WOMEN'S oppression is an essential tool for capitalists to justify their policies and attempt to shift responsibility for social welfare from collective institutions to the 'privacy' of the family. Here Mariele Barbosa, Heather Dashner, Penny Duggan, Carol McAlister and Eva Nikell outline a new study, on the world-wide position of women, by the Fourth International's International Institute for Research and Education. RESTRUCTURING AND integration of the global capitalist economy - including the recent imposition of so-called structural adjustment policies involving austerity measures, privatization of the economy and deregulation of the market, the current moves towards establishing formal trade blocks through NAFTA, the EU and MERCOSUR, have particulaf impacts on women in both dependent and advanced capitalist countries.
Equally important, these economic transformations and their roie in undermining the political strength of the international working class depend precisely on the continuing exploitation and oppression of women. This latter point must be grasped to adequately understand the fundamental dynamics involved.
Broadly speaking, the formal trade blocs with their goals of downward "harmonization" of economic and social policies to remove barriers to the free movement of capital, the search for cheap labour and the maximisation of profits, simply codify and deepen trends already well under way. Women's work THE OVERALL implications of economic integration for women's work has been to promote contradictory proletarianization of women on a world scale, forcing them into the workforce and at the same time using their role in the family and society to justify job insecurity and casualization and the return of many private services to the "private" sphere of the family, to be shouldered by women.
Today's international capitalist restructuring involves the development of export-processing industrialisation by multinational corporations whereby parts of the production process (usually those that are low-skilled and labour intensive are located in free-trade zones throughout the Third World.
These zones represent localised models of what the new trading blocks will create on a broader regional basis. Industries in these free-trade zones depend on the particular exploitation of women's labour to provide the increase in surplusvalue and in profits that is the goal of restructuring. As a result, a significant layer of Third World women are brought into industrial production and in fact into some of the most modern sectors of the economy, though under very exploitative conditions.
Informal sector
However, this development has also been accompanied by a huge expansion of the informal sector into which most women workers, including those who have been laid off from multi-national industries because of age or pregnancy, are channelled. In fact, women's work in the informal sector is used to underwrite the "cheapness" and "flexibility" of both male and female labour in the industrial sector and to provide a safety valve for periodic retrenchments in that sector.
This trend toward informal-sector work is accelerated by the increasing commercialisation and export- orientation of local agriculture, a shift which frequently undermines women's role in the more traditional farming economy. Reorganisation of the world economy involves deeper attacks on abortion rights In the advanced capitalist centres, there has been a shift of the job market away from industrial work toward service-sector employment, drawing large numbers of women into the low-paid "pink-collar ghetto". This shift has been accomplished without massive disruption by building off the gendered division of labour in the family.
Thus it was women who played a key role in holding families together through periods of unemployment and economic stress, and also women who more readily took up the new low-wage jobs in response to their feelings of responsibility for family survival.
This expansion of the service sector has been combined with a new phase of industrial development in the US, Canada and Western Europe, depending largely on the labour of immigrant women. These women, vulnerable because of the combined factors of gender, race and immigration status, often work in small workshops or at home, signalling the revival of the turn-of-the-century sweatshops and putting-out system.
Fragmentation
Fi Cam Labo that men and women are now competing over informal-sector jobs, thus removing even this safety net for women.
The establishment of formal trade agreements will most certainly accelerate these developments, leading to a further "maquiladorization" of women's work in both advanced capitalist and Third World societies.
None of their basic aims - aside from ensuring certain rules for capital flow and investment, while highly regulating things like patents - will be to generalise the elimination of certain regulations of working conditions and labour relations which have not already been eliminated, using the argument that their maintenance would constitute "unfair practices".
Undoubtedly, then, we would see challenges to rights such as:
The right to safe, decent working conditions. Hazardous conditions in both industry and services where women are concentrated already exist - for example, danger from the use of toxic chemicals in electronics factories, fires in garment sweatshops, and rising stress-related injury for clerical workers using computers.
• Retirement age requirements may be "harmonised" as is already being fore-