index of 2005 conference papers

Neo-Liberal Globalization in the Philippines:
Its Impact on Filipino Women and Their Forms of Resistance

Ligaya Lindio-McGovern
Indiana University, USA

In the current debate on globalization some view it as a neutral process: the increasing integration of the world through the expansion of technological development that turns the world into a global village. Others, however, define globalization with a more critical stance: “the integration of the economies of the whole world into the liberal capitalist market economy controlled by the Group of Seven” (Mananzan, 1999:2). This definition with a more critical stance recognizes the controlling power of Japan, the U.S.A, France, Germany, Great Britain, Canada, Italy (the G-7) in the globalization process to make it more to their benefit. Hence, it is not a neutral process. The Philippines provides a good case in point that globalization is not a neutral process – it hurts the poor most, especially women, and that it is being contested by those who are injured by it. In this paper I examine the impact of the globalization process in the Philippines on women and what they are doing to resist it.

Main Features of Globalization in the Philippines

Neoliberal globalization in the Philippines has the following interlocking essential features that have detrimental impact on women.

Liberalization

This involves the creation of a borderless economy through dismantling of controls on the flow of goods, services, and capital, allowing unrestricted entry of foreign investments. It eliminates protective tariffs, and eases restrictions to trade, giving a free-play to the market. Entry of goods from other countries is unrestricted---justified by the notion that this is good because consumers will have multiple choices and the ensuing competition will reduce prices. But this destroys local industries, creating import dependency for basic needs and ultimately resulting in food insecurity. Food insecurity hurts most poor pregnant women and children whose special nutritional needs are unmet.

Deregulation

This removes state control on the economy, giving free rein to market forces in the organization of economic activities --- making profit the highest value, sacrificing consumer and labor rights, social and ethical concerns. It lifts price control systems that most intensely hurt the poor, especially women. Since it is women who are generally the ones who attend to the daily needs of the family, they are the ones who first experience the social psychological impact of price increase of food and other basic daily needs for their families (Lindio-McGovern, 1997).

Privatization

This puts all productive activities, including social services, into private hands or capital, in the Philippine case, primarily in foreign hands. This process entrenches foreign control of Philippine political economy, especially by transnational corporations. It eliminates public subsidy on social services and public sector corporations as they get sold to the private sector. Privatization opens markets for profit-making for private capital.

One sphere of privatization in the Philippines that is softly but surely killing the poor, especially women and children is the privatization of health care according to the dictates of the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Under the current government, the Health Sector Reform Agenda and Executive Order 102 diminished the role of the Philippine government in the provision of health care services (HEAD, 2001:2). Consequently, 38 public hospitals intend to privatize by 2010 (Ibid, p.9). The privatization of health care will deny affordable and accessible basic health services to the poor which currently comprise approximately 59% of the Philippine population. Increasingly the government has decreased its budget allocation for government hospitals where the poor go. For example, from 1999-2001 there has been an accumulated decrease in hospital budget for 10 government hospitals in MetroManila amounting to more than 307 million pesos (HEAD, 2001:21). The Philippine Constitution requires for 5% of GNP to be allocated for heath care services, but in a span of 15 years GNP allocation averaged only less than 1% (.6%). Ultimately, the main beneficiaries of health care privatization would be the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, while the poor women and children who have special health care needs due to their lifecycles will be most detrimentally affected.

Finance Capitalism

Financial speculation is given priority over human needs – increasing speculative investment more than productive investments that can generate manufacturing employment. Consider this: “In 1976, 80% of all international transactions involved the buying and selling of goods and services. By 1997 only 2.5% of international transactions involved the buying and selling of goods and services. 97.5% were for speculation” (EILER,Inc., 2000:7-8, citing ILRIG 1998). In the Philippine experience, this is reflected in the following data: “ In 1993, 66% of investment inflow was portfolio. In 1994, its share tototal foreign investment reached 70%, 75% in 1995 and 86% in 1996. During the first quarter of 1997, immediately before the Philippines suffered a financial crisis, portfolio investment 70% of total invest inflow. In the overall, 85% of portfolio investment was foreign. The leading investor in the Philippines is still the US (33%), but it has the least share of direct investment (productive investment) at 6%” (Villegas, 2000:47). Financial capitalism also involves opening the Philippine financial and banking systems to greater foreign control. This resulted in mergers and consolidations that displaced thousands of male and female workers (approximately 7,000 bank workers), while the small local corporate elite and foreign investors benefited more from it (Villegas, 2000:43,46).

Labor Flexibilization

This can be viewed as “the micro-economic or firm-level aspect of the ongoing economic restructuring of the world economy” that goes hand in hand with the macro-level liberalization, deregulation, and privatization features of neoliberal globalization. “Labor flexibilization pertains to the relatively recent innovations in work organization and employment schemes associated with the adoption of new production technologies and/or human resource management designed to extract greater profits prompted by increasing global competition.” (IELER, Inc., 2000:1). These schemes to maximize profit includes labor-only-contracting, subcontracting, hiring of casuals and contractuals, the hiring of apprentices --- so that in the Philippines labor flexibilization is used synonymously with contractualization or casualization of labor. While labor flexibilization may garner superprofits for the big capitalists, it increases the exploitation of workers and poses obstacles to their militant unionization, and raises the rate of unemployment and underemployment. Due to contractualization, 60,000 regular workers lost their jobs in 1996, another 62,736 in 1997, and yet another 129,965 in 1998 and an average of 4, 000 workers lost their jobs daily since 1997 (Villegas, 2000:54, citing Department of Labor and Unemployment estimates). Currently, almost 10 million Filipinos, approximately 1/3 of the entire labor force are unemployed and actively seeking jobs (Beltran, 20001:6). The unemployment rate of the Philippines , which was 11% as of 1997, was the highest compared to Thailand ’s 5,5%, Malaysia ’s 5.3%, South Korea ’s 6%, and Indonesia ’s 8% (Villegas, 2000:54, citing Newsweek, “Asia’s Job Crisis”, August 3, 1998, p.14)

Greater trends of labor contractualization is more likely to be found in foreign owned or affiliated firms and those which are export-oriented. For instance, LAWS Textle that exports shirts mainly to the US, with JC Penny as one of its major clients, has 1, 700 contractuals who are contracted for only three months at a time, but only 390 regular workers. In Export Processing Zones or Special Economic Zones, subcontracting and contratualization are mechanisms of TNCs to maximize profit. For example, major international labels like Reebok, Adidas, Timex, Calvin Klein, Fujitsu, and Intel have a large share of their workforce subcontracted as contractuals, majority of whom are women and youth, forced to do overtime hours in 6-7 days a week in a period of 3-4 months at a time (EILER, Inc., 2001:25-26, citing KMU (2000), Ang Mangagawa, various issues).

Contractualization also happens in the service sector. In the retail trade, a notorious example is Shoemart, the biggest department store chain in the Philippines . Of its estimated 20, 000 employees, 85% of whom are women, only 1,731 are regular workers, while the rest of its workforce are subcontracted through recruitment agencies as temporary workers for less than five months  

Labor Export

In the Philippine experience, labor export due to globalization has become a key feature as a way to deal with the foreign debt (which has reached to US$52.2 billion as of June 2000) resulting from the structural adjustment policies of the IMF and the growing unemployment that is a consequence of the key features of globalization that I have discussed above. Labor export is the leading industry in the Philippines and has become the biggest source of foreign exchange for the government’s debt servicing of an annual average of more than $5 billion (Tujan, 2001:3; Capulong, 2001:30. Labor export has led to the economic diaspora of approximately 7 million Filipinos in over 181 countries (Capulong, 2001:3), making them most vulnerable to abuse, human rights violations, labor exploitation and control.

Labor export has produced the following patterns: (a) commodification of Filipino migrant labor as it has become a source of profit-making for the Philippine government and private employment agencies in the Philippines and in the receiving countries , (b) illegal and legal trafficking of women in domestic service and in the entertainment and sex trade in the richer countries, (c) creation of an exploitable and expendable cheap labor force in the receiving countries, and (d) feminization of migrant labor---where increasingly it is Filipino women who comprise majority of export labor (61% in 1998 to 70% in 2000). Ultimately, it is then women who are carrying more the brunt of foreign debt, more commoditized, more trafficked, and are the ones who suffer the triple oppression of gender, race/ethnicity/nationality and class as migrants.

Women in domestic service work comprise the bulk of Philippine labor export. Many of these women have college degrees and a good portion have professional work experience as teachers and nurses, thus they experience a downward occupational mobility in the labor-receiving countries. This nuances the brain drain from the Philippines since what we find is a “brain waste”. While the Philippine society has invested in the human capital development of these women, their educational training is wasted or under-utilized in the labor-receiving countries. Thus, these women and the Philippine government are made to subsidize the privatization of social reproductive labor or domestic carework in the richer labor-receiving countries. Further, the concentration of Filipino female export labor in domestic service work reinforces labor segmentation in the host countries based on gender, race/ethnicity, and class-- ---consequently entrenching a transnational division of female labor where low-wage, low-prestige domestic work is generally assigned to migrant women from poorer countries. Undocumented migrant domestic workers are in worse situation since they are more vulnerable to severe exploitation. --- further fortifying this transnational division of female labor that allows women and men in the receiving households to engage in the formal labor force with more prestige and better pay and working conditions. Thus, the globalization of domestic service work therefore perpetuates the subordinate status of Filipino women in the global political economy.

Women who are sexually trafficked are the most exploited since their whole being are totally controlled as their bodies are commodified for profit in the sex industry in richer countries, like in Japan , Germany , and Netherlands . Several actors participate in the commodification of their bodies: the state, the male consumers, the recruitment agencies, and the capitalists of the sex industry.

Labor export has tremendous social costs that affect women more adversely than men. Since majority of export labor are women in domestic work, they are the ones who suffer more the loneliness of working in a foreign household, the difficulties of adjustment in a foreign culture, and gender-race-class discrimination in the labor receiving country, and the pain of separation from family and children they leave behind with their spouses and/or other relatives.

Ironically, labor export has not mitigated unemployment in the Philippines since foreign exchange earnings through remittances is not invested in employment-generating projects, but most of it goes to debt servicing: about 87% (about US$5.9 billion) of the US$6.79 billion remittances in 1999 went to debt servicing (Episcopal Commission for the Pastoral Care of Migrant and Itinerant People, p. 4). While deployment of export labor has consistently increased from 660,122 in 1996 to 747, 696 in 1997, to 755,684 in 1999, to 841,628 in 2000 (Bultron, 2001:2), reaching approximately 2,300 workers per day in the 2001, unemployment rate has increased from 9.8% in 1999, 11.2% in 2000, and 12.2% in 2001 (Dizon, 2001:5). Meanwhile the Philippine government garners P21.2 million /day from the 2000 overseas contract workers deployed daily through pre-departure fees it charges (McGovern, 2001). On the global scale, financial earnings from international migration amounted to approximately US$71.1 billion in 1990, second to trade in crude oil; in several Asian countries (the Philippines, Pakistan, India, Sri-Lanka, Bangladesh) the export of people has displaced export of commodities as major source of foreign exchange revenue (Bultron, 2001:2).

Women’sResistance to Globalization

At the homefront the women’s resistance to globalization is being led by GABRIELA, the militant national coalition of women’s organization in the Philippines . GABRIELA has facilitated the organization of grassroots women. It has conducted consciousness-raising on the impact of globalization on Filipino women. One of its major political campaign over the past two decades is the Purple Rose Campaign ---an international camapaign against the sex trafficking of Filipino women and children. One of the major accomplishments of this campaign is the passing of a legislation that illegalizes sex trafficking in the Philippines . This is a historical milestone because with the passing of this law, the movement against sex-trafficking now has a legal frame that they can invoke upon, thus a legal back-up for the Purple Rose Campaign.

GABRIELA works in alliance with other organizations in combating some of the tenets of globalization, like the campaign against the privatization of water in the Philippines that will have greater impact on women’s and children’s health.

GABRIELA has a research arm, the Women’s Resource Center , that has conducted grassroots oriented research on issues related to globalization For example, it has conducted a study on the social cost of the migration of women and has a pamphlet of it for popular education and consciousness-raising. The social costs of labor export, such as family dislocation, break-up and separation, is something that the government hardly talks about when it dubs the overseas workers as “modern day heroes” and continues to promote labor export as a long-term development policy.

Contrary to the hyper-globalist notion that globalization withers away the state, GABRIELA targets the state in its politics of resistance. It has denounced and participated in the nationwide campaign against the growing militarization in the Philippines to contain progressive and radical groups who oppose the current pattern of globalization in the Philippines . One significant contribution that GABRIELA has accomplished in the long-term process of changing the Philippine state is the formation of a Women’s Party which has been able to have GABRIELA’s candidates elected into Congress, such as Representative Liza Largosa Masa, who had been instrumental in legislating against sex trafficking of Filipino women and children in the sex trade and around U.S. military bases.

Overseas, Migrante International plays a significant role in facilitating organized resistance to globalization among migrants. It has established chapters in various countries. In the areas where I conducted fieldwork domestic workers have formed organizations that are linked to Migrante International and participate in its international Congress, its highest policy-making body that meets every three years, where they discuss issues, share their experiences of resistance, and plan a program of action.

A major issue in the discourses of Migrante International is the concept f commodification of migrant/export labor. This was for example the theme in the International Migrants Conference held in Manila in 2001 that Migrante International convened with other NGOs concerned about migrants’ rights. The concept also runs through their discourses in the United Filipinos in Hong Kong composed mostly of

Filipino domestic workers

Migrante International targets the state, both the Philippine government and the labor-receiving governments in their politics and strategies of resistance. Since their actions are policy-oriented it confronts the state in their demands for policy changes of neo-liberal globalization.

Both Migrante International and GABRIELA believe and propagate the idea that the more fundamental response to the problems of poverty and unemployment that affect women, men, and children is to assert economic self-determination, genuine land reform that will redistribute land to the tiller, national industrialization that will create jobs in the Philippines, not labor export that commodifies migrant labor more for the benefit of the richer labor-receiving countries and reinforces the subordinate position of the Philippines in the global political economy. This change agenda is persistently being submerged by neoliberal globalization. However, the broad resistance movement in the Philippines of which Migrante International and GABRIELA are linked has also persistently maintained its resistance both on the national and international levels.

index of 2005 conference papers