Bailouts for Bankers, Burdens for Women

50 Years Is Enough is calling on the U.S. Congress to vote no on the Clinton Administration's request for $18 billion to expand the International Monetary Fund (IMF). At the heart of the problem with the IMF is this: in over 80 countries around the world, it routinely subjugates the social and economic rights of poor and working people, particularly women, to the pursuit of economic reform. So pervasive is this subjugation that it has become part of the very model of development promoted by the IMF. To rout it out will require a transformation in both the IMF as an institution and the economic policies it promotes. To force transformation will require holding back funding. Gender at the IMF: Women? What women?

Ignored in most discussions of the IMF are impact its policies have on virtually every aspect of women's daily lives, from their wages to their access to and quality of health, education and other services, to what they produce and consume, to how they use their own labor and to the economic struggles they face and the options they have for overcoming them.

These impacts are overwhelmingly negative. Extensive data from around the world show that IMF-imposed austerity and economic reform programs have stripped many women of what meager health and education benefits were once available to them. Women's formal sector unemployment has increased due to IMF-induced recessions, privitizations, and government cutbacks. In Central Asia, for example, women have been the targets of dramatic job losses as state-owned companies are sold to the private sector. Women's unemployment average 70 percent in Armenia, Russia, Bulgaria and Croatia, and topped 80 percent in the Ukraine, according to a recently released report from the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). Sweatshops, whose workers are predominantly women, have proliferated, specifically supported by IMF policies encouraging exports and free trade zones.

Food production and other activities that provide income and sustenance to households have been undermined, as in Africa where incentives that switch land and labor to export crop production have forced women to reduce time tending farm plots that are the basis of food security and spend more time as unpaid laborers. The proportion of female-maintained households continues to grow as men become unemployed or are pushed out of their traditional income- generating roles. Since the onset of SAPs, women have had to work harder and harder just to survive, absorbing enormous physical and psychological burdens. And even after 15 years, there is no light at the end of the tunnel.

The IMF pleads ignorance of these impacts, passing the buck for even thinking about them to its brother institution, the World Bank. This is of little use to women, however, given that the World Bank walks in lockstep with the IMF and has proven itself no more likely than the IMF to change its economic prescriptions, no matter how vast the evidence of their harm to women.

Macroeconomics: The Silent Killer

Following are examples of specific gender impacts of standard IMF policies and programs, imposed on over 80 developing countries as a condition for receiving foreign assistance. Designed to ensure repayment of IMF loans, open markets and support export-led development, these same policies are now being forced on more industrialized Asian economies. Export-led growth. The IMF uses a number of policies to encourage exports. These include devaluation, which makes exports cheaper, targeted subsidies to export industries, and removal of price controls and trade regulations such as tariffs and quantitative restrictions.

In Africa, where women farmers are responsible for the majority of food production, policies designed to shift resources into export-crop production contributed to decreases in per capita food production in the 1980s of close to 2 percent a year. Food imports during that time increased dramatically. In Kenya, women report planting tobacco right up to their door, yet not having enough money from its sale to buy food, and in Uganda, government incentives to produce beans for export left women farmers with no food crops for their families. A woman farmer in Zaire, referring to a scheme to switch land used for food into export-crop production spoke to the wider reality of rural women across the continent when she observed, "If you have to buy food, you will never have enough."

For women in Asia, export-led growth has taken on a different dimension. Not only do women dominate as workers in export industries, but they themselves have become the important exports. In Indonesia, for example, women migrants to the Middle East increased from 8,000 in 1979 to over 100,000 now. In the Philippines, women's composed more than 60% of the 675,000 documented overseas workers in 1994. The majority of women migrants are service workers -- domestic helpers, entertainers and related work -- subject to harsh living and working conditions and vulnerable to sexual abuse and violence. Mortality rates of Filipino migrants -- measured conservatively by the number of migrants whose bodies are flown back to the Philippines on commercial carriers (a newly lucrative business, according to the airlines) -- are far above the national average. In addition, they suffer ills common to all migrant workers: separation from their children and families, racial discrimination, cultural shock and social isolation in host countries and social and economic reintegration problems upon return. Of the 2800 Filipino maids that work in the U.S., 2000 of them are employed by staff at the World Bank and the IMF.

Monetary Policy: As the high priest of monetary policy, which posits that inflation is caused by "too much money chasing after too few goods", the IMF uses a two-pronged strategy to reduce inflation. The first is to increase interest rates, which is intended to help diminish the problem of "too much money" by making credit too expensive for people to borrow money, thus cutting back on the amount of money circulating in an economy.

These macroeconomic policies, seemingly so neutral, can be devastating to women in a number of ways.

• By making credit prohibitively expensive, high interest rates diminish women's already scarce access to credit needed for production and household emergencies;

• Women workers are subject to massive layoffs both because they predominate in small and medium sized enterprises hardest hit by high interest rates and overall economic slowdowns, and because of the widespread practice of laying off women before men in both public and private sector operations. In 1998 alone, IMF-imposed responses to financial troubles in South Korea are expected to result in the demise of 53,000 small and medium enterprises (SMEs), where women make up the largest portion of workers. In both South Korea and Thailand, reports show that women are being targeted for layoffs. A recent report of the Friends of Women Foundation in Thailand reports that 80% of the unskilled workers laid off in the past eight months have been women.

The second prong is to cut overall spending. This is done directly by cutting government programs, including subsidies, and indirectly through wage restraint policies and currency devaluations which cut expenditures by making imports more expensive and wage restraint. In other words, to cut spending, the IMF induces recession.

Government cut-backs in food subsidies and health budgets have been a major cause of worsening health in countries like India and Zimbabwe, as well as of social unrest. The most recent example is Indonesia, where the IMF-driven removal of foods subsidies has sparked riots in major cities.

IMF-mandated low wages affect women directly, and have a ripple effect throughout the economy, placing further downward pressure on women's income. In Africa, falling incomes have destroyed local demand for many goods produced by women, such as textiles, and created large numbers of unemployed workers. Displaced women have been forced into the informal sector in large numbers to compensate for their own income loss and that of their household partners. This has greatly increased competition and further decreased women's wages in that sector.

Separate IMF policies often work at cross-purposes. Anti- inflationary measures are directly countered by devaluations, which increase the price on imports such as food, fuel, fertilizer and other productive inputs. This can have a negative impact on production, which increases the scarcity of goods, and makes prices rise even more. Because the IMF does not sufficiently disaggregate inflation rates by categories of goods and services, situations such as that faced by women in Haiti are not uncommon. In that country, the IMF justifies its draconian policies by pointing to its success in decreasing inflation rates from 60% to 30%. Women, however, report price increases of one and two hundred percent on the imported food and medicines they need to survive.

Labor Market Flexibility: IMF's insistence on "labor market flexibility", a euphemism for making workers bear the brunt of economic change, has directly and indirectly undermined the status of women workers. Not only are women being targeted for layoffs, as noted above, but such gains as they have been able to make in increasing wages and status within the workplace, which came about only as a result of years of struggle and organizing within unions, are now being wiped out in the name of economic crises. In addition, the deregulation of labor markets has led to a significant increase in part-time and unstable employment and in contracting-out arrangements, where women undertake piecework in their homes. Not only are women paid abysmally low wages for long hours, but, because regulation is non-existent and there is no separation between living and work space, women and their families face increased health hazards. The IMF's choice to undermine labor rights in the name of economic reform is a choice to support and encourage the exploitation of women workers.

Wearing Women Down: The Cumulative Impact of IMF Policies

For tens of millions of women around the world, IMF policies have meant deprivation, uncertainty, and a never-ending struggle to survive. Increases in violence against women due to higher levels of frustration and stress within the family, caused by reduced income and intense financial pressures brought on by SAPs, are reported in countries from Poland to South Africa to the Philippines. For an increasing number of households, things are so bad that vulnerable members such as children and the elderly are being forced onto the streets. The effects of the mental stress of balancing multiple roles, the physical wear and tear of overwork, and the psychological impact of grinding poverty and worry about survival accumulate and damage women's health over the long term. Women's own quality of life is damaged, as is their capacity for productive activity, for ensuring the survival of their families, and for contributing to the viability of their societies.

The impacts of IMF policies are massive, long-lasting, and touch every aspect of women's lives. We call on the U.S. Congress and the Clinton Administration to move quickly to transform the IMF as an institution, as well as its policies. If they don't, U.S. policymakers will be complicit in the ongoing exploitation of women around the globe.

This background paper was prepared by Lisa A. McGowan

More Information on:

Globalization the Cause of Women's Woes, Says Panel - www.southbound.com.my/souths/twn/title/woes-ch.htm

Women's Eyes on the Bank - www.wedo.org/global/bank.htm