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Women and the Jobs Summit:Notes for a Labour PresentationPresented to the Joint Committee on the
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Contents
- Unemployment, Poverty, Inequality and the position of Women
- Labour's proposals
- Macro-economic framework
- National Public Housing Programme
- Public Works Programmes (PWPs)
- Youth Brigades
- Wage Gap, Training and Quality of Jobs
- Taxation
- Industrial restructuring and sectoral summits
- Public Sector Policies
- Informal sector
- Stemming job losses in the economy
- Social security network and income grants
- Hearing the views of women
- Unemployment, Poverty, Inequality and the position of Women
- Labour's proposals
In labour's 'base document' (tabled in April this year) which set out the framework for labour's proposals to the Job Summit, a range of policy interventions were proposed to ensure that these concerns were taken on board in an integrated way. Section IV of the document, on Women and Job Creation, proposes ten elements of an approach to comprehensively address the plight of women, and to empower them to themselves begin to act to change their situation:
- An integrated policy development approach, which addresses obstacles to development of women in all areas of policy;
- Mainstreaming women in development strategies, ensuring that the problems confronting women are not marginalised, but that their concerns are integrated into all policies and programmes;
- Gender-sensitive macroeconomic and industrial policies;
- Harmonising work and family responsibilities, including the arrangement of working time, and social support services and infrastructure to enable families to cope with family and work responsibilities;
- Targeted job creation for women;
- The role of public sector employment as a major employer of women;
- Public works programmes, both providing short term poverty relief, infrastructure to empower women, and training;
- Developing a regulatory framework, including anti-discrimination legislation;
- Education and training aimed at empowering women;
- Access to productive resources for women including land, natural resources, capital , credit, infrastructure, and technology.
This constitutes the broad framework within which our proposals need to be located. In August this year, the four constituencies in the negotiations tabled an 'audit' of their concrete proposals and programmes. Labour has proposed 21 programmes, and a series of financing mechanisms, aimed at a large-scale structural intervention in the current crisis.
All of labour's proposals, if implemented, would have a profound impact on the economic and social crisis confronting women in our country. However, space only allows us to concentrate on a few of these, to indicate the type of impact which the proposals will have on women. These comments below should be read together with our proposals outlined in more detail in the 'audit' document- this proposal is attached for members of the Committee to scrutinise in detail.
Macro-economic framework
National Public Housing Programme
- Public Works Programmes (PWPs)
A number of proposals are raised in labour’s document for a developmental macro-economic framework. Effective implementation of developmental programmes to address women's concerns is not possible in the context of inappropriate macro economic policies. For example, low interest rates are needed to facilitate entry of women into small enterprises; re-regulation of capital markets and tariffs to stem job loss; and more expansionary fiscal policies to allow expansion of social services, social security, and public sector employment.
Labour proposes a mass public housing programme, focussing on rental housing stock, to be driven by a housing parastatal. This proposal is critically important both in terms of job creation and in terms of building of infrastructure towards meeting basic needs - which has particular significance for women. The proposal explicitly encourages job creation for women. Further, its emphasis on breaking down apartheid geography, by building houses on well located land in the cities, promotes access of poor women to a range of facilities which were previously beyond their reach.
Labour emphasises that the types of infrastructure and assets that are created should benefit women through meeting basic needs and improving infrastructure in ways that lessen the unpaid labour of women e.g. building of health centres, schools, childcare centres and housing as well as programmes to improve sanitation, electrification and roads.
- Youth Brigades
- Wage Gap, Training and Quality of Jobs
- Taxation
- Industrial restructuring and sectoral summits
- Public Sector Policies
- Informal sector
- Stemming job losses in the economy
- Social security network and income grants
- Basic income grants, to be allocated to all adults, aimed at the unemployed and those living in poverty. This will reduce women's reliance on remittances.
- Extension of UIF
- Support for the social sector, the self employed and co-operatives
- Concessions for the unemployed
- Hearing the views of women
Around the world, women’s access to employment is constrained by various factors, including inequality in access to education and training, and productive resources, household responsibilities and gender stereotypes. Where women are employed, they face discrimination and disadvantage. They are employed in lower paid, less secure jobs and they have limited access to economic resources, including land, capital, credit and technology. Their contribution to the economy in terms of unpaid labour remains unrecognised and undervalued.
Women are the last to benefit from periods of employment growth, but they are the first to suffer when employment levels fall. The unemployment rate for women in South Africa, particularly rural women, is shockingly high.
Women are also found in jobs where standards are deteriorating. More women are being drawn into atypical work, as opposed to full-time, permanent, regular employment. This means that they face a severe problem of underemployment.
Women in South Africa, specifically black women, are worst affected by unemployment, poverty and inequality. This position is the result of a range of factors, but most serious is the legacy of decades of exploitation and oppression of black women under the apartheid system. In particular, the systematic dumping of women into remote rural areas, and urban ghettos to bear the burden of reproducing families, without support from the state, access to land or other means of livelihood; the exploitation of black women as a source of ultra-cheap labour, located in many of the worst paying, and most insecure jobs; and the perpetuation and distortion of the worst features of patriarchal structures in traditional societies, as well as society in general, to maintain women in a position of powerlessness. This is what has come to be known in South Africa as triple oppression- exploitation of women as workers, oppression as black people, and domination by a patriarchal society.
This is the legacy we have to confront today. Therefore a critical test of the proposals before the Job Summit, and ultimately agreements reached at the Summit, is the extent to which they comprehensively begin to address the plight of black women, their poverty, unemployment, and inequality in opportunity and status in society. Indeed, the Summit will only begin to address the crisis of unemployment, poverty and inequality more broadly, if the plight of women is seriously addressed. This needs to be done in a comprehensive way, which 'mainstreams' the concerns of women. In other words, proposals which merely propose a few add-on projects for women, or mention women at various strategic points, but fail to comprehensively address this structural oppression of black women, will have failed to change the plight of the ordinary women, unemployed, poorly paid, living in poverty.
Neo-liberal macro economic policies reinforce and deepen the poverty, and dependence of women, particularly in developing societies such as ours. The implementation of the economic policies of the current architects of globalisation has a devastating impact on the economic and social plight of women, in at least three areas. Cutbacks in state expenditure, mean firstly job losses for women in the public sector, and secondly, the cutback in critical social services which women depend on to reproduce their families. This simply transfers the costs of social services that ought to be borne by the state to the household, and to women in particular. Thirdly, under the guise of 'labour market flexibility' women are disproportionately the victims of retrenchments, underemployment, and casualisation. This means that women are increasingly concentrated, where they are employed, in low-paying, part time jobs, with little or no job security. Both the quality and quantity of jobs occupied by women are under attack.
We don't intend to engage in a detailed critique of the positions of other parties. However it is disturbing that business in particular, has taken the neo-liberal agenda uncritically on board, with apparently little concern for the devastating implications of this approach for women in particular, and society in general. It has come as a shock to us that representatives of business have advocated that already exploited and underpaid women (as well as youth) should accept lower conditions of employment! They claim that this is the route to fostering new employment creation.
Labour proposes to specifically target women for employment in PWPs. These can provide not only temporary employment, but also training and experience that can enable women to enter traditionally male-dominated fields and generally empower women with skills that they have been denied. Innovative PWPs could potentially include literacy classes and information about health, nutrition and family planning. Thus, labour emphasises a broader approach than simple poverty alleviation but sees PWPs as building infrastructure and sustainable employment
This is an innovative proposal to skill and empower the young unemployed for participation in the labour market.
Young working class black women face particular barriers to participation in the labour market and education.
In poorer families young women are often discouraged from taking advantages of such opportunities because of household duties.
Youth brigades must be linked to education and skilling for women.
Black women experience the worst forms of discrimination and disadvantage in the labour market and are concentrated in the most insecure low-paid and vulnerable segments of the economy. Labour’s interest is to ensure the implementation of strong interventionist policies that help overcome vertical and horizontal segregation and increasing casualisation.
The apartheid wage gap has a strong gender dimension which needs to be emphasised and consciously addressed.
Central to labour’s proposals is the emphasis on quality of jobs to counter the trend of casualisation.
Labour proposes a massive expansion of training, which should help to empower women to enter new areas of the labour market.
The proposal for job-sharing, the reduction of overtime, and the reduction in working hours, has special significance for women working in areas such as the service sector, which are characterised by long hours and low pay.
Labour's proposal for more progressive taxation, in particular VAT proposals are important for women, since the regressive nature of VAT impacts most strongly at the level of the household where women bear the brunt of poverty.
These proposals are aimed at expanding employment in sectors, and preventing job shedding in other sectors, some of which are dominated by women, e g textiles and the service sector, including through the development of industrial policies, beneficiation, re-negotiation of tariffs, and so on.
The state should be a model employer of women – internationally the public sector often offers secure and better quality jobs for women. Labour proposes a National Framework Agreement for restructuring the public sector, including expanding it where this is necessary to achieve required levels of service delivery.
Retrenchments mean job losses for women – this is completely unacceptable when the services women are offering- they are e g the majority of teachers and nurses, are in short supply in the country
Procurement policies should have specific requirements in terms of targeted job creation for women and mechanisms to deal with their participation e.g. childcare, parental rights etc.
Labour, together with the community, supports proposals for formalisation of the informal sector, including the extension of labour market protection and regulation. Access to productive resources for women, including land, natural resources, capital, credit, infrastructure, technology and skills is supported by labour.
This is a key labour proposal – a central part of the unemployment problem is job shedding not just the failure to create new jobs. Labour will continue to defend existing jobs and struggle to enhance the quality of jobs.
The proposal for monitoring job losses is also aimed at scrutinising and reinterpreting employment and unemployment statistics- which currently tend to mask unemployment, underemployment, and casualisation- all prevalent amongst women. The practice of excluding ‘discouraged workers’ from the register of unemployed , particularly conceals the extent of the unemployment problem amongst women workers.
Labour proposes to extend the Social Plan, to assist workers in sectors in crisis, to go beyond industries which have very large closures, such as the mining sector. We have argued that the proposed threshold of 500 workers (under which retrenched workers do not qualify for social plan assistance), is too high in many sectors, and that the threshold needs to be sector-specific. This is important in sectors such as service, where women are the dominant victims of closures.
Labour's proposal on social security argues that "structural unemployment is a fundamental problem which won’t be resolved in the short-term, (this) means that various support measures have to be undertaken to alleviate the plight of the unemployed, and to prevent conditions of destitution. This will also facilitate re-entry of unemployed people into employment, and limit the phenomenon of ‘permanently discouraged’ unemployed people, whose only recourse is to crime, or outside of the formal economy".
This is critical in tackling the poverty and deprivation in our country, which women experience most intensely. To this end, Labour has proposed a comprehensive set of measures to support those who are unemployed and living in poverty.
This programme involves a package of measures, some limited and short-term, and others longer term in nature. These include:
These hearings by the JOINT COMMITTEE ON THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE QUALITY OF LIFE AND STATUS OF WOMEN, are an important start to ensuring that the position of women is sharply addressed in the run up to the Job Summit. However, there is a need for a more active and public assertion, by women themselves, of their concerns. It is a negative reflection of our society, that voices of women have not been as directly and actively heard as they should be. This needs to happen, both in the run-up to the Job Summit, at the Summit itself, and critically in the process afterwards, where many of the issues will still have to be finalised.
