Precarious Classes, Neo-liberal Globalization
and Older Women
Targ, Harry, Dena Targ and David Cormier
Purdue University and West Virginia University
The Rise of Neo-liberal Globalization
With the collapse of socialism, what is called neo-liberal globalization has expanded dramatically. “Neo-liberal” refers to a set of economic policies that are derived from the vision of Adam Smith and David Ricardo. These policies include limiting state involvement in economic life; promoting “markets;” reducing impediments to the global penetration of each and every country by capitalism (particularly in production, investment, trade, and finance); and finally privatizing the provision of all goods and services needed to maintain human existence. Globalization refers to a process of dramatically increasing cross-national interactions between peoples, particularly in trade, production, cultural exchange, and communication. The policies and the process are closely related.
Neo-liberalism as an ideology influences public policy today in nearly every state, whether industrial-capitalist, post-socialist, or post-colonial. Every powerful global institution--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the association of powerful states known as the G7 countries--promotes neo-liberal policies. The most powerful instrument that global institutions have used over the years, even preceding the collapse of the socialist bloc, to induce countries to embrace the neo-liberal policy agenda is debt. Countries began borrowing billions of dollars in the 1970s due to dramatic increases in the price of oil. Now the world’s nations owe banks trillions of dollars. Each loan or each decision to reschedule a debt comes with demands for economic “reform.” In other words, banks, multinational corporations, and wealthy capitalist states force the world’s peoples to accept the neo-liberal medicine.
Advocates of neo-liberalism claim that the policies they recommend will, in the long run, yield economic development, rising living standards, and political democratization. For neo-liberals, the expansion of capitalist penetration helps needy countries grow. To the extent that globalization increases interactions of all kinds across sovereign borders, economic development will occur. “Global celebrants” believe that neo-liberal globalization will bring humanity to a new level of social and economic well- being.
Precarious Classes and Social Exclusion
Despite the prevailing view that neo-liberal globalization is a blessing for humankind, compelling evidence suggests that many peoples have not experienced economic advancement over the last forty years. In fact, some data suggest that economic marginalization, economic inequality, economic stagnation, and insufficient health care and education, have all increased over time. Sectors of the global population-workers, indigenous people, people of color, women and particular sub-groups of these sectors, such as the elderly, have not been beneficiaries of the changing global economy.
For example, in 1960 the gap between the top fifth of income earners and the bottom fifth was 30 to one. By 1997, the gap was 74 to one. Between 70 to 80 countries in 2002 had income per capita below that of ten or thirty years ago. (Black, 2002, p. 54).
While scholars and pundits are debating whether income and wealth inequality has increased or not, there seems to be less debate about the absolute measures of poverty
in the world. For example, the World Bank estimates that 1.3 billion people (of some 6 billion global residents) live on less than one dollar a day and nearly three billion live on less than two dollars a day. The United Nations Development Fund found that the top one percent of income earners has more wealth than the bottom 57 percent. Parallel to the paucity of income are a variety of other indicators of poverty. More than 840 million people are malnourished. Twelve million people die each year for lack of access to water while 1.1 billion lack access to clean water and 2.4 billion people lack public sanitation (Seabrook, 24). The International Labor Organization (ILO, 2004) estimates that nearly 2 billion workers, that is the working poor, meet World Bank criteria for poverty (earning less than $2 a day) or extreme poverty (less than $1 a day).
Samir Amin (2003) has introduced the concept of the “precarious classes” to describe what he believes to be the growing percentage of the world’s population that is becoming economically marginal. He estimates that of three billion peasants, only 20 million of them are necessary to produce the food needs of the planet. About 1.5 billion peasants produce food with nominal technologies to satisfy basic food needs. And finally, nearly 1.5 billion peasants live under impoverished conditions. These “no tech” farmers barely grow enough to feed themselves and their families, with little or nothing left for sale in markets. This latter group of peasants is truly precarious.
As to urban workers, Amin indicates that 1.5 billion of the remaining 3 billion people who live in cities are marginalized. These urban workers, because of outsourcing, contract labor, and other production schemes of global corporations, have become casual labor. Amin concludes that at least 3 billion peasants and workers, half of the world’s population, experience the depths of economic marginalization and poverty.
Munck (2005) elaborates on the concept “social exclusion,” which parallels Amin’s notion of “precariousness.” He suggests that the concept of exclusion was developed in the 1990s in Europe to address the multi-dimensional character of poverty. It is a holistic and relational concept that incorporates the economic, social, political, and cultural ways in which some groups are marginalized in relation to others. Social exclusion is defined by Munck as “all the ways people are excluded from the necessities of life.”
Women and the Precarious Classes
Amin paints a picture of a vast sea of humanity increasingly marginalized by global economic and political processes. Munck suggests that precariousness, or exclusion, is a multi-dimensional concept that includes social, political and cultural as well as economic relations. For purposes of strategy and action, as well as analysis, it is important to disaggregate precariousness and social exclusion to better grasp their significance for categories of people based on shared experiences and relations to economic and political power. Gender and aging, two critical categories, and their intersection, are addressed below (future research by Cormier and H. Targ will address the connections between race, neo-liberal globalization and precariousness).
Various indicators suggest that women’s experience of the global political economy is even more negative than that of men. For example, the International Labor Organization estimates that seventy percent of the world’s 1.3 billion poor people
who live on less than $1 a day are women. Women spend twice as much time as men on unpaid work. Women make up 60 to 90 percent of all part-time workers. They earn a third less than men. Women workers are more likely than men to be in the informal sector: underpaid, unregulated, with no benefits, and no rights.
In order to assess the impacts of neo-liberal globalization on women, Alexandra Spieldoch (2004), with the Center of Concern and coordinator of the International Trade and Gender Network, explored the effects of “free trade,” on women. The North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA which went into effect in 1994 has cost U.S. and Canadian workers jobs and has been associated with declining real wages in all three affiliated countries ( United States , Canada , Mexico ). Seventy percent of the workers in so-called Maquiladora plants along the Mexican side of the U.S. border are women. Working conditions in many such plants are deemed unsafe and wages are low. In addition, women remain the primary caregivers within their nuclear and extended families despite the fact that they must work longer hours to earn the same wages as men.
Spieldoch concludes: “this preliminary set of statistics shows that the NAFTA model based on trade, finance, and investment liberalization, in line with ongoing
privatization and deregulation policy shifts, is having a negative impact on many women and their families’ livelihoods.”
The Global Demographics of Aging
The Report of the Second World Assembly on Aging identified what it called “a revolution in longevity” in the twentieth century. From 1950 to 2000, life expectancy around the globe increased by 20 years, and longevity is expected to increase by another 10 years by 2050. At the dawn of the new century there were 600 million people over 60 and it is projected that that figure will rise to two billion by 2050. In the Global South the percentage of the population over 60 will increase from 8 to 15 percent in Asia and Latin America between 1998 and 2025. In Europe and North America the percentage of those over 60 will rise from 20 to 28 percent and 16 to 26 percent respectively. Only Africa will experience marginal increases in the percentage of older people because the HIV/AIDS epidemic is ravaging younger cohorts. And the report indicates that “the remarkable demographic transition under way will result in the old and the young representing an equal share of the world’s population by mid-century” (Second World Assembly on Aging, 2002, p.1).
There are a number of additional factors of relevance to older women. In developed countries aging populations are more likely to be found in cities whereas in developing countries older people are in rural areas. While aging women outnumber men all across the globe, the ratio of women to men is larger in developed countries (100 women to 71 men) than in developing countries (100 to 88). However, the report notes: “Older women outnumber older men, increasingly so as age increases. The situation of older women everywhere must be a priority for policy action. Recognizing the differential impact of ageing on women and men is integral to ensuring full equality between women and men and to the development of effective and efficient measures to address the issue….It is essential to integrate the evolving process of global ageing within the larger process of development.”
Precariousness and Exclusion: Older Women
Despite the admonition from the World Assembly, research and advocacy about issues relating to globalization and its effects on women have tended to focus on young women at the point of production and reproduction. Insufficient attention has been given to older women who bear particular burdens with respect to their economic and family situations. To quote the ILO: “certain categories of women are especially vulnerable to inequalities in the labour market: rural women, those working in the informal sector, migrant women, the young, the older, and the disabled….Older women face continued discrimination in the labour market and often have to assume caregiving responsibilities within their families in addition to their work outside the home.” Further underscoring this omission, the Older Women’s Caucus at the Beijing +5CSW Preparatory Conference identified the “feminization of poverty” and “invisibility” as the two major themes they wanted to raise.
Because women comprise a majority of the older population worldwide, the issues confronting the elderly are today, and will continue to be, in large part older women’s issues (Kinsella and Phillips, 2005, pp.23 and 25). Three major problem areas confronting older women are economic exclusion, caregiving issues, and political barriers. They are prevented in numerous ways from earning a living wage and lack adequate retirement benefits and other safety nets; they are intensively involved in caregiving for family members of older and younger generations and lack caregivers for themselves, and face barriers to their involvement in standard and oppositional political participation.
Women’s difficult status in old age is the cumulative result of their situations throughout the life course. With regard to economic status, lack of education, family responsibilities, and discrimination, force women to work in the informal sector (including subsistence agriculture, paid housework, unpaid family caregiving, and unregistered and/or household enterprises) which provides no retirement benefits, or if they are employed in the formal sector, their employment is often intermittent due to family involvement at different stages of the life course, reducing if not eliminating benefits.(ILO) Many women rely on the retirement benefits of husbands and experience reduced benefits when they are widowed.
However, most married and widowed women cannot rely on husbands’ benefits. Not all non-industrialized countries have publicly-funded pensions. And even in those that fund such pensions, only a small portion of workers are covered; for example, civil servants, military personnel and those in the formal economy. (Kinsella and Phillips, 2005, p.33) And of course never-married women do not have access to benefits based on a husband’s earnings.
Because of the lack of paid work, young men in developing countries leave rural areas and go to urban areas to find work, often leaving their wives, children and parents, especially mothers, behind. On the positive side, some send money back to their families. However, in Africa these men have contracted AIDS in epidemic proportions, infected their wives when they came home for visits, and their mothers nurse them while they are dying. The mothers of the terminally ill must cope with numerous problems in including in some instances the loss of financial support from the adult child who is ill. In addition, in part as a result of the loss of economic support, studies in Zimbabwe and Uganda found that they lack access to adequate food, clothing and health care. The disease is still stigmatized causing social isolation and in some circumstances affects medical care. Furthermore, their own health is often compromised and they may experience abuse as the result of being accused of witchcraft (Kinsella and Phillips, 2005, p.23). These grandmothers then take on the responsibility of earning money and raising the children who are left.
“As AIDS has swept through Africa, it is not governments and their stretched health service, not international donors, certainly not the financial institutions, and even less the pharmaceutical companies that have held society together; it is….millions of ordinary people, most of them older women….They just do it.” (Seabrook, 2003, p.76).
In a study of Peru, Fiona Clark (1999) examined at the effects of neo-liberal globalization on older people through a gendered lens. Regarding pension reform, she pointed out that neo-liberal policies created in 1990 by President Fujimori to reduce government included a privately-funded pension program. This resulted in two pension systems, one private and one public. Both are gender-biased because they favor the formal sector. Even with two systems, coverage is low and many people, especially poor people, continue working late in life. Women often are not covered or only covered through a husband. Furthermore, a widow’s pension is less than half of what her husband had received.
As to family, Clark reports that the effects can be contradictory. Older women, especially widows, can be seen as a burden although they can help with the children and the household as younger women go to work. However, the work performed by these older women often goes unrecognized and unappreciated; it is invisible work, leading again to the women being defined as a burden.
Finally, Clark comments on the exclusion of older women from Peruvian social movements and resultant programs, either as participants or recipients. If the focus is on the elderly, the specific circumstances of older women are ignored; if the focus is on women, the specific circumstances of older women are ignored.
Conclusion
Critics of neo-liberal globalization have raised serious challenges to the view that the international economy will yield improved living conditions for much of humankind. To the contrary, data suggests that human misery in economic form continues, if not increases. Neo-liberal globalization may not be the cause of such misery but it is part of the context in which it occurs.
Globalization impacts categories of people differentially. Although older women are a substantial proportion of the precarious classes and are negatively affected by social exclusion they receive little attention from anti-globalization theorists and activists.
References
Amin, Samir, “World Poverty, Pauperization, and Capital Accumulation,” Monthly Review, October, 2003, http://www.monthlyreview.org/1003amin.htm
Black, Maggie, The No-Nonsense Guide to International Development, Verso, 2002.
Clark, Fiona, “Old Age, Gender and Marginality in Peru: Development for the Elderly , in United Nations, Ageing in a Gendered World: Women’s Issues and Identities, Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1999, pp.215-245.
International Labor Organization. Global Employment Trends, Geneva, 2004.
Kinsella, Kevin and David R. Phillips, Global Aging: The Challenge of Success, Population Reference Bureau, Washington DC, March, 2005. http://www.eldis.org/static/DOC17927.htm
Munck, Ronaldo, Globalization and Social Exclusion, Kumarian, Bloomfield, CT, 2005.
Seabrook, Jeremy, A World Growing Old, Pluto Press, London, 2003.
Second World Assembly on Ageing, Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing, 2002, United Nations, www.un.org/esa/socdev/ageing/waa/a-conf-197-9b.htm
Spieldoch, Alexandra, “NAFTA Through a Gender Lens: What “Free Trade” Pacts Mean for Women,” CounterPunch, December 30, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/spieldoch12302004.html
Thompson, Margaret, “Older Women’s Caucus: “We Are Marginalized Even Among Our Own Sisters,’” Beijing +5 Older Women’s Caucus, www.fire.or.cr/older.htm
index of 2005 Conference papers
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