The excesses of globalisation and the feminisation of survival

Parallax

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 100-110

  Sassen, Saskia ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 4644323019     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640010015980     Document Type: Review

References (43)

1. This article is one of several based on the author's larger multi-year project on 'Governance and Accountability in the Global Economy' (Department of Sociology, University of Chicago, USA).
2. I have used this type of analytic strategy also in my research on strategic instantiations of gendering in the global economic system, arguing that the articulations between globalisation and various types of gendering in economic operations is often not evident. Saskia Sassen, Globalization and its Discontents: Essays on the Mobility of People and Money (New York: New Press, 1998), part one.
3. I have used this kind of theoretical approach in the research on the formation of labour migrations, arguing that these often take place in already existing systems that connect sending and receiving countries. See Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
4. Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999).
5. According to Toussaint (Eric Toussaint, 'Poor countries pay more under debt reduction scheme?' w.w.w.twnside.org.sg/souths/twn/title/1921-cn.htm (July 1999)), from 1982 to 1998 indebted countries paid four times their original debts, and at the same time their debt stocks went up by four times.
6. According to Susan George, the South has paid back the equivalent of six Marshall Plans to the North. (Asoka Bandarage, Women, Population, and Crisis (London: Zed 1997)). Yet these countries have been paying a significant share of their total revenues to service their debt. Thirty-three of the 41 Highly Indebted Countries paid $3 in debt service payments to the North for every $1 in development assistance.
7. Many of these countries pay over 50% of their government revenues toward debt service or 20 to 25% of their export earnings (Thomas Ambrogi, 'Jubilee 2000 and the campaign for debt cancellation, National Catholic Reporter (July 1999)).
8. This debt burden inevitably has large repercussions on state spending composition. This is well illustrated in the case of Zambia, Ghana and Uganda, three countries, which have been seen as co-operative and responsible by the World Bank as well as effective in implementing SAPs. In Zambia, for example, the government paid $US 1.3 billion in debt but only $US 37million for primary education; Ghana's social expenses, at $US 75million represented 20% of its debt service; and Uganda paid $US 9 per capita on its debt and only $1 for health care (Asad Ismi, 'Plunder with a human face', Z Magazine (February 1998)). Africa's payments reached $US 5 billion in 1998, which means that for every $US 1 in aid, African countries paid $US 1.4 in debt service in 1998.
9. Michel Chossudovsky, The Globalization of Poverty (London: Zed/TWN, 1997);
10. Guy Standing, 'Global feminization through flexible labour: A theme revisited', World Development (1999) 27(3), pp.583-602;
11. Aminur Rahman, 'Micro-credit initiatives for equitable and sustainable development: who pays?', World Development (1999), 27(1), pp.67-82;
12. and Diane Elson, Male Bias in Development, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). There is, also, an older literature on women and the debt, focused on the implementation of a first generation of Structural Adjustment Programmes in several developing countries linked to the growing debt of governments in the 1980s; this literature has documented the disproportionate burden these Programmes put on women. It is by now a large literature in many different languages and includes a vast number of limited-circulation items produced by various activist and support organizations.
13. For overviews see, e.g. Kathryn Ward, Women Workers and Global Restructuring (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991);
14. Christine E. Bose and Edna Acosta-Belen (eds.), Women in the Latin American Development Process: From Structural Subordination to Empowerment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995);
15. Lourdes Beneria and Shelley Feldman (eds.), Unequal Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty, and Women's Work (Boulder Co.: Westview, 1992);
16. York Bradshaw, Rita Noonan, Laura Gash, and Claudia Buchmann, 'Borrowing against the future: children and third world indebtedness', Social Forces (1993) 71 (3), pp.629-56;
17. Irene Tinker (ed.), Persistent Inequalities: Women and World Development (New York: Oxford University Press 1990);
18. and Carolyn Moser, 'The impact of recession and structural adjustment policies at the micro-level: low income women and their households in Guayaquil, Ecuador.' Invisible Adjustment (Vol. 2. UNICEF, 1989).
19. On these various issues see, e.g. Diana Alarcon-Gonzalez and Terry McKinley, 'The adverse effects of structural adjustment on working women in Mexico', Latin American Perspectives (1999) 26(3) pp.103-117;
20. Claudia Buchmann, 'The debt crisis, structural adjustment and women's education', International Journal of Comparative Studies, (1996) 37 (1-2) pp.5-30;
21. Helen Safa, The Myth of the Male Breadwinner: Women and Industrialization in the Caribbean, (Boulder Co.: Westview Press, 1995);
22. Erika Jones, 'The gendered toll of global debt crisis', Sojourner (1999) 25(3) pp.20-38;
23. and Nilufer Cagatay and Sule Ozler, 'Feminization of the labor force: The effects of long-term development and structural adjustment', World Development (1995) 23(11), pp.1883-1894, as well as several of the references cited in the preceding note.
24. This has been an important element in my research on globalisation: the notion that once there is an institutional infrastructure for globalisation, processes which have basically operated at the national or sub-national level can scale up to the global level even when this is not necessary for their operation. This would contrast with processes that are by their very features global, such as the network of financial centres underlying the formation of a global capital market (e.g. Saskia Sassen, 'Global Financial Centers', Foreign Affairs, (1999) 78 (1): 75-87.);
25. or various systems of cross-border migrations (Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1999)).
26. Trafficking has become sufficiently recognised as an issue that it was also addressed in the G8 meeting in Birmingham in May 1998, (IMO (International Migration Office), Trafficking in Migrants, (Quarterly Bulletin), Geneva). The heads of the eight major industrialised countries stressed the importance of co-operation against international organised crime and trafficking in persons. The US President issued a set of directives to his administration in order to strengthen and increase efforts against trafficking in women and girls. This in turn generated the legislation initiative by Senator Paul Wellstone; bill S.600 was introduced in the senate in 1999.
27. Hilla Dayan, Feminist Responses to Globalisation: The Case of Trafficking in Women. MA Thesis submitted to the University of Chicago, Summer 2000.
28. See generally Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV) and the Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). For regularly updated sources of information on trafficking, see http://www.hrlawgroup.org/site/programs/ traffic.html. See generally Sietske Altink, Stolen Lives: Trading Women into Sex and Slavery (New York: Harrington Park Press and London: Scarlet Press 1995);
29. Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, Global Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redefinition (London: Routledge 1998);
30. Susan Shannon, 'The global sex trade: humans as the ultimate commodity', Crime and Justice International (May 1999), pp.5-25;
31. Lap-Chew Lin and Wijers Marjan, Trafficking in women, forced labour and slavery-like practices in marriage, domestic labour and prostitution, (Utrecht, Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV), and Bangkok, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW) 1997);
32. and Lin Lim, The Sex Sector: the Economic and Social Bases of Prostitution in Southeast Asia, (Geneva: International Labor Office, 1998).
33. STV-GAATW report, (Utrecht: Foundation Against Trafficking in Women (STV), and Bangkok: Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW)).
34. IMO (International Migration Office, Annual Quarterly, Trafficking in Migrants, Geneva 1996).
35. For various items of information including Asian and post-Soviet trafficking, see: http://www.hrlawgroup.org/site/programs/ traffic.html.
36. IMO 1996.
37. Global Survival Network, 'Crime and servitude: an expose of the traffic in women for prostitution from the newly independent states': www.globalsurvival.net/femaletrade.html (November 1997).
38. There are many instances in various reports. Malay brokers sell Malay women into prostitution in Australia. East European women from Albania and Kosovo have been trafficked by gangs into prostitution in London. European teens from Paris and other cities have been sold to Arab and African customers. In the US the police broke up an international Asian ring that imported women from China, Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and Vietnam (Booth, William, 'Thirteen charged in gang importing prostitutes', Washington Post 21st August 1999). The women were charged between $US 30,000 and $US 40,000 in contracts to be paid through their work in the sex or needle trade. The women in the sex trade were shuttled around several states in the US to bring continuing variety to the clients.
39. Dennis Judd and Susan Fainstein, The Tourist City, (New Haven, Ct: Yale University Press, 1999).
40. See e.g. Ryan Bishop and Lillian Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle, (1998).
41. Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
42. Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton University Press, New and updated edition; 2001, originally published in 1991).
43. Natacha David, 'Migrants made the scapegoats of the crisis', ICFTU Online, International Conference of Free Trade Unions, www.hartford-hwp.com/ archives/50/012.html.