similar to the terms First World and Third World. This classi‹cation was created by Marxist development economists to highlight the relationships...