2003
The marketisation of social reproduction in the new service-led economy
Marina Fe B. Durano
Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN)
Policies are implemented within an institutional setting that dictates the distribution of costs and benefits. Among the challenges that we face today is the need to create a set of policy and legal instruments that will reconstruct the gender-biased institutional setting within which globalisation currently operates. The markets have generated a structure of incentives that encourages women to undertake productive activities. But we know of hardly any incentives to encourage men to take over caring responsibilities. The result is that social reproduction is being moved out of the households and into the privatised market sphere in what appears to be a move out of the frying pan and into the fire.
Introduction
Among the characteristics of the current
wave of globalisation is the rise of the service industry and the increase in
trade of services activities. Developed countries that are leading the way have
progressively become more service-led economies over the last two decades. These
economies have prized highly skill-intensive, knowledge-intensive and
technology-intensive services since these provide the highest returns and
largest added value. Meanwhile, the de-industrialised manufacturing sectors of
developed countries have increasingly moved their operations to developing
countries in the form of foreign direct investment while retaining control over
productive activities in their headquarters.
The service sector in developing
countries echoes the characteristics of the low-skilled, low-value-added nature
of their manufacturing sectors, which have declined as a result of competitive
threats from imported substitutes brought in by trade liberalisation. Thus, the
polarisation between developed and developing worlds remains and even
intensifies.
As this industrial and employment
structural shift occurs, women are unable to move up the value-added ladder
since the possession of skills, knowledge and technology continues to favour
men. Furthermore, services sectors that support social reproductive work,
such as community, social and personal services, education services, and health
services, are losing public financial support as the market is being presented
as a more efficient method of providing these services. This occurs at a time
when the stability of government budgets is constantly threatened by waves of
financial and economic crisis.
Providing care, however, must continue,
and “socially imposed altruism” is relied upon to ensure that provision occurs.
Ascribing caring roles to women puts them under the double burden of productive
and social reproductive work. The nature of the service sub-sectors where women
are heavily involved are determined by these role expectations. The sub-sectors
differ according to whether women predominantly act as consumers or act both as
consumers and producers. In the case of the latter, services are least valued as
they tend to be dichotomised between the formally regulated and the informally
regulated, with women in the informal sector being most vulnerable to crisis.
The process of trade liberalisation and
globalisation has placed a focus on the service sector, which used to be
considered non-tradable. The insistence of investment
as a way of trading services facilitates the opening of service markets to
foreign interests. When coupled with privatisation of state assets and
corporations in the sector, the marketisation of services for social
reproduction is practically guaranteed.
The rise of the service economy
Not only have negotiations over tariffs
in manufactured exports lost relevance over the recent decades, but developed
economies have also seen a shift in their industrial and employment structure
from manufacturing to services mainly because of technological advances and ever
increasing specialisation. By the mid-1990s, the share of services in the gross
domestic product of industrialised countries was around 70%. Newly
industrialised economies have services at around the 50-60% range while
developing countries are close to 40% (Kang, 2000).
Over this period there has been a
perceived decline in the price of services, particularly for transport and
communication. Jones and Kierzkowski (1990) think that this decline explains the
increased use by manufacturing firms of global production chains as a production
strategy. Thus, we find a fragmentation of production into production blocks
that are then distributed among various countries, mainly developing countries.
Certainly, the intermediate goods produced by these productions blocks
constitute much of global trade today. According to Milberg (1999), trade within
firms now represents 30-50% of the trade volume of the major industrialised
countries. This means that imported inputs are becoming increasingly important
for these countries. Much of this has been made possible by the decline in the
price of transport, which has lowered the cost of the physical movement of goods
and the decline in the price of communication, which has lowered the cost of
coordination between the headquarters and the production blocks.
With the spread of the production
process across the globe comes the need for other supporting services such as
finance, accounting and legal services to follow in the wake of fragmentation of
production. Corporations using this production strategy have to decide whether
these support services will continue to be supplied internally within the firm
or outsourced to the service market. The rise in the number of service firms
indicates that many have chosen the latter course. These services have to take
on a trans-national character in order to service their corporate clients and,
therefore, there is a push to open up service markets to these multinational
service corporations.
At the same time, the location choice of
the production blocks depends upon the availability of cheap labour—usually
female—and a set of fiscal and other economic incentives provided by the
governments of developing countries to encourage foreign direct investment.
The care economy
Fragmentation is not only happening
among production firms. Households are also experiencing a similar kind of
fragmentation; more and more socially reproductive services are being outsourced
as more and more women participate in productive activities in the market. The
rise in women’s participation in the labour force, encouraged by export-oriented
policies, cannot be understood simply as a contribution to economic growth.
However, women’s participation in production is conditional on the presence of a
replacement for neglected social reproductive work.
Social reproductive work covers those
services that have clear caring functions, which are particularly important in a
setting where there are dependants—children, elderly and the infirm. Women’s
role as primary care providers is a social imposition. Social norms on family
obligation assign to women the greater responsibility for care. Feminist
economists have sometimes referred to the provision of these services as the
“care economy”.
When women enter the workforce, the
household work that they traditionally performed must still be done. The
replacement for the working woman can take many forms. It might be timesaving
household appliances such as washing machines and dryers, laundromats or vacuum
cleaners. It might be the laundrywoman or the housekeeper, part-time cooks or
fast food delivery chains. It might be full-time nannies, babysitters on an
hourly basis, or childcare services. It might be the elder daughters, the
grandparents, or any other member of the family. The increase in hiring of
domestic services helps explain to a certain extent the informal service market,
which is mainly made up of these services. The provision of care is thus
undertaken in the following ways: through the unpaid labour of female members of
the household, through technological advances in household appliances, or
through the service market.
Outsourcing of domestic services may not
be as complex and sophisticated as the global production chains but it can and
does take on a global character. In developed countries where both female and
male labour force participation rates are very high and kinship systems are no
longer a reliable source of support, the domestic services must be bought from
the market.
Low wages in high stress situations
characterise many services provided by women, such as nursing, teaching, and
domestic care work. Rules on international migration are conveniently amended to
fill the gaps in labour supply for these sectors. The Philippines is well known
to provide domestic servants to families in Hong Kong, for example. There is
also recruitment in some Caribbean countries, to provide teachers to the US
public school system.
The occupational segregation as
discussed is echoed in female-male wage inequality. This segregation accounts
for a significant portion of the gender wage gap. And since the rise of the
service economy depends to a great extent on skills, knowledge and technology,
one can expect a widening of this gender wage gap in the future. Sassen (1998)
has already established an exacerbation of inequality in profits and earnings
within the global cities that have served as the base for service industries. An
additional stimulus to greater inequality is the increasing “casualization” of
employment in the service sector as firms have less demand for intermediate
skills and full-time employment.
The decline of publicly provided
services
Sometimes it is not very easy to
identify what we mean by publicly provided services. There are many terms:
social services, social welfare, social funds, social insurance, social safety
nets, social security, social policy, social budgets, and so on. These terms
refer to a mode of delivery but they all contain social services. Whatever we
mean by publicly provided services, the provision of services has been
threatened by budget cuts and privatisation, especially in debt-burdened
economies. Publicly provided services have been sold to private companies or now
use a voucher system or impose a form of user fee. When privatisation is coupled
with trade liberalisation, the general experience is that the burden of social
care will intensify for women, since women are the default providers of care.
Even when public services are available
some questions have to be raised regarding the nature of these services.
Infrastructure services do not meet the needs of female users. Social services
have a paternalistic approach to the provision of care. Social welfare and
insurance rely on the concept of a male breadwinner when programmes are
developed.
Services may be divided into
infrastructure services and social services. These two could not be farther
apart from each other. Both, however, are very important to women. The
difference between these two is in the manner of participation by women as
producers or as users. Infrastructure services tend to carry a male gender
association because men dominate the design, engineering and constructions
aspects while women tend to be users of these services. Water and energy
infrastructure in rural areas could help lower the time girls spend in
collecting water and firewood and thus increase the time available for
schooling, if planning and design recognised women as primary users of these
services.
A different picture is drawn with social
services where women are generally involved in both its production and use.
Rather than women being able to control and determine the nature of provision as
producers and users of social services, they have to accept that service
provision at present is paternalistic, serving only to support and reinforce the
“caregiver” roles of women. Since women are directly involved in the care of the
family, they should be the ones receiving income support or be the target of
social subsidies. Immunisation programmes, nutrition programmes, and so on, tend
to target mothers, for example. This approach can be criticised for taking an
instrumentalist view of women.
Social welfare programmes have not
adjusted to the rise of the service economy. As the labour market becomes more
informal and casual, welfare regimes based on the traditional manufacturing
employment relations become irrelevant. Not only is there a need to reorient
social welfare and insurance away from its male breadwinner bias (Elson and
Cagatay, 2000), but reorientation is also needed to include those now outside of
the regulatory scope as well as those beginning to fall outside of the
regulatory scope of public social support in line with the reorganisation of the
labour market.
This is not to say, however, that such
programmes do not help women. These are necessary and supportive of their caring
functions and help to ease their social reproductive burdens. The criticism with
these programmes involves their inability to challenge the gender norms of
caring.
Concluding remarks
Among the challenges that we face today
is the need to create a set of policy and legal instruments that will
reconstruct the gender-biased institutional setting within which globalisation
currently operates. Policymakers can no longer ignore the interactions between
economic policy and gender norms. The latter invariably dictate social behaviour
and reaction to economic policies.
Policies are implemented within an
institutional setting that dictates the distribution of the costs and benefits.
Policy instruments are chafing against rigid institutions. The policies
themselves cannot be expected to change the institutional arrangement of
property rights and care obligations because they are not created to do so. The
inconsistent results that literature on gender and trade have found are
explained by this separation of the policy instrument from its institutional
setting.
Although challenges by women and the
women’s movement to the institutional arrangements have been made, resistance
remains strong. We know that the markets have generated a structure of
incentives that encourages women to undertake productive activities. But we know
of hardly any incentives to encourage men to take over caring responsibilities.
This is a dilemma for feminist advocates
and activists. Policymakers only want to talk about policies and not about the
interaction of policies with institutions. Without serious attention paid to the
institutions, economic policy will always fail women. In the worst cases,
policies will exploit women.
Finally, while there are differing views
on the analysis of the care economy, there is agreement on the “concerns about
the future quality of life in a capitalist marketplace in which paid care
services are playing an increasingly important role” (Badgett and Folbre, 1999).
Gender-blind policies are converging to move social reproduction out of the
households and into the privatised market sphere in what appears to be a move
out of the frying pan and into the fire.
References
Diane Elson and Nilufer Cagatay. “The
social content of macroeconomic policies,” World Development, 28(7): pp.
1347-1364, 2000.
M.V. Lee Badgett and Nancy Folbre.
“Assigning care: gender norms and economic outcomes,” International Labour
Review, Vol. 138 (1999), No. 3, pp. 311-326, 1999.
Ronald W. Jones and Henryk Kierzkowski.
“The role of services in production and international trade: a theoretical
framework,” in Ronald R. Jones and Anne Krueger, eds. The Political Economy
of International Trade. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.
Jong-Soon Kang. “The services sector in
output and international trade,” in Christopher Findlay and Tony Warren, eds.
Impediments to Trade in Services: Measurement and Policy Implications.
London: Routledge, 2000.
William Milberg. “Foreign Direct
Investment and Development: Balancing Costs and Benefits,” in International
Monetary and Financial Issues for the 1990s Vol. XI, Geneva: UNCTAD, 1999.
Saskia Sassen. Globalization and Its
Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money. New York: The
New Press, 1998.
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