Journal for the Study of Peace and Conflict WORKING WOMEN AND THEIR WORLD: THE NEW GLOBAL WORK HIERARCHY AND WOMEN'S STRUGGLES OVER NON-WAGE WORK byTorry Dickinson
	Women and the Global Economy This paper explores three related aspects of women's lives in today's world: recent developments in the world-economy and changes in work, the reordering of gender relations, and woman-centered social movements that reflect struggles relating to changes in work. Woman-centered movements are explored in relationship to "selective globalization." This concept was developed to: l) identify common developments addressed by world-systems and globalization theorists and 2) examine changes in women's work and movements within this framework. "Selective globalization" is used here to emphasize that, although the world-economy develops as a global unit, investment and work patterns create differentiated, fragmented, and selective developments (Schaeffer 1995; Dickinson 1997). Since the decline of U.S. hegemony in 1975, changes in investment patterns have placed new pressures on the women, men and children who make up world labor. This paper illustrates the connections among selective globalization (which provides a framework for understanding the world-economy's contraction in some parts of the world), the impact of selective globalization on the gender order in wage labor and non-wage (or self-organized) work, and the emergence of recent women's global labor movements. Here the emphasis is placed on what often has been the forgotten half of women's work-related movements: the movements that primarily have developed within the context of non-wage work. Non-wage work has become generally defined as women's work in the global North and global South. Although males often assumed extensive non-wage responsibilities a century ago (Osterud 1991; Hansen 1994), girls and women generally have become more closely associated with non-wage work grew as the world-economy developed (Dickinson 1995; Davin 1996). Especially in the last two decades, there has been an increase in female-headed households and a growth in women's non-wage responsibilities (Blumberg et al. 1995; Turpin and Lorentzen 1996). The last twenty years mark the first time in the world-economy's history that women and women's protests about non-wage work, wage labor, the state and the global economy have formed a major focus of many global labor movements. Although regional and national women's work-related movements appeared before, woman-centered global labor movements did not become key forms of organizing until the 1980s, 25 to 50 years after the world-economy had touched even the most hidden corners of the earth. Since then, women's protests have created a new political center for women, for their families, and for labor. In the background of the recent history of women's work and protests, there is the question of what is happening to the world-economy itself. Is it just going through another round of reorganizing itself, as it has done after other hegemonic powers have declined and after specific cycles of expansion and contraction play themselves out? Are we going to have a long contraction in some parts of the world and not in others, a contraction that might be similar to Latin America's long seventeenth century (Gunder Frank 1969)? Is the whole world-economy beginning to contract in a long-term sense, and is this the beginning of the end of the system (at least as we know it)? I do not think we can say yet, but it does seem clear that in recent years there has been a contraction of the geographical space in which the world-economy grows. And this affects women's lives. Uneven development has continued to unfold in the last two decades, creating the greatest global inequities ever seen in the post-colonial period. Uneven development had always been a hallmark of capitalism, but it became an especially pronounced pattern in the last two decades. The restructuring of global capitalism required the formation of a new global work hierarchy, a hierarchy that enabled selective globalization to become the new formula for profit-making. This new global hierarchy has rested on the backs of women more than before, and women have responded by protesting and by trying to remake the social order. The changing global hierarchy offers few options for women, and so women have begun to formulate their own ways of organizing social life. In general, women now work for lower wages, substitute their own work for services and subsidies that used to be provided by the state, and improvise more as they generate income from subsistence work and petty producing. Women also have relied on informal networks for support, which have strengthened women's bonds and increased the level of cooperation between them. Within this changing context, women- and household-centered movements have tried to reorganize work and social life outside the orbit of the formal market and the state. They have tried to "short circuit" or bypass the market imperatives of the world-economy (Douthwaite 1996). In some cases, informal organizing has occurred in relation to formal institutions. And informal political efforts can always have spill over effects, eventually shifting the ways business and the state operate. Out of repolarized world, women's political actions have begun to rechart where both the gender order and global labor movements are headed. Women and World Labor Even though most people imagine individual wage workers and employer-run worksites when they hear the word "labor," labor also refers to the total work relations that allow working-class households to maintain themselves daily and generationally. These sustaining or reproductive relationships yield income in money and in kind, and include wage labor and non-wage work. When workers engage in coerced or freer wage labor, employers pay wages in money and/or wages in kind to female and male laborers. In-kind wages can include clothing, food, access to shelter, and access to land for growing crops. When at least one household member works as a laborer for a given time period (even if it is temporary), that entire household becomes attached to the world-economy and constitutes part of world labor. The vast majority of laboring households are attached to the world-economy through many simultaneously developing relationships with employers and the economy. There are multiple ways of being drawn into the world-economy's institutions (e.g., colonization, enclosures and expropriation, taxation, indebtedness, and/or market consolidation), there are probably many ways of being disengaged from the world-economy. But working in the capital/labor relation has been one of the central mechanisms through which households have become defined as labor. The wage labor/capital relationship and households' linkages with the market and the state only form part of global labor's universe. Even in most parts of the global North, wages do not cover the full cost of labor's reproduction. These reproductive relationships change as the moral and historical conditions of global wages become reconstituted, and as groups of working people are socially divided and redivided. The basic reproductive unit of labor, as it has been defined in the world-economy, is the household, which often consists of multi-generational, co-residential, family members (and sometimes some unrelated members and/or members who do not live together). Household members pool enough of their income together so that they can make ends meet by combining wage and non-wage resources (Friedman 1984). The household pooling process is uneven, and this includes its process of redistributing resources to household members from different gender and ethnic groupings. Women and girls often get overworked and short-changed. And many households do not have contributing adult male members. But the household--with its differential degrees of gender, age and sometimes ethnic divides-- typically has served as labor's fundamental unit of reproduction over the course of the capitalist world-economy's history. The combining of wage sources (including children's wages) and non-wage sources (including the use values created by women's cooking and care-giving) takes place within the household. Lower wage levels, especially those in the global South, usually require households to generate a larger proportion of their income through non-wage work. Even though we are living in late capitalism, the proportion of non-wage income has remained much higher than scholars typically have recognized. This is because the world-economy's development has brought the ongoing restructuring of poverty, a pattern that has not changed in any significant way, even in the contemporary period that follows the decline of U.S. hegemony. In many of the poorer countries of the world, one-half of household income--on the average--has often come from non-wage or informal sources; however, the precise mix of wage and non-wage sources changes over the course of the household's life cycle (Smith, Wallerstein and Evers 1984; Beittel 1992; Smith and Wallerstein 1992). Of course, there are tremendous income differentials in any part of the world, and there are many examples of households and regions in the global North that also are heavily dependent on non-wage and/or state-subsidized income (Stanley and Smith 1992). This should not come as a surprise because a large segment of the U.S. working population used to generate about one-third of its income until the mid-1930s, when the New Deal began (McGuire and Woodsong 1992; Dickinson 1995; Friedman-Kasaba 1996). And there is extensive evidence suggesting that the non-wage component of household income has become even more important today, especially in the global South (Blumberg et al. 1995). As means-tested state transfer programs in the United States have established more rigid criteria for assistance, low-income people have had to assume more responsibility for generating their own income, for addressing their growing personal indebtedness, and for creating their own family-based and local safety nets. The U.S. process is mirrored in the global South by the imposition of structural adjustment programs, which have brought rising interest rates (and declining real incomes), a reduction in state services and jobs, and internationally imposed programs that direct women to turn to non-wage work as a source of income stability (Sparr 1994; Blumberg et al. 1995; Caulfield 1996). Women's Non-Wage Work Movements as Global Labor Movements Today's women's movements are trying to form labor's own cooperative reproductive relations, which would complement and typically not replace household work arrangements. Although woman-led movements are approaching this goal from different vantage points, many non-wage global labor movements are trying to establish networks and institutions that create cooperative, reproductive relations. These social reorganization movements generally are creating a collective sphere that enables women and men to conduct marketing, producing and/or distributing elements of household work within a community-oriented framework. As members of different households work together to control and benefit from their individual and collective work, laboring groups as evolving communities begin to assume more responsibility for labor's survival and for community development. Women's global labor movements respond to social pressures that reduce wage income and state support, and resist outside pressures that dictate stressful changes in the components of total household income. New pressures placed on households include the decline in real wages, the decline in various types of state support, and the growing need to rely on non-wage income, even though natural resources used in non-wage work processes are disappearing. More specifically, poorer households in both the North and South often have been affected by lower wage incomes (partly through the rise of part-time, temporary, and contractual work), an increase in the amount of unpaid and paid non-wage work that needs to be done, decreases in state transfer payments and/or decreases in subsidies for education and consumer necessities (e.g., fuel), rising indebtedness of individuals and many nation-states, and decreasing access to unpolluted natural resources that allow families to grow food, raise animals, gather food, get drinking water, and harvest twigs and branches for fuel. Women and others engaged in these movements often try to establish new ways of living that will prevent these globally induced pressures from developing. By focusing on issues of group and community sustainability, these woman-centered movements address common concerns that relate to social reproduction. Sustainable production and marketing networks, which build on inter-household connections, often begin to develop next to household survival strategies. Although some appropriation movements cultivate a communal ideology [e.g., female and male peasants who seize land and urban residents who squat on and claim urban properties (such as the low-income women's tent city in Kensington, Pennsylvania in the late 1980s)], participants in most women's global labor movements are not trying to completely substitute cooperative, communal strategies for household survival strategies. Given how institutionally entrenched and personally sustaining most household and family relations have been (Wallerstein and Smith 1992), this is not surprising. These woman-centered movements share a common emergence that is related to the development of a reordered gender hierarchy. This reordering brought the restructuring of wage labor, non-wage work, and labor's relationship to state subsidies and services. Although some higher-income laboring households in the North have accrued greater income security, most laboring households have experienced the negative side of the socially created gap between rich and poor. An integral part of this restructuring has been an increase in women's work and a polarization of gender groups along certain dimensions. Movements in the global North learn from those in the global South, and vice-versa, making "local" and "regional" movements assume a global character. Now women in Washington, D.C. and Chicago, and in small towns in Western Europe, strain to learn about new approaches to social change that have been advanced in India, and women in Africa are anxious to learn about women's land- and skills-sharing movements in Canada and Brazil. Although "imported" organizing models usually are modified before they are used in particular settings, there is a tremendous amount of cross-fertilization between movements and organizations, enabling many women's movements to have global impacts. Women's movements, regardless of whether they are labeled as feminist or working class movements, have tended to be overlooked or dismissed as insignificant (Daines and Seddon 1994:80-83). Of equal importance, research on social movements (including the women's peace movement) "has underestimated the significance of the global connections within and between movements" (Roseneil 1997:55). The lack of understanding of the global influence of seemingly local and regional women's movements and actions has also led to fragmented analyses of women's work-related movements. In much the same way that women's right-to-vote movements moved from one country to the next, today's women's global labor movements spread from region to region, advocating for changes in work and income-related relations. Because of the diversity of their work and their broad understanding of family needs, women have addressed all income-yielding areas: wage labor, state transfer payments and subsidies to labor, and non-wage work (including unpaid and income-generating, self-organized work). Although the specific histories of local and regional movements differ (Rowbotham and Mitter 1994; Basu 1995; Wieringa 1995; Scott et al. 1997), many of these movements address how labor can begin to reorganize the totality of work life, and how it can promote more positive social development. Although movements push for pro-active change in localities and regions (which may lead to change in other regions), they sometimes also try to push back the forces of global development. Some feminists who are associated with these movements even have envisioned the rise of many regional, self-sufficient economies and the break-up of a world-economy (Mies 1986). Ever-present at the United Nations Nairobi Conference on Women in 1985, and then in full force at the United Nations Beijing Conference on Women in 1995, these women's global labor movements have taken the center stage in terms of reconceptualizing how work can and should be remunerated (Update on Beijing 1996). Today's issues relating to women's education, day care services, domestic violence, environmental preservation, female land-ownership, and asset development often are discussed in relationship to new ways of organizing and valuing all household and community work (Leonard 1995; Update on Beijing 1996). It is important to understand what woman-centered global labor movements are about, why they have developed, and how our lives are connected to them. It is problematic to make quick assumptions about what good social change strategies are and what they look like. Rather, we need to constantly examine what is really going on in the world and what we can do to make our lives better. We need to keep on thinking critically about the world and our place in it. Feminists and labor activists and supporters have had the chance to learn that social change strategies need to be reconsidered on an ongoing basis, as we learn from our experiences and as we take in new knowledge. Women in different parts of the world approach social change from a new vantage point today. In the 1970s many First World feminists believed that moving women into the job market and into positions where the state could be influenced would remove many of the basic ills of the patriarchal order. And these efforts continue today, both within the global North and the global South, but they often are cast in a broader framework. Especially in the last decade, women from different countries often have stepped away from a largely institutional focus on employment and the state and are introducing new social change strategies through women's informal and local networks, women's grassroots organizations, and woman-run international organizations that connect local and global issues. In particular, women around the world are exploring the importance of transforming the gender hierarchy through the female-dominated sphere of labor's self-organized informal and unpaid work. Of course, some women's groups now carry out both informal and institutional efforts. But the informal approach, chosen deliberately as the best political choice, is largely new. More woman-centered labor movements appeared at the same time that the new global organization of the work force started emerging. Women's actions responded to a number of changes that were taking place, including: the dimming of the hope that women's lives would be stabilized through the job market, the highly exploitative use of teen girls and women in export enclaves and on agricultural estates, the growth of the traffic in women, the reduction of real and often absolute wage levels, the decline of full-time work, the lengthening of women's total working day, the reduction of social and economic supports for women and their dependents by indebted and fiscally-squeezed states, and the ongoing degradation of the environment and household sustaining resources such as water, wood, and fertile soil. Forces of Change: Selective Globalization and the Reorganization of Wage and Non-Wage Work Following the decline of U.S. hegemony and the worldwide economic contraction that followed it, the renewed expansion of the world-economy required the development of a new infrastructure for global accumulation. And this new infrastructure, which represented a slightly altered form of the long-established global division of labor, centered around a global accumulation strategy that can best be described as "selective globalization." Selective globalization means that core-based companies (especially in the United States and Western Europe) increase their direct investments in core countries, and in regions close to the core (Eastern Europe); and transnationals decrease the proportion of their direct investments in the "Third World." This marks a relative shift in core-based transnationals' investments, and not the end of previous economic patterns. As some specific regions are selected in and other regions are selected out, the overall system of North/South stratification remains in place. There is not a totally new international division of labor, and neo-colonialism is not dead. The recent history of selective globalization simply means that for the 1980s and 1990s--and probably for the first two decades of the twenty-first century-- transnational corporations are strengthening the infrastructure for capital accumulation in more relatively risk-free regions. Transnationals now prefer to operate in countries that have strong states (Sassen 1998), and strong state rule usually is found in the core and in highly regulated, often core-friendly enclaves of the semi-periphery (which includes the world-economy's middle-tier of "sub-imperial" countries). De-capitalization by First World investors sometimes has followed de-colonization in parts of the Third World (or in the world-economy's periphery). This is certainly the case in many regions of sub-Saharan Africa. One of the main avenues of global accumulation continues to be debt collection from especially Africa and Latin America, continents that have many regions selected out of core-based, direct investment portfolios. The particular form of selective globalization and its application during this historical period are new, but the expansion of the world-economy has been a selective process for the last five hundred years. In the distant past, areas were targeted for colonization and for specific types of investments during particular cycles and secular stages of the world-economy's history. Now that mid- to late-twentieth century executives have seen the high costs of colonization, of running core-based businesses throughout decolonized countries, and of carrying out global accumulation in an environmentally devastated world that has reached its outward geographic limits (Wallerstein 1996), selective investments are made slightly more in the global North, in nearby post-socialist areas, in export enclaves, and in accessible and coastal areas of the semi-periphery and periphery. In these areas, the highly underpaid labor of teen girls and women--which is supplemented by extensive non-wage work--often forms the backbone of factory production (e.g., textile and electronic work) (Wolf 1992; Tiano 1994; Safa 1995). Studying the relationship between women's underpaid wage labor and women's necessary non-wage work would provide one way to examine the many ways that gender is tied to contemporary selective globalization. The restructuring of the global work hierarchy, which severed some of the coordinated linkages between capital and the state and reduced labor's economic security in the global economic system, enabled "selective globalization" to proceed apace. Part of the reason why the core and near-core areas look risk-free is that part-time and temporary work, decreased state obligations to labor, and new capital intensive equipment have already been introduced in these areas. Rather than the sale of goods, labor and land proceeding in an evenly distributed pattern throughout the world, as the concept "globalization" suggests, post-1970s development gradually created at least four different types of areas: some highly commodified areas in the core; some heavily invested areas in the countries with mid-level incomes and in parts of the global South (investments which were concentrated in relatively small export enclaves and free trade zones, in mineral- and oil-rich areas, and in regions with large rural estates, such as rubber plantations); some areas that reflected changing, but established patterns of underdevelopment; and then some areas that investors have quickly and possibly permanently deserted. Rather than a homogeneous red carpet of globalization being rolled out and intensifying the world-economy's linkages with all people, economic relations have assumed a checkerboard or quilted appearance. In both the North and South, highly industrialized areas with large capital investments are found next to areas where the formal economy is stagnant or contracting. In these contracting areas, informal, non-wage relations constitute a large portion of work and "productive" relations. Much of this work is done by women, whose role as the main and sometimes only breadwinner in households has grown throughout the world. How the economic quilt will look depends on whether there is little employment, few investments, and new reductions in state support. In other words, if labor finds that it is undergoing a process of involuntary de-linkage from the world-economy, this will affect the choices that laboring groups make. The economic quilt also is shaped by typically woman-centered or woman-related efforts to change households' connections to the world-economy. Women may create networks to bypass traditional markets, thus promoting labor's partial voluntary delinkage from the world-economy's institutions. All these avenues, which involve political struggles and political choices, take place in a world that is ever-changing where patterns of development and outcomes are unpredictable. For example, if they were successful, women's protests to increase state support for laboring households could increase households' level of integration within the world-economy. However, it is also possible that a redefinition of state power could lead in the opposite direction and reduce a nation-state's ties to traditional global institutions. The removal and decline of investments from many African countries, as well as the drop in U.S. investments in Latin America, has been noted in the literature (Turner and McMullen 1982; Kenwood and Lougheed 1992; Maitra 1996). One writer argues that African laborers' strong communal traditions, and their resistance to outsiders who tried to commodify reproductive relations, helped to create the continent's wage-profit crisis (Caffentzis 1995). I cannot say whether this was part of the cause of transnational corporation's partial delinking from non-export enclaves in Africa, but other social forces clearly have been at work. As competition between states in the core grew around 1970, states and corporate organizations in the core discovered that the costs of maintaining production in former colonies could be reduced greatly by massive disinvestments and by allowing local businesses to assume more risks (such as through flexible sub-contracting and putting-out operations). Selective globalization meant that transnational corporations became even less socially responsive to laborers' national demands. In the 1970s through the 1990s, underemployment surged, state transfers shrank, and families faced the world-economy's economic crisis. Employers and the state in both the South and the North suddenly provided less economic support through wages and state transfers, subsidies and/or services. During the last twenty years, the workings of these powerful institutions created great need and inadvertently contributed to a widespread understanding of direct wage and indirect non-wage exploitation. Direct wage exploitation refers to the underpaying of workers in wage positions; indirect exploitation refers to the use of household-based and often women's unpaid and family-organized work as a base that enables the payment of low wages. For example, a teen girl in Java who produces goods for export is directly exploited when she is paid a very low individual (and not family) subsistence wage. In some cases, teen girls on the global assembly line cannot sustain themselves through their monetary and in-kind wage income alone, thus compelling household members to support them. If family income provides assistance to working teens, then it can be said that families are providing a hidden subsidy to transnational corporations. This transfer of household income to transnationals enables these companies to pay wages that do not even permit an individual teen girl to reproduce herself at socially established levels. The partial reproduction of individual or family labor through household-organized work is a form of indirect exploitation. Indirect exploitation also includes labor's non-wage work that generates monetary or in-kind income. Labor's non-wage work actually supplements employers' low wages and gives a subsidy to employers, buffering them from the effects of competition. This hidden subsidy is provided when laboring females and males raise goats or chickens, sell food or other goods, grow vegetables for direct consumption, rent rooms or sell food to boarders, gather firewood and haul water, cook and clean, sew clothes, take care of children and elders, transfer gifts to relatives and friends, and even steal from other workers or from the wealthy. All of these kinds of work reduce the wages that employers have to pay to ensure the ongoing reproduction of labor. Although all of these activities are social ones (many which have positive meanings in family life), they also constitute forms of indirect exploitation. These household-organized activities, which have become associated with women and girls, supplement wages that do not meet individual and/or family reproductive needs. The workings of business and state institutions exposed how insecure the system was becoming for most laboring families in the world. By focusing on increased global profit-making and by separating states from corporations, the former "providers" of minimal income levels opened the door for new social movements to develop. Many of these movements evolved from the household-centered sphere, which was now expected to make up for income losses in other spheres. And many of these movements were feminist ones, which centered around women who were protesting the intensification of the gendered system of direct and indirect exploitation. Increasingly women sent another message along with "we don't like it"; they started to define a better way of setting up social relations. Removing Our Blinders and Seeing Labor's New Politics as Feminist Politics As people who are enmeshed in the everyday workings of the world-economy, we can only appreciate what we open our eyes to see. And sometimes this requires the intervention of other people and the educational impact of social events. Unfortunately, we often have been taught history within a very narrow framework. And we often see our own historical importance (and, too often, our presumed "lack of importance") within this narrow framework. Too many of us have learned to value only labor's strikes, other shop floor shakedowns, and angry demonstrations against the state. Although these important forms of protests will continue, the retraction of capital's and the state's support for labor will mean that new forms of protest will continue to appear. And many of these will be woman-centered protests because of the ways that paid and unpaid work has been changing. We can expect to see more tree preservation and "tree-hugging" movements, more bio-mass projects developed on the reclaimed commons, more land reclamations, more women's markets, and more sharing of land, seeds, and skills. We need be ready to value the full range of women's and men's economic, social and political activities. Labor's diverse array of social change approaches can only be appreciated if we actively seek and use knowledge of the past. A full history of work, one that takes into account both employer-organized and labor-organized activities, and one that includes all work done by men and women, leads to a broader understanding of women's politics today. The development of a more woman-centered world of work and politics has begun to prepare us to recognize liberating pathways to economic and democratic equity, which now may be unfolding before our eyes. Although the development of the world-economy created the conditions in which new women's movements emerged, women in different parts of the world have been promoting social change in active ways. Global women's movements structurally emerged in relation to the world-economy's workings, but without women's educational and organizing efforts, social movements would be very weak today. Moreover, we would not be developing a vision of what non-hierarchical, egalitarian and democratic social relations might look like in the future. Global labor movements are increasingly shaped and led by women, who often have a feminist orientation toward social life. And a central stage for women's global movements is not the factory floor, but households' informal terrain--the kitchen, the hearth, the yard, the street, the neighborhood, the locales that recently have been used by women to begin reclaiming the commons and reversing the 500-year old global enclosure process. We know that labor has generated its income and its ability to maintain and reproduce itself from both labor-organized household activity (the main source of labor's resources in the world) and from wage labor. For this reason, the partial claiming of responsibility for labor's political future by women does not produce an either/or situation when it comes to the location of political activity. It is not just a question of whether labor generates its transformative energy in the home or on the shop floor. Political actions that reclaim the commons through environmental, anti-state and self-empowering actions (such as creating women-run producing and marketing networks that bypass systemically-driven ones) potentially provide a strong base for other actions. These include confronting employers at the point of production, in factories and in geographically-dispersed, putting-out operations. The global assembly line is challenged at the factory gates and through women's well-established base of economic and social networks, which historically have sustained and nourished households. The World-Economy and the Creation of Female-Organized, Hearth-Centered Social Movements Once again, the world-economy's profit-making system has been based on the direct exploitation of laborers in capitalist work places (factory-based or in putting-out situations) and on the creation of indirect exploitation through income-generating work relations at home. Of course, the levels of labor exploitation in employment and at home have varied tremendously in the global South and the global North. In business, state employment and non-wage work, households in the South were economically disadvantaged, working a lot more in wage and non-wage work and generating a lot less income that was translated into a world-economic "monetary value." Within the South and North, especially when different historical periods are examined, there have been big disparities in total income levels, even within the same country at the same time (Smith and Wallerstein 1992). Women's pivotal role in today's global labor movements has grown out of the undervalued but essential non-wage and wage work done by female household members. As working-class families provided labor for the global economy's workshops and state sector, they simultaneously did extensive non-wage work in order to supplement inadequate individual wages. Third World working-class households, in particular, sustained labor (including children, elders, the disabled) through their own self-organized efforts, and not just through low-paid wage labor. The idea that the wage alone has sustained most of the world-economy's workers is a mystification. Rather, at least one-half of monetary and in-kind income that has sustained labor through the world-economy's 500-year history has come from the self-organized efforts of women, families, and various inter-household networks. Because of this, feminist scholars often define women's non-wage work as the pillar or base of the world-economy (Saffioti 1978; Benson 1997; Dalla Costa and James 1997). And women, in particular, and people in the South often have recognized how hard they have worked, how little their work has been acknowledged or valued, and, in recent years, how central their non-wage work and informal work has become (Beneria 1992). Women often work harder and longer at their paid jobs and/or at their self-organized non-wage work, earning very little income and generating little monetary value for each hour worked. Currently state-initiated efforts encourage the recreation of community ties in the United States. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actively intervene in the South to increase the level of indirect exploitation of women in the home and in their communities. In both the North and the South, the state now pushes women to generate more income and to assume even greater responsibility for the daily and generational reproduction of labor. Of course, the gender hierarchy and the socially-established rule of men was an integral part of this system of exploitation that rested on unpaid family work. Not only did the world-economy expand because the hardest, most underpaid and undervalued labor was placed on the backs of the world's poorest through colonialism and neo-colonialism, but women in the South and North were placed in the position of serving as the world-economy's invisible internal colony. Two secrets of the system have been: 1) the world-economy's expansion depended on non-wage work largely, and increasingly, done by women (work that historically reproduced most of the world-economy's laboring households at least as much as wage labor did); and 2) the cultural system of gender inequity created workers ("females") who assumed responsibility for keeping people alive and well. But what has been overlooked is that the "system" of indirect exploitation has created a long-established and continually transforming set of social relations that has the potential to become a force for long-term social change. Capital and the state socialized production and even socialized many aspects of laborers' lives and of their reproduction. And especially in the South and in relatively impoverished areas, women and their households always have had to organize new ways to share their reproductive burdens. They had to establish household-to household connections, including mutual exchanges of resources, bartering arrangements, and gift exchanges (Dickinson 1995). "What goes around, comes around" is more than a cliche; historically it has been an organizing principle of household survival and now it seems to be an organizing guideline for political activity directed against the world-economy's dominant institutions. Since they are at the very heart of the world-economy, women's political efforts in informal social areas have the potential to change the world as we know it. When growing numbers of women and men, along with national state officials, representatives of international financial institutions (like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) begin developing movements and policies that define women's work at home as the key factor for future development, there is at least a cultural revolution that is beginning to take place. Women's work at home, and all self-organized, paid and unpaid work at home and in the community, has begun to be recognized as a key to social development. For agents who represent the world-economy's institutions, women's non-wage work is seen as a key to social stability. For women and their families who are trying to figure out how to create long-term security, many non-wage women's movements are beginning to support human reproduction over profit-related production (Dalla Costa 1995:11). As women begin to value the connections among their work and the world around them, they are developing a vision about how the world should be. Today women have started to envision using households' self-organized networks (which generate and share non-wage income and resources) as the building blocks for a future society. Many women's movements relate to the maintenance, expansion and recreation of these labor-organized networks. Women are beginning to redefine the social meaning of these networks, which used to make up the heart of civil society (Dickinson 1995). They are no longer seen by some social change agents as primarily a hidden site of indirect exploitation, or as simply forming the "hearth" for the laboring class. These networks now are seen by many women in various movements around the world as the primary site for reorganizing society. Women's political choices closely reflect the global change that took place between the 1985 Nairobi conference on women and the 1995 Beijing conference. In just a decade, women's organizations and their delegates turned away from primarily defining the barriers and problems faced by women (including the non-compensation for much of women's work) to the collective project of using women's under-valued work as a means of transforming society and creating new economies. And during the previous decade, which is known as United Nations Decade for Women (1975-1985), women's organizations had moved from largely designing strategies for supplementing women's income to conceiving of women's economic development as an integral and necessary component of societal and global development. The transition from income supplementation to addressing gender equity as a component of social development for families and communities is known as the change from "women in development" to "gender and development" (Moser 1995). Although much U.S. feminist scholarship has overlooked the significance of the United Nation's conferences on women, these international forums served organizing sites that promoted the global transfer of women's ideas, approaches, and long-range thinking. Even though today's women's work movements are extremely varied, some activists have moved from thinking about labor market- and state-oriented "gender and development" strategies to thinking about "gender and development" strategies that emphasize the importance of valuing women's reproductive work over global production. This is where it seems that the really innovative work on gender and social transformation is taking place. Certainly there is a long distance between individual household survival strategies and sustained, collective efforts to construct non-capitalist, woman-centered producing and marketing networks (Women's Day on Food Conference 1996). But, before one becomes involved in designating certain activities as supporting the status-quo and others as revolutionary, it is important to appreciate how these work movements emerged from the reorganization of the global economy (which affected particular regions in different ways), common organizing and transfers of information at UN women's conferences, and common advances in popular education that were made possible by regionally and globally connected women's groups and organizations representing wage labor. Many of these movements help women become involved in collective decision making, allowing them to gain experience and skills in democratic settings. Women's social reproduction movements enable women to acquire economic development skills at the same time that they learn how to lead in democratic, egalitarian ways. The transformative implications of these changes in democratic participation should not be overlooked. Even though an outside observer may just recognize the importance of acquiring technical skills, activists develop analytical, organizing and community development skills at the same time they acquire technical skills. As women's global labor movements are exploring new ways to reorder the world of work, they are pushing working people to think about what our social priorities should be, and what democratic participation is all about. For example, since 1986 the Women's Self-Employment Project (WSEP) in Chicago has provided micro-enterprise training and micro-loans for women who have needed alternatives to underemployment and low paying, gender- and ethnic-segregated jobs. WSEP's programs benefited from the organizational lead provided by the first women's micro-enterprise project in Minneapolis-St. Paul, which was started in 1983. Minnesota's Women's Economic Development Corporation (WEDCO) had designed, implemented and evaluated many models for helping women become self-sufficient through micro-enterprise development. Many of the standards for operating women's micro-enterprise and loan programs were established by WEDCO, and Chicago's WSEP learned from the experiences and leadership provided by program operators and self-employed women in the Twin Cities (McKee, Gould, and Leonard, 1995). WSEP departed from the Minnesota models by stressing the importance of asset development (including buying property) and increasing savings. And, of great importance to micro-enterprise organizations in industrialized areas, WSEP implemented the peer lending circle model (which it borrowed from Bangladesh's Grameen Bank). Women's peer lending circles both create a peer support system and increase the rate of loan repayment (thus allowing other women to borrow). After applying this model successfully in Chicago, WSEP activists shared their knowledge with women in Los Angeles, who then started a peer-lending program (Douthwaite 1996:133-135). One regional women's movement in India (which grew out of a larger rural organization) has helped to sustain a community by promoting gender-inclusive, democratic decision-making practices. In 1985 women involved with India's SARTHI movement became actively involved in land rehabilitation projects, which restored communal lands that were affected by drought and overgrazing. SARTHI, or Social Action for Rural and Tribal Inhabitants of India, had been promoting women's leadership development and supporting local social change efforts. When women in Panchmahals, an impoverished region in the Indian state of Gujarat, realized that many of their non-wage work problems were associated with the destruction of the forests, they decided to restore the ecological balance on their common lands. There was a clear need to improve productivity, stabilize water sources, secure fodder for cattle, obtain fuel and natural foods, and improve people's health. All these goals were accomplished when local women began organizing in a variety of new ways. Women assumed non-traditional roles, which was a major change. They gained the support of male family members and community leaders, confronted landowners, organized work processes, operated bio-mass plantations to restore the environment, and conducted community and regional education. By identifying priorities and developing a holistic approach to solving problems associated with non-wage work, women in these communities became local leaders. Soon other communities asked these SARTHI women for help, enabling other women and men to benefit from the cross-fertilization of social change ideas. (Sarin 1995; Thomas-Slayter 1995). Concluding Reflections on Changes in the Self-Organization of Labor and the Rise of Woman-Centered Non-Wage Movements As centers of family life and community networks, and as relatively low-paid wage laborers, women "kept track of" globally-influenced changes that disrupted wage employment and non-wage work. Women were in social situations that enabled them to recognize and/or experience the cumulative impact of changes in direct and indirect exploitation. Women in different parts of the world were ready to act and they did. They quickly began naming and responding to the system's inability to support them; and the women in different parts of the world invented new ways for women and labor to support themselves. They fought for the political space to carry out new "economic" activities, which started new ways of reconstituting labor's civil society. And then women started to "institutionalize" these new means of support through informal networks and new organizations, gaining global support of and reinforcement by other women and some laboring men. Because of these efforts to institutionalize non-wage community networks in an informal way, women may turn out to be highly successful organizers in today's world. Their long history of inventing social life within the terrain of non-wage work has become translated, at this point into woman-centered struggles that benefit labor in general. In this sense it can be said that women and women-influenced groups now are in the forefront of developing global labor movements. In the global South and global North, households have continued to rely on an often unrecognized but very important aspect of self-reliance and self-provisioning. Women's self-organized non-wage work, including women's economic networking through petty producing and marketing work, forms a major component of labor's independent work. Even in the North in the early twentieth century, non-waged work continued to provide a very important part of household income, especially for low- to moderate income working families. Lower-income households in the core continued to organize and operate sustained, institutionalized informal producing and marketing networks until the 1930s. In the semi-periphery and periphery, these self-organized and worker-run networks have played a much bigger role. With low wage levels socially imposed by businesses and by states, laboring households had to generate a much larger share of non-wage income. The ongoing maintenance of these labor-organized networks and the recent memory of worker-run markets in the First World have provided a structural basis for women's organizing today. For example, in the United States and Germany, countries where labor was presumed to be completely dependent on wages before World War II, non-wage practices continued to thrive until state- and business-led initiatives eradicated informal producing and marketing, destroying much of civil society. But the memory of this work, its partial maintenance, and even its growth in some areas has helped to provide women in the North with a vision of how new economic relations can be created in the middle of the dominant system, without being an integral part of it. This vision is leading to the global development of women's ideas about how the long-term structural transformation of South/North relations can take place. For those women working within this transformational framework, direct communication and collaborative discussions between women in the South and in the North seem to be vital elements of this project. In summary, woman-centered groups consciously have begun developing their previously undervalued work and informal networks as a means of providing a social and economic alternative. Sometimes this model has been seen as a way of subverting and redirecting the world-system. But how successful can these disparate movements be, even when they seem to produce global echoes and reinvigorate other movements across impossibly long distances? Are these woman-centered efforts simply another expression of penny capitalism, a way to enable everyone to have something, as I heard one supporter say? Are they just another survival strategy, another means of coping in a harsh world, where survival strategies are discarded and then possibly rediscovered and then reinvented as the need arises? Are women merely recreating a civil society that will prop up the world-economy (now that wage cuts and state cutbacks have occurred), providing a safety net for laboring people? What will be the short- to long-term impact of women's neighborhood credit unions, lending circles, producing and marketing networks, Local Exchange Trading Systems (LETS), printers of local trading currencies, producing and service cooperatives, flexible and cooperative business networks in the countryside and city, and Third World craft producers who sell to female consumers of fair trade products? For the Third and First World participants in the Women's Day on Food Conference held in Rome in 1996, women's non-wage work can build new social relationships that may help form new subsistence economies. These woman-centered movements do have a lot of potential, especially when they try to influence the state and businesses, but we can only see the impact of these efforts if we follow their progress and critically evaluate their history. As full of promise as these women's movements are, many of these movements are based on local and regional networks, which may transform social life only in limited regions. The world today is a tumultuous ever-changing place, where greater chaos and disorder can be expected, as civil and regional wars, famine, massive disinvestments, reductions in state revenues and transfers, and organized and informal criminal groups reduce laboring communities' surpluses, services, and natural resources. The guilt-free relocation of capital and the obvious hesitation of some state officials to say, "Stop, there's got to be a better way," have created many power vacuums throughout the world, which have been quickly filled by criminals and warlords. Women, too, have stepped in to fill these power vacuums, as they have in the past. But during this period some women have begun to recognize that they may have a chance to help remake the world in a more egalitarian, more democratic way. And they seem to be remaking the world for themselves and their families, for their communities, and for all of us. Torry Dickinson teaches in the Women's Studies Program at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. This paper was presented at the Gender, Work and Organization Conference, Manchester School of Management, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, Manchester, England in January, 1998. © Torry Dickinson
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