Nvironmental laws as "unfair trading practices". For example, in certain communities on the US -Mexican border, the problem of toxic wastes is already linked to cancers of the female reproductive system and to severe birth detects such as encephalic children.
Environmental
With the general weakening of environmental regulations, such problems could be more widespread throughout North America. At the same time, NAFTA will pose a challenge to the national health-care programmes of Canada and Mexico while making it more difficult to establish a comparable programme in the US. While this affects the whole of ine working class, women, as primary consumers of health-care services and as those mainly responsible for family health, will be particularly hard hit. In the case of the EU as well, health care and other components of state welfare system could be gradually chipped away. CLOSELY RELATED to the question of health and welfare is the effect of economic restructuring new trade policies on the social gains women have fought for over the past quarter century, and in relation to which they have won at least partial victories. the right to equal pay, and the right to freedom from sexual harassment and violence.
While the general economic crisis has alreadv generated serious attacks on women's rights, formal trade agreements have the potential to undermine these rights in a more formal and thorough-going way.
This is largely a result of the supra-national and corporate-dominated decision-making structures proposed in these agreements, which will supersede regular legislative and executive actions. This, combined with the focus on "unfair trade practices", sets up a situation rife for the challenging of measures that equalise women's role in the economy.
While the reason for attacking these rights may have a primarily economic basis, we should note that the rights themselves help ensure women's positions in many areas of society. Their significant weakening would, in fact, bring in to question women's basic status as citizens.
Social Charter The possibility for such a development is particularly clear in North America, where NAFTA provides no guarantees for such rights. In Europe the situation is more uneven, in that the Social Charter that accompanies the EU proposal provides common European principles on these matters, thus promoting stronger measures in certain cases (e.g., Ireland and Portugal) while perhaps undermining existing laws in others (e.g. Sweden). sexuality is one of the primary ways in which capitalist restructuring uses and builds on women's oppression. This happens in several ways.
First, there are the attacks on sexual and reproductive rights discussed above. In this sense, such attacks can be seen as not only an effect of economic change but also as a way of preparing the way for further restructuring by making women more vulnerable in both economic and social terms.
Second, we can find numerous instances where the entry and dismissal of women from the wage-labour force, as well as the super-exploitation under which most women work, are justified by images of female sexuality. This, for example, is very common in factories where women are alternately represented as "sexually loose" and thus "free" to be exploited, or as requiring stringent controls - including the physical organisation of the work place using the threat of sexual violence - to maintain their sexual purity, thus limiting their autonomy and. mobility.
Finally, there are particular instances -such as the expansion of the international sex trade in Europe, Asia and Latin America, the increase in dowry deaths in India, and the imposition of class-based population policies, for example in Singapore -in which women's sexuality is both commodified and controlled in ways that directly further the economic strategies of individual men or capital as a whole. THE IDEOLOGICAL transformations that accompany global integration also have an impact on women.
There is, for example, the manipulation of sexual images and norms we have just discussed.
Also of importance is the ideological emphasis on individualism and privatization that parallels recent changes in economic relations. Because of women's traditional role in the family, such an ideological development affects them differently - and also depends on their often unconscious collaboration to carry out such a broad cultural change.
Finally, there is the possibility that both NAFTA and the EU will play a role in undermining both memories of and aspirations for progressive national struggles. This in turn could have special implications for women, since it is through such struggles that women's demands are frequently raised and secured. For example, to prepare the way for the implementation of NAFTA there are already pressures to revise the official histories of the Mexican revolution.
Such revisions would serve to weaken the collective memory of the gains of the revolution, including those of particular importance to women, such as rights to materilty leave, child-care and health care. The Irish struggle provides another example, in that the dampening of its vigour because of the renewed ideology of a common Europe could also dampen the aspirations for women's emancipation connected with the goal of national liberation.