|  An
Introduction to Women and Globalization
Globalization is about making things global. It is the process
of creating languages, services, and products that apply not
just to an individual neighbourhood or city or country, but
to the whole world. Globalization has brought many benefits
to the lives of Canadians including access to products and
services from around the world. But it has also led to deepening
global poverty, increased stress and workloads in both the
paid and unpaid labour force, and environmental destruction.
Women have been particularly affected.
Globalization has given Canadians access to a wide range of
products and services from around the globe. Because of the
merging of global economies, we can buy cheap bananas and
pineapples, foods that don't grow in Canada, year-round. We
can also surf the internet and find out about life on the
other side of the globe. We can indulge ourselves in African
and Cuban music. And, we can drop by at our neighbourhood
flower shop and pick up low-cost and beautiful fresh flowers
on the coldest winter day. So if globalization is such a good
thing, why are so many people so critical of it?
 While
one interpretation of globalization has to do with equal exchange
and sharing of goods and services between countries and cultures,
the reality of a globalized world is much different. Globalization
is a phenomenon that crosses and erases geographical and political
borders and makes all countries start to look the same. As
a result of globalization, local products, services, and cultures
disappear into a global culture, a culture defined not by
the global citizenry but rather the world's economic and political
superpowers - mostly North America-owned corporations. Because
of globalization, people on every continent are exposed to
and consumed by a North American 'culture' defined by Nike
running shoes, MTV, Coca Cola, and McDonald's. Some people
have re-named the process of globalization and called it McDonaldization
or CocaColonization.
Not only does globalization create one bland culture the world over, it forces people to arrange their lives to promote this culture. Impoverished Filipino farmers end up being forced off their land and into factories producing running shoes and video cameras for North Americans. Forests and agricultural land are grabbed by international corporations and used to farm beef, bio-fuel and other crops that feed wealthy foreign consumers. There are many reports of this being carried out in a violent way, displacing local peoples and reducing their access to land. Because of its focus on corporations' access to the free market, globalization has led to an increase in the gap between rich and poor. The world's poorest people have experienced deepening poverty while the incomes of a very few rich people have soared.
Although globalization is about culture,
it is mostly about money. Globalization encourages the merging
of world economic markets through 'free' trade agreements,
the creation of transnational
corporations that sell products and services to people
all over the globe, and the privatization
of government services like health care, water, and mail delivery
in favour of private ownership. Unfortunately, globalization
isn't about equal exchange, it's about concentrations of profit
and power in certain parts of the world and with certain people.
Economic globalization is fueled by
international trade agreements signed between nations. The
goal of these agreements is to get rid of barriers to trade
by allowing companies to move their factories to countries
with the lowest labour and environmental standards, countries
where they can produce their products the cheapest and therefore
sell them for the lowest price, earning them the highest profits.
Visit bilateral.org for current reporting about Free Trade Agreements worldwide.
What free
trade means in real terms is that whichever country can
produce the cheapest product, wins. Through the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), factories in Canada
and the United States move to Mexico because they can produce
cheaper goods. If this means that Mexicans are forced to work
at less than a living wage or that the Mexican environment
is polluted due to lax environmental regulations, it doesn't
matter. The only rule in the game is low cost. While Mexicans
are benefiting from the Canadian and American hungry appetites,
they are doing so at great risk. Demand for cheap goods comes
at the expense of workers who are forced to work in increasingly
harsher workplaces. Minimum wage falls, jobs become less secure,
and it is more difficult for workers to join together and
create unions. While the assumption behind free trade is that
all peoples are affected in the same way - that everyone's
life gets better, in reality, free trade is 'free' for very
few people. In the year 2000, seven years after NAFTA, eight
million more Mexicans were living in poverty than before NAFTA.1
It appears that NAFTA has made life more dangerous for women in particular. Since 1993, over 400 women and girls have been murdered and many more are missing from both Ciudad Juarez and Chihuahua. Some of the women were workers at maquiladoras and disappeared on their way to or from work. Many suffered sexual violence and torture. Most cases have not been adequately investigated and very few charges have been laid. 2
 Globalization
also encourages cut-backs to government services. Many political
leaders have been persuaded that the best way for a country
to reduce its spending is to limit the amount of money it
spends on things like health care, education, electricity,
water, and mail delivery. In Canada, between 1986 and 1993,
Canada Post down-sized and closed 1300 rural post offices,
laying off 3000 people, 83% of whom were women.3
When governments stop providing essential services, the door
is open for private companies to step in. Government leaders
in Alberta continue to threaten privatization of health
care. This means selling the 'business' of health care to
private companies who in turn provide these services to citizens
but this time for a profit. What proponents of economic globalization
do not recognize is that cutting government services creates
poverty. While companies may make money off of citizens' very
real needs, the money is certainly not equally distributed
amongst all citizens. Instead, many poor citizens are put
in yet more vulnerable situations forced to pay exorbitant
prices for services they need for their basic survival.
For emample, rather than being considered a human right, water is being treated as a commodity and is increasingly under the control of private companies. The World Bank has pushed for privatization and “advocates that, given the scarcity of water and the fact that often water is more wasted than used, full cost pricing of water is advisable.” 4 Vast quantities of water are used for irrigation, mining and other industries – often with little cost incurred by the companies that use it. Grassroots people’s access to water for day-to-day life is becoming jeopardized and some argue that poor people are at risk of being excluded all together from the water market. Things getting worse for access to water would be catastrophic, already research in Sub-Saharan Africa shows that women in that region spend 40 billion hours a year collecting water – the equivalent of a year’s worth of labour by the entire workforce in France. 5
The
trend towards privatization is highlighted clearly in the
experiences of citizens of Heavily-Indebted
Poor Countries (HIPCs) like many of the countries in sub-Saharan
Africa, where privatization of social services is one of the
requirements of Structural
Adjustment Programs (SAPs). SAPs are development schemes
forced on poor countries by international financial organizations
like the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World
Bank. Why do rich countries have a right to tell poor
countries how to spend their money? The answer is simple:
debt.
Many of these countries are indebted to rich countries for loans made several decades ago. The rich countries encourage their debtors to pay back what they owe by cutting the amount of money they spend on health care and education. In many African countries,
education is becoming a luxury very few can afford and health
care is almost completely inaccessible. Money governments
could be using to provide for their people and create human
wealth in their own countries, is instead being sent to rich
European and North American countries to pay for loans that
have already been paid back several times over (see Money,
Banking, and Debt for more on the global debt crisis.)
The exploitation of poor countries that results from globalization
has led many people to liken the process to colonization.
Trade is not a new thing. But today, just as 500 years ago,
the trade of goods and resources is not a simple exchange.
When the early European explorers set out across the ocean
in search of spices, tea and sugar, they set the stage for
a massive transfer of wealth from one part of the world to
another. In search of sugar to sweeten European tea, Christopher
Columbus 'discovered' America including a lot of gold which
was carried back to Spain. Unfortunately Europeans didn't
merely take over resources. They assumed ownership of land
and governance and eventually massacred millions of indigenous
peoples. A simple exchange quickly turned into colonization.
In Canada, early European settlers began by taking fur and
fish. Eventually, they took over land, government, and all
resources. For Aboriginal peoples living in the Americas,
exchange became exploitation.6
Women and other marginalized communities have suffered disproportionately
from free trade agreements. When communities become less stable
it is women who must pick up the pieces. Globalization has
increased women's unpaid work as social services are privatized.
At the same time it has decreased the quality of many of their
paid work opportunities. Women are already overrepresented
in low-paying, labour-intensive sectors where women's nimble
figures, flexibility, and ability to work hard are needed.
Free trade drives wages even lower and makes these industries
even less stable. To read more about how women's work has
been affected visit Globalization
and Women's Work .
One of the hardest hit industries has been
the garment industry. In Canada, 30,000 jobs in the garment
industry have been lost since the advent of international
trade agreements. Most of those jobs were held by women. To
find out more about women involved in the garment industry
in Manitoba and the world see Globalization
and Clothes.
Globalization has also severely impacted
women's relationship to food and the production of food. The
liberalization of trade and the subsequent global spread of
a market economy (see Economic
Systems for more on the market economy) has forced many
impoverished countries to stop growing food for themselves
in favour of growing food for export. This has led to greater
food insecurity, reduced nutrition, and has moved women in
exporting countries into low-paying, undervalued agricultural
work such as picking and packing tomatoes for export. Thousands
of indigenous women in Guatemala and other Central American
countries have lost their own land and subsequently their
ability to grow food for their families and been forced to
move. To find out more how free trade is impacting food security
in Manitoba and around the world, see Globalization
and Food.
 When
inequalities between countries become greater, the desire
for citizens of poor nations to leave their own countries
also increases. Millions of people worldwide, many of them
women, leave their homes in search of work in other countries.
Thousands of farm workers come to Canada each summer to harvest
fruits and vegetables. Many Filipino mothers feel their only
option is to go overseas and work as domestic servants for
wealthy people. And women in Eastern Europe, displaced by
the market economy, become part of the global sex trade. To
read more about this trend see Globalization
and Migration.
Leaders of the world's richest and
most economically influential countries continue to meet to
develop plans to expand economic globalization. The G8
leaders (Britain, France, Italy, Germany, USA, Japan, Russia,
and Canada) meet every year. The
World Trade Organization
(WTO), the IMF and World Bank also hold regular meetings
and the World
Economic Forum is held once a year. Since the massive
protests which brought 50,000 concerned people to Seattle
and effectively shut down the WTO meetings in late 1999, large-scale
demonstrations have accompanied all major meetings of the
economic superpowers. Citing the example of Mexico and NAFTA,
thousands of people gathered for the Summit of the Americas
meetings in Quşbec City, Canada in April 2001 arguing against
the Free Trade
Area of the Americas (FTAA). One of the reasons they gave
for being there was the fact that between 1980 and 1996 while
world trade was increasing, 28 of the world's poorest countries
in sub-Saharan Africa became poorer.7
To read the story of one Manitoba woman who attended these
meetings, visit Carla's Story.
 Organizers
of these global superpower meetings have responded to public
disapproval by even more blatant disregard for human rights
and public dialogue. Meetings are being held in more and more
remote locations such as Doha, Quatar and Kananaskis, Alberta.
Perimeters of fear are constructed around the meeting sites
and millions of dollars are spent on security. Teargas, rubber
bullets, and riot-gear clad police officers, become commonplace.
In June 2010, 40,000 people took to the streets to protest the meeting of the G20 in Toronto and the G8 in Huntsville, Ontario. The themed days of resistance included; Indigenous Justice, Queer Rights, a Toxic Tour of Toronto, Labour Justice and Human Rights – all demanding that the health of communities and the earth be a higher priority for governments than corporate interests and profit. In violent response, police arrested more than 1,000 people, some at gunpoint in the middle of the night in their own homes. The state reaction and the government price tag of over 1 billion dollars for the summits speak volumes about what people all over the world face daily – violence and a lack of respect for human dignity when peacefully acting to change unjust structures of power.
 But
for most of those in attendance, the demonstrations are not
about violence. A surge of creativity accompanies each gathering.
Days before the 2002 G8 meetings in Kananaskis, 1500 people
gathered in Calgary for the G6B
Summit - the Group of 6 Billion, representing the entire
global citizenry - as opposed to the Group of only eight.
Manitobans were among those in attendance. To read one woman's
story visit G6B Report. And since
2000, the
World Social Forum has been meeting yearly in Porto Alegre,
Brazil in stark contrast to the World Economic Forum and providing
opportunities to discuss alternative economic models. Visit
Gisèle's Story to hear of
one Manitoba woman's experiences in Brazil.
For women and men who attend these counter-summits and for
all those working to create global equality, globalization
can come to mean much more than the simple transfer of money
and products. Globalization has created opportunities for
us to connect with and learn from women all over the world,
to come together demanding and believing that Another
World is Possible, a world that centres around
the experiences and needs of people, not profits.
Globalization talk is full
of acronyms and complicated words. To learn what some
of the words like APEC, GATTS, and the WTO are all about and
how they affect the lives of real citizens, see Canadian
women and the global economy by UNPAC member Deborah Stienstra.
To find out more about how free trade has impacted
disadvantaged groups, especially women, check out our Links
page
We've also discovered a number of
good books on globalization and women, including:
- The Globalized Woman: Reports from
a Future of Inequality by Christa Wichterich
- No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand
Bullies by Naomi Klein
- Women Working the NAFTA Food Chain:
Women, Food, and Globalization edited by Deborah Barndt
- Tangled Routes: Women, Work and Globalization on the Tomato Trail by Deborah Barndt
Photos:
Unless otherwise noted, the photos in this article were taken
by Jennifer deGroot in Calgary during the G6B and G8 meetings,
June 2002.
|
Intro to Globalization
Globalization
& Clothes
Globalization
& Food
Globalization
& Migration
Globalization
& Women's Work
Globalization
Glossary
Globalization
Quiz
“Globalization is most comfortable with political systems where there is a high level of citizen apathy – preferably by choice, but, if not, then enforced by an autocratic state.”
Richard Swift
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