From DEBRA@OLN.comlink.apc.orgTue Sep 12 08:23:53 1995 Date: Sat, 09 Sep 1995 08:25:00 +0100 From: Debra Guzman Reply to: beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org To: beijing95-l@netcom.com, beijing-conf@tristram.edc.org Subject: WCW: Issue of Globalization [The following text is in the "ISO-8859-1" character set] [Your display is set for the "US-ASCII" character set] [Some characters may be displayed incorrectly] ## Original in: /HRNET/WOMEN ## author : hercilia@wcw.apc.org ## date : 03.09.95 -------------------------------------------------------------------- Globalization: an intense political issue By Maria Elena Hurtado The globalization of the international economy, which is tying countries through trade, communications, and global finance, is benefiting only a small minority. That was the conclusion of three of the four speakers at the plenary on Globalization of the Economy. The audience seemed to agree. One of the longest applause was when Helen O'Connell of Women in Development Europe (WIDE) told the full packed auditorium that despite all the hype about the benefits of globalization, "many are in a worse position economically and politically than before". With every single country encouraged to join the global rat race, globalization had become an "intensely political issue". It started with colonization. After independence it went on with the push for modernization. Then in the 1980s, it took a quantum leap with the debt crisis when countries went into an export drive in order to repay their debts. The Uruguay Agreement on the GATT, which has increased the concentration of power in the hands of transnational companies which are now into finance, production, transport, credit and communication, proved to be the "icing on the global cake". Hundreds of thousands of women all over the world are working for the same company, but not for the same wages. A computer operator in the Philippines is paid 12 times less, on the average, than in Europe. The problems of globalization, according to O'Connell are: * countries could not choose their road to development; * the ethos of the global economy is to accumulate wealth, not to distribute wealth;. * poverty is increasing all over the world, which entrenches existing inequalities of race, gender, groups within and between countries. The challenge for women, O'Connell told the plenary, was for organized women to fight for the sharing of wealth and the democratization of the international economic institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Duan Cunhua of the Sumster Group Corporation of China was more upbeat about the benefits to women from globalization. Chinese women working in township enterprises earn two to three times than the average worker, she said. The number of women workers had grown dramatically in South East Asia in the last few years, thanks to the export successes of those economies. She recognized, however, that "the level of development of the productive forces did not determine the number of women in employmentO. Many countries were restructuring their industries as a result of globalization. A tiny percentage of women had made it to top management. The intellectual development of women was insufficient and retraining was needed. Esther Ocloo, a Kenyan woman entrepreneur and founder of the Sustainable End of Hunger Foundation, spoke about how poverty in Africa had increased due to the global economic recession and as a result of structural adjustment programs linked to Africa's debt crisis. To survive, many men were turning to the informal sector, displacing women who could no longer compete. At the same time, due to the globalization of communications in urban areas, parents were losing control of their children. Technology, though welcome, was displacing women from traditional work such as manual harvesting. Occlo pleaded for more funds from UN agencies such as the UN Fund for Women so that NGOs could help African women cope with the economic crisis. Finally, Marcia Rivera from ECLAC, a federation of 100 research institutes in Latin America and the Caribbean, spoke about the contradictory signs involved in globalization. Technological changes such as computing, telecommunications, new materials and genetic engineering was leading to increasingly rapid changes and to ethical dilemmas, she said. Workers were increasingly unprotected as a result of market changes which required 'flexibility' of the labor force. All these were happening with less and less government regulations and no international controls on transnational power. Rivera advised women to use the new technologies for their own ends, demand discussions in Parliament on anti-monopoly legislation, liaise with trade unions to stop the erosion of workers' benefits, and get women into power so that they can argue for a more human and equitable development model.