Global Business
Globalization: What does it mean for women?
Part 2 of a two-part series
By Karl Hess
Recent history: the maquiladoras
Although the potential for positive growth for women exists in a globalized economy, the appreciable results, at least in the short term, have been largely negative.
The majority of new jobs created by the last thirty to forty years of trade liberalization between the U.S. and Mexico have been low-wage manufacturing jobs. This sort of work generally involves assembly of materials made outside the country, which are then re-imported into the material producing country almost duty-free. The big draw of this system for corporations is cheap labor: wages in Mexico are around a tenth of those in the United States.
Women compose 80 percent of the labor force in these export manufacturing zones, called maquiladoras in Mexico. Critics of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the work-in-progress Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) say that the trade agreements foster these kinds of low-paying, "sweatshop" jobs, and do not provide mechanism by which labor can voice grievances.
Most often these workers are refugees from the country, leaving the subsistence agriculture that has been a way of life for countless generations.
Needless to say, this sort of new work is unlikely to produce any lasting benefits to laborers. Since the majority of maquiladora workers are women, the growth of this sort of work may well be a way in which globalization has hurt the position of women. It is certainly no move forward.
While maquiladoras are by no means the employment situation of the majority of Mexicans, they do account for a significant percentage of the new work created by globalization. Over a 15-year period from the 80s to the mid-90s, the number of maquiladora employees swelled by about 625,000.
Labor abuses
Groups protesting globalization have been quick to criticize "sweatshop" manufacturing conditions that they claim are fostered by trade liberalization regimes such as NAFTA. Unfortunately, the criticism is well-founded.
One of NAFTA's major failures has been the absence of any mechanism to defend labor rights, which led to much mistreatment of workers. Many were fired for trying to organize unions; others claimed sexual harassment and other abuses. The ugly working conditions of many assembly centers throughout the developing world have been well-documented.
In addition, if the failures of globalization in Mexico are any indicator of what will happen in the rest of the developing world, we can expect more crimes against women. In Ciudad Juarez, a town on the U.S.-Mexico border with around six hundred maquiladora employees, nearly two hundred women between the ages of thirteen and twenty have been killed over a span of six years.
These acts were perpetrated as the young women traveled between factory jobs and shantytown homes on the outskirts of the city. Although several arrests were made, the killings continued. Blame fell on the local authorities as well as companies such as Honeywell that employed the women, who were seen as failing, respectively, to provide adequate protection for citizens, and as exploiting underage workers, since many of the victims were under the legal working age of sixteen.
Women in the global slave trade
Perhaps the most disheartening crisis faced by women in the developing world is slavery, particularly forced prostitution. Globalization complicated this problem by making prostitution a transnational business. In addition to this, the desire to emigrate to wealthier nations often turns into a means by which women are forced into prostitution.
This sort of slavery has existed for a lot longer than efforts to globalize the world economy. However, the processes involved in globalization (such as fast international travel) have created an illicit "sex tourism" industry, and also made it possible to exploit women desperate to emigrate to the West.
Another version of this same problem is indentured servitude in sweatshops instead of brothels, in exchange for being smuggled into the West. In both cases women become slaves, either through mounting debt incurred by the cost of transportation, or kidnapping, as was reported recently in Britain.
It is unclear whether globalization has worsened something that has been a problem for centuries. Of course, prostitution is the oldest profession, and sex-slavery has a long history in Southeast Asia and Central and Eastern Europe, where most are from now. At the very least, the de facto slave trade in women and children has been increasing over the last several years.
Conclusions
What the worst-case scenarios above show is that for the majority of women who are extremely poor, the positive effects of globalization are slow in coming, while negative affects are quickly appreciable. Fifty percent of the world still follows a lifestyle of subsistence agriculture, and having this lifestyle overturned in a generation can be extremely traumatic.
However, it must be said that if the majority of us are horrified to read about sweatshops or forced prostitution, it is likely that our reaction is not against globalization per se but against the gross poverty the vast majority of the world lives with every day. A certain level of affluence protects a person from the kind of mistreatment described above.
Although our affluence is not always readily apparent to us, it is partly responsible for the relative stability of our society. Although there may be inequality in the U.S., there is for most people, no desperate want of material necessities, and so we are able to keep things like sweatshops out of sight, out of mind.
At this level, what conservatives say in favor of globalization is true. If industrialization in the United States is responsible for our relatively high standard of living, then in the long run women throughout the developing world stand to benefit from globalization.
Some women, not mired in abject poverty, will stand to benefit in ways unheard of prior to globalization. And it may be that, according to the current understanding of the history of industrialization in the West, the poverty of sweatshops is just a stopping point on the way to a still imperfect, but much better state of affairs, characterized by the rule of law, democracy, and modern medicine.
However, the gross inequalities of the present system continue to raise questions about this interpretation of history. It seems almost as likely that the present course of globalization only perpetuates historical divisions and inequality.
While opening world markets is necessary and inevitable, it is also important that vigorous debate of present policies allow for mobility upward in what seems to be a rigid system of hierarchy in the globalized world.
Sources consulted:
- Brouthers, Lance Eliot. "Maquiladoras: entrepreneurial experimentation to global competitiveness," Business Horizons, March-April 1999. http://www.findarticles.com/cf_dls/m1038/3_42/54370814
- "Eradicating Feminized Poverty," UNIFEM website. http://www.unifem.undp.org/ec_pov.htm
- Frieden, Terry. "U.S. task force will combat trafficking in humans," CNN.com/LAWCENTER, March 27, 2001. http://www.cnn.com/2001/LAW/03/27/human.trafficking/index.html.
- "Globalization, the multilateral agreement on investment, and the increasing economic marginalization of women." http://www.cs.ubc.ca/spider/fuller/apec_alert/articles/mai.html
- Mears, Rona R. "The Impact of Globalization on Women and Work in the Americas." http://www.hayboo.com/briefing/mears1.htm
- "A much-needed globalization debate," Edmonton Journal, A8, August 26, 2001.
- "The NAFTA Scam," http://www.uniteunion.org/reclaim/politicalarchive/nafta/nafta.html.
- Platt, Leah. "Regulating the Global Brothel," The American Prospect, Vol. 12, Iss. 12, July 3-16, 2001. http://www.theamericanprospect.com/print/V12/12/platt-1.html
- "Sex slavery: The growing trade," CNN.com/WORLD, March 8, 2001. http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/03/08/women.trafficking/index.html
- "Unsolved serial killings spark anger in Mexican factory town," CNN.com, June 4, 1999. http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/americas/9906/04/mexico.killings/index.html
- "Who are the Anti-globalists?" Talk of the Nation, July 10, 2001. (audio)
- Wolfensohn, James D. "The challenges of globalization: the role of the world bank," April 2, 2001. http://www.worldbank.org/html/extdr/extme/jdwsp040201a-en.htm
- "Women and Trade," UNIFEM website. http://www.unifem.undp.org/ec_trad.htm
Karl Hess is an editorial intern for DiversityCentral.com.
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