Future of Work - South

Dear Friends,

I have the big task of representing the entire South, and I do not think I can manage it. I just might be able to represent a bit of the women’s movement and the issues which are being raised in the context of globalisation. Five years have passed since Rio, and two years since Beijing. Many promises were made to us. In the Southern countries, these are the issues we have worked hard for, lobbied for, and got the politically correct language in. But when it comes to implementation, we are never sure. We need to map the kind of changes which are happening from our perspective.

The World is getting smaller and smaller - it is possible, for example, for someone to come from India to address a symposium in Germany, but on the other hand, the divisions between people are widening - between the north and the south, between people within the north and within the south. We can not talk about north and south as much as the of point of view that we are trying to represent. There is a south in the north and there is a north in the south. All of us gathered here are concerned about the large majority of poor who are really the ‘south’. Secondly there is not only no homogeneity within a particular country or a particular community, there is also no homogeneity within the household. And I think that this point needs to be clearly stated, because there is a tendency to look at the household as a homogenous unit, with each protagonist within it acting out of benevolence. I believe there is a power relationship that exists within the household and there are dynamics of gender that are bred within the household that we need to look into when we re looking at the impact of globalisation, and at what kind of strategies we can use to changing the lives.

There are some unprecedented changes happening around us. The one major change is the revolution in microelectronics, which has brought in the information age and is helping bridge the communication gap between countries. The other area of change is the pattern of employment. The earlier speaker spoke about how investment does not necessarily mean an increase in employment. That has been very true, in India and elsewhere employment patterns are changing. The relationships between people are altering with the new communication patterns that are emerging through these changes. But the more frightening aspect is the question of sustainability, the way in which bio-technology, cloning, or different ways in which bio-engineering and technology are operating in the world. We are just starting to feel the implications of this on all of us in terms of social sustainability.

There is an unevenness in the impact of globalisation. There is an unevenness within the north, and an even more profound unevenness within the south. One sees that, within different countries, each is trying to compete with the other. The possibility of regionalism is steadily dwindling, because there is a tremendous amount of competition between regional areas for international capital investment Private foreign capital is coming into our countries and changing the role of (and any kind of control we had on) our national economies. If one takes the example of Albania, one sees the way in which an entire country almost collapsed with private capital manipulations. We see similar patterns in India, and in other South Asian countries where large amounts of investments are being made. Often the investments are in the stock market, and as soon as it ceases to be profitable, capital is withdrawn. What is the implications of this kind of capital fluctuations on an economy ?

I feel that the role of the State is very heavily undermined in the process of globalisation. It is true that the World Bank’s recent report speaks of giving importance to the State along with the Market. But I think we have to look at the kind of role which the State is playing. I don’t think, even in our own countries, the State has given up its rule. The State has given up its responsibility for social security, it is cutting down expenditure on basic food packets, education and health. But when you look at the type of regulations formulated for capital markets, they are very strictly regulated. Governments are speaking about how to regulate the insurance market, how to structure the capital flow market. So the State is coming in, not in the areas where we would like, but in other areas. The State is very much involved in repressive measures - one sees many movements quickly getting repressed. So it is not that the State’s role has been reduced, it has withdrawn in certain areas and these are the areas of concern for today’s symposium.

Changes happening around globalisation must also be seen in the context of growing fundamentalism. It appears that there is a parallel growth of the right wing and liberalisation of the economy. And it is creating a gender and class inequality. Another impact of globalisation is a kind of a hegemony of culture, of tastes, of aspirations, of cultural and musical expressions. I think its doing away with the multiple ways in which we live and the ways we express ourselves. I think there is much fear around this issue.

But the major impact is in the pattern of employment. In India, we have just seen five years of the World Bank’s structural adjustment program and we can already see some impacts and trends. There is a trend towards reduction in employment and the quality of employment. Firms are implementing flexibilisation, reducing their workforce, changing their structure and their patterns of production. Workers are given multitasks to do so other workers can be dismissed, and we are finding large sections of workers, especially women in the organised sector, are being systematically retrained.

There is a range of workers which fall in between the formal and informal sector who are employed as contract workers. A large number of workers employed as part-time workers or temporary workers do exactly the same work as the organised sector workers. Unions usually do not organise contract workers who are working in the same unit as its permanent, union members.

There exists a chain of workers from the highly protected organised sector, where they have unions and good wages, to the home-based workers who have nothing. And I would like to disagree with the first speaker who said let us not put the sectors in opposition to one another. The formal sector is very clearly exploiting the informal sector and in fact surviving and making profits off it.

Subcontracting is the buzzword. There is a downwards spiral of how low one can go - and that is where capital and production will go. If India is not able to lower production costs, Capital will go to China. If tomorrow China becomes expensive maybe it will go to Vietnam. I think the question of the shifting production process the exploitation of labour is a major one in today’s world. It has an impact on any discussion on social security, the most basic one being security of work. If you cannot provide employment security to a large section of people, social security will mean nothing in the long-term. The internal logic of capitalism is exploitation on the one hand and on the other the pressure to make you buy / consume more. I think it is this contradiction which needs to be looked at.

The general reduction in employment and reduction in wages can be juxtaposed with the high wages for corporate executives. It is amazing what the business magazines report about salaries offered by American Express or Citibank. Of course this polarisation was always there, but it is so enormous now that it is a matter of concern. In NGO circles we are forced into worrying whether we can get good people, because the market rates for any kind of professional work is high. So I think there is a range of questions regarding employment. Collective forms of production which were practiced earlier, such as co-operatives, are being wiped out because in the present neo-liberal way of thinking, competition is the only way of operating. The high level of competition does not allow many co-operatives to function profitably.

Another development is the rising number of people joining the informal sector. In India 91% of the working population is in the informal sector which covers the entire range from agriculture to any other kind of production. But there is a new argument emerging, and that is to talk about, not informal sector, but "self-employment, and self-entrepreneurship" Each individual can work on his/her own, if we provide them with enough credit they will be able to survive as self-entrepreneurs or small entrepreneurs. Many studies show that, in truth, this is not what exists. Self-employed people are de facto employees.

The other major area of impact of globalisation is on people’s food patterns. For the first time in India, this year our food production was less than our population growth. It has never happened in our history of 50 years that we have had less food than our population. The argument that India is too big and cannot feed its people was never true - there has always been enough food, India did not have the political will to provide to the people the food that was lying in the hands of the government or was being exported. Now the nature of food production is being effected, because the food is being explicitly produced for export, large tracts of lands being converted for prawn farming and entire farms are converted for flower production. I think there is a commitment away from a welfare state towards a kind of social Darwinist model of survival of the fittest .

Globalisation is also reducing the space that we had as NGOs, as people’s organisations, and as movements. There was some amount of space - our states were always repressive but today it’s becoming even more difficult. Secondly, internationally we must also talk to other agencies, like WTO, SAARC, UNO etc. There is an new area of work which we have to look at and see if we have the skills to be able to deal with it.

In this larger picture, one might feel that international agencies and international forces are big and everything is hopeless. We can only work if we have hope, and for me, there are very many indicators to show there is hope. The one hope that we see very clearly in India, is the way in which trade unions are beginning to break out of their narrow ways of organising. They are beginning to see how they can reach out to contract workers, how they can reach out to informal sector workers, how they can organise this large number of people who have a right to minimum wages, who have a right to basic health care, who have a right to benefits of the organized sectors. This is not only happening in India, but internationally. There has been a dialogue - within the ILO of a home workers convention because of many different organisations and trade unions coming together.

Another area of hope are consumer campaigns. There is the Clean Clothes Campaign in this part of the world, and the Rugmark Campaign - which is saying lets buy clean clothes and let us allow good wages to be paid to the people who actually make our clothes. There is also another hope - the right-wing organisations in many countries are under attack. Not only in India, but if you look at what is happening in the UK, in France, there is a move towards a more left wing - or, I don t want to say more left-wing, more anti-right - whatever the in-betweens may be - political landscape. In some countries, there is a challenging of dictatorship and a process of democratisation which is positive.

There is a beginning of a north-south solidarity, which is not only significant in all these UN-Conferences, but also as part of the long term. There have been campaigns that have been initiated in the south and have been supported by organisations in the north: I would just like to take the example of a big movement in India against the building of huge dams with World Bank funds. A people‘s movement was supported by organisations in the north and it is because of this solidarity that the World Bank withdrew its support and is now reviewing its policy on all big dams So I think there is hope. The only question I have is: as NGOs and as movements, are we really equipped to take on this role? Are we equipped in terms of our own skills? Sometimes I feel that, NGOs in the South, are still not so clear. We still have our old ways of thinking, we still want to work within the particular framework which we have got used to. And this is a time that a new reflection, a new way of looking and strategising needs to be done.

I see four kinds of responses that NGOs have made us vis à vis globalisation. The first response is to fit into this whole framework and say OK, the state can not give us the goods, NGOs will come in and deliver the goods". I have a problem with that kind of position, We feel, and we fear, that this is one way of privatisation: Today it is the NGOs and after five years it will be a private organisation. How can we influence this process - even if NGOs take on this role, what mechanisms of accountability can we implement? We can go up to the State and say You have to provide", we cannot go up to an NGO and say You have to provide" because they can just close shop. So what is the process of accountability? What kind of mechanisms and structures can be created to ensure that people have some rights in the strategy of participating as a delivery system?

The second kind of strategy is to say: let us prepare ourselves to participate in the market. There have been many organisations that are working in India on which the question of patenting; saying let people’s knowledge be patented and use the logic of the market for the good of the people. There have been attempts to say OK, if the market is being opened up to export, let us try and see what are the people’s organisations’ possibility and potential to export directly". So there have been many processes of engaging with the market to find out what are the ways and mechanisms you can strengthen people within the market.

The third response has been to engage in confrontation with the State, pressurising it at various levels and saying: you can not give up your responsibility for food, education and health care. We need some kind of mechanism for social security, so the State has to be pressurised both at the national level as well as an international level to provide certain rights which have been given to people.

The fourth response, which I think is something that we need to look at, is the questioning of the market and its rationalise. There have been many, many struggles which may be small, but are raising this question - is the market going to bring about a sustainable World? The divisions which exist between the skilled and the unskilled, the owners and the non-owners needs to be questioned. The paradigm of Development being promoted in society needs to be questioned. Is this the way to be happy, or search for one’s soul ? To consume more, to live in a materialistic way, is this going to mean development? Is it possible for everyone? And even if it is possible for everyone, does it really provide us with the happiness which we are looking for in life? I think that there are visions being developed around this question - by ecofeminists, who are talking about a more collaborative relationship with nature; or by the Gandhians who are talking about kinds of production and its relationship with needs. And I think each of these alternatives have a philosophical, personal dimension, so each one of us can be a better human being.

Thank you very much.

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