Under Very Poor Conditions

T he current economic turmoil in East Asia may have the effect of halting or even reversing progress made in the long march towards equality for women in the
region.

The East Asian export boom, between 1980 and 1996, was fuelled by the labour of women, whether paid work in export-related activities and services, paid migrant labour, or the vast quantities of
unpaid labour. In this period, women workers were frequently the primary contributors to household income, a sign of their substantial role in the national economy.

Driving this trend towards the feminisation of employment in Asian countries was employers' need for cheaper and more "flexible'' sources of labour. This was closely connected to the move to more
casual labour, part-time work or piece-rate contracts, and the insistence on greater freedom in hiring and firing.

Another factor behind the feminisation of labour was the widespread conviction among employers in Southeast Asia that female employees are more malleable and subservient to managerial authority, less
prone to organise into unions, more willing to accept lower wages, and easier to dismiss using life-cycle criteria such as marriage and childbirth.

The feminisation of paid employment can be a double-edged process, however. On the one hand, access to earned income substantially improves women's position within the household, gives them greater
control over the distribution of earnings and household resources, and generally improves their status and strength in society, as well as their own self-esteem.

In the broad social context of Asia, where women are typically denied the ownership of property and control over assets, the ability to earn outside income can become an important instrument for the
transformation of gender relations and can challenge many traditional patriarchal tendencies.

However, it is not necessarily the case that the feminisation of employment improves the social and material conditions of women workers. It can also simply result in a double burden for women,
adding to their unpaid work paid work under very poor conditions.

Moreover, if such paid work is mostly performed under casual contracts with flexible hiring and firing arrangements, there is the clear danger that women will be fired more easily · either because
the high burnout rate associated with some tasks makes employers prefer a high turnover of relatively young women, or because of a recession in domestic industry or decline in export markets. It is
precisely this feature which is most in evidence in Southeast Asia today.

Reports suggest that the bulk of the new unemployed are women workers who had earlier found work in the burgeoning export manufacturing and services sectors. In South Korea and Thailand, the
contraction of the textile industry had already led to declines in job creation and to the firing of women workers in particular. Layoffs of women workers are also increasing in the computer-related
industries and in the assembly of consumer electronic goods, which were in any case sectors that employed mostly women.

In Thailand, women workers in the low-tech labour-intensive export industries like low-end garments, furniture and low-end plastics were the first to be laid off.

In Indonesia as well, large numbers of women previously employed in export industries have lost their jobs, and in both countries the rural areas can no longer support these women who migrated to
towns to find work.

The demand compression in the region is also affecting service employment, as domestic markets for services shrink as a result of the reduced real incomes of workers. It is estimated that 5,000
persons per day are losing their jobs in South Korea, the majority of whom have been in the service sector, and a significant number of whom are women.

In the near future, along with retrenchment by the industrial chaebols (Korea's conglomerates), retail trade and distribution as well as banking and finance will also cut jobs, and here women's
employment has been significant.

The question of large-scale unemployment is especially serious in the region because except for South Korea, no country has significant safety nets such as unemployment benefits or insurance for the
unemployed. Even in South Korea, there are no unemployment benefits for workers in firms with fewer than 5 employees, or for new entrants to the work force.

This means that the newly unemployed throughout the region are being forced to turn for material protection to traditional sources like the family, in a context in which all workers' incomes are
already being substantially squeezed.

To make things worse, other policies, such as cutting food subsidies, have raised the prices of basic goods and further exacerbated the problem of material survival for the unemployed.

All these factors will have serious negative repercussions for the social and material status of women.

Jayati Ghosh is an economist, she teaches at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.

Freitag, 02. April 1999