Globalisation and intensified international competition are continuously reducing workers rights and conditions.

Never before have corporations been so mobile. When workers organise and wages rise, companies look elsewhere for cheaper labour and increasingly this means women’s labour. For corporations, women’s labour constitutes a flexible, low cost, non-unionised workforce that can be deployed at will.

Women account for up to 90% of the 27 million workers in Export Processing Zones, where conditions are the worst of all. Here women can expect compulsory pregnancy testing, sexual harassment, adverse environmental and health conditions, repetitive and often harmful work and extreme job insecurity.

Women’s employment under globalisation is precarious. Millions of young women throughout the world are hired at minimal wages, only to be laid off when they get married or start a family. Women’s jobs are the first to be lost, often forcing them into even more marginal and potentially dangerous means to earn a living, or to migrate in search of work.

Overall, the pattern of women’s employment is unlikely to be a lifetime of full employment, but sporadic employment in temporary, part-time and contract positions. Inequalities between men’s and women’s pay are increasing, as is gender segmentation of the workforce which restricts women to jobs that are lowest in status and skill.

Women are working longer and harder to earn a living. At the same time their responsibility for domestic work has not reduced. The resulting social costs are felt not just by women’s families, but by society as a whole.

The impacts of globalisation are more acute for women who are additionally subject to racial discrimination.

AND ACKNOWLEDGING THAT

Women’s struggles against social injustice, violence and war, as well as against inequalities within countries and between North and South, are fundamental to IMF efforts to build alternatives to globalisation.

Despite the very evident impacts of globalisation on women workers, discussions of globalisation generally ignore the specific interests of women, including within trade unions.

The conditions of women’s work under globalisation present an enormous challenge to organising.

The precarious and irregular pattern of women’s employment is increasingly becoming that of men too.

AFFILIATES WILL

Take a stand against the inferior forms of employment that are often the only ones available to women.

Gather information on gender segmentation and equal pay in their areas of coverage and use it to ensure that women are not restricted to the lowest paid, lowest skilled work.

Use negotiation and implementation of International Framework Agreements to promote women workers’ rights.

Work together with women’s organisations to organise women workers in EPZs and the other ghettos of globalisation, raise their issues and ultimately improve their conditions of work.