gender
Workplace polices must change to reflect 21st century realities
It’s 2016 and we are moving backwards on work, care and family policies. Governments focused on balanced budgets rather than balanced lives have stymied support for workers with caring responsibilities – mostly women. This is at a time of increased global attention on gender, inequality and care.
At the G20 meeting in Brisbane in 2014, Australia signed on to a global compact to reduce the gender gap in workplace participation by 25 per cent by 2025. But who will care for the kids, the frail aged, the ill and people with a disability? In order to increase women’s workforce participation and build a fair Australia, governments will need to invest in a basic universal system of social care that supports all workers with caring responsibilities.
Those performing paid care must also be recognised and remunerated appropriately. But recent changes to work, care and family policies do not reflect the research evidence about how to build a national system of social care infrastructure that is attuned to the needs of Australian households and the economy.
This month’s budget retained radical cuts to Australia’s first national paid parental leave scheme which will leave many new mothers with less paid time at home with their baby, contradicting research evidence and World Health Organisation recommendations. Plans to restructure and enhance Early Childhood Education and Care funding by $3.5 billion have also been deferred until 2018. Complex implementation rules, reduced access for children from disadvantaged households and changes to funding rules for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services raise serious doubts about the reform package.
The demographic and research evidence tells us we need to be heading in a different direction.
Managing work and care is being cast, increasingly, as a private matter that individual households need to sort out for themselves. But research evidence on the total (paid and unpaid) working time of Australian women and men, and the associated time pressure, shows the current approach is unsustainable. Building a more effective system of social care services has become urgent.
Our workforce is increasingly feminised and ageing, with the formal retirement age set to increase to 70 by 2035. Workplaces will need to change to manage the needs of an older workforce. An ageing population also means more workers will have responsibility for aged relatives and friends – especially as the aged-care system increasingly relies on unpaid “informal” care.
At the same time, the paid care workforce is expected to grow to meet Australians’ demand for affordable and high-quality childcare, aged care and disability care services. These must be decent jobs that provide workers with the adequate wages and conditions essential for the delivery of high-quality care infrastructure.
A new report released by the Australian Work and Family Policy Roundtable, of which I am co-convenor, makes a series of policy recommendations for a care infrastructure to meet the needs of 21st-century Australia. Drawing on the research and expertise of more than 30 academics from 16 Australian universities, the report urges the next government to provide a minimum two days per week of subsidised early childhood education and care for all children, regardless of their parents’ workforce participation.
We call for the extension of the parental leave pay and dad and partner pay schemes to 26 weeks in the near term, and eventually to 52 weeks, alongside raising the payment level from the minimum wage and including superannuation. The report also urges a liveable aged pension as a cornerstone of Australia’s retirement system. This must be delivered at a level that allows those eligible to live with dignity in their old age, by continuing to index pensions to increases in average earnings.
We are not alone in calling for improved work, care and family policies. The OECD’s 2016 Going for Growth report urged Australia to increase government spending on high-quality early childhood education and care in order to meet the Prime Minister’s national productivity and innovation agenda. Earlier this year, the IMF advocated for the use of public debt to finance investment in key productive inputs such as education.
Right now, an erratic policy environment and absence of a predictable, affordable system of social care compromises the wellbeing of Australian households and our economy. We need to do much better if we are to ensure a good society where work and care can be combined with benefits for all. It is high time we got this right.
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This post originally appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald (30 May 2016)
The post Workplace polices must change to reflect 21st century realities appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
The Best Mother’s Day Gift? Paid Parental Leave
Please, no scented candles or toasters for Elizabeth Hill this Mother’s Day. What she really wants — what all Australian mothers want — is better paid parental leave, affordable childcare and a ramp at her local train station.
Last Sunday was my 15th Mother’s Day. To mark my first in 2001, I wrote an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald suggesting that the best Mother’s Day gift would be paid parental leave, affordable childcare, ramps and lifts in public spaces. No bunches of white chrysanthemums or fluffy pink slippers for me!
Since then, the daily challenge many mothers face in managing paid employment and care giving has morphed from John Howard’s ‘BBQ stopper’ conversation into a hot political issue that has shaped federal elections, budgets and political debate.
You would think all this attention might have led to some improvement in the day-to-day experience of Australian mothers.
But not really, and in many cases we have gone backwards. Over the past 15 years, paid parental leave policy-making has become a political sport, childcare services have become more expensive, and prams still need to be carried down steep steps at my local train station.
Being pregnant in the workplace remains fraught
There have been some modest improvements in workplace flexibility, with the right to request flexible arrangements for workers with caring responsibilities now embedded in the National Employment Standards. However, this right is not legally enforceable and remains weak in its application.
Many employers have their own flexible workplace policies, and in the past three years, some of Australia’s largest corporations have moved to mainstream flexible work practices across their workforce.
This has been good for all workers, not just mothers. Business also likes it.
But being pregnant in the workplace, and moving in and out of the workforce on account of children, remains fraught.
Discrimination against women who are pregnant and have care responsibilities has long been illegal in Australia.
Nevertheless, a national review undertaken by the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2014 found one in two Australian mothers experienced discrimination in the workplace on account of being pregnant, seeking parental leave or on return to work following parental leave.
Childcare needs overhauling, not tinkering with
Childcare remains a key issue for women’s participation in paid work. Australian women with young children have much lower rates of workforce participation than women in comparable OECD economies.
Over the past 15 years, childcare has been a difficult area of policy for successive governments. Efforts to reduce the out-of-pocket cost of childcare for parents by increasing public subsidies has only led to a constant escalation in the price of childcare making it unaffordable for many mothers.
Australia’s childcare system is in need of major renovation, not tinkering.
The Abbott government referred the problem to the Productivity Commission, and in the 2015 federal budget, announced a new Jobs for Families Childcare Package that includes more than $3 billion of new investment over four years. But there is a catch.
The new funding for childcare is contingent on cuts to family payments — Australia’s mothers are expected to trade more money in one policy area for less in another.
As it turned out, the Senate crossbench did not pass the deal and we head into the federal election with the childcare reform package pushed out to 2018.
Australian mothers will just have to wait. We always seem to be waiting.
Remember last Mother’s Day?
The biggest debacle has been paid parental leave. When I first became a mother, Australia was one of only two developed economies that did not have a national paid parental leave scheme (the other was, and still is, the USA).
In 2011, Australia introduced a national scheme providing 18 weeks of leave paid at the national minimum wage.
Early evaluation found the scheme to be efficient and effective, with significant benefits to low-income women and those working in small business. It was a good start, with plenty of room for improvement.
In 2013, the then leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, made paid parental leave his signature policy, advocating a totally new system that would deliver 26 weeks of paid leave to new mothers at full wage replacement levels on incomes up to $150,000 (later reduced to $100,000).
This was to be funded by a levy on the 300 wealthiest companies. The policy split the parliamentary Liberal Party, got business off-side (many of whom already funded their own paid parental leave schemes) and divided the women’s movement. Paid parental leave became the prime minister’s millstone.
Then, on Mother’s Day last year, Mr Abbott double-crossed Australian mothers, dumping his signature paid parental leave policy and slashing eligibility for the existing scheme.
Then-treasurer Joe Hockey, social services minister Scott Morrison and the prime minister spent Mother’s Day accusing women who used the government scheme of fraud, rorting and ‘double dipping‘.
The Senate crossbenches refused to pass the cuts, but the Government’s intention to slash the current paid parental leave scheme remains embedded in the 2016-17 budget.
We’re still waiting, fighting for it
Australian women deserve more respect and recognition than they currently receive.
Building a predictable, sustainable care infrastructure that meets the needs of women and their families has become an urgent task that requires serious resourcing. Great Australian feminist leaders and regular women alike have been arguing the case for more than 150 years — these things are not new!
But for all the policy debate, Productivity Commission inquiries, books, news stories and discussion we have not made much headway over the past 15 years.
Perhaps worse than that, successive governments have used up so much political capital on issues such as paid parental leave that it will be a very brave government that chooses to poke the hornet’s nest that policy support for Australian mothers has unwittingly become.
So my wish list for Mother’s Day 2016 remains much the same as in 2001: a strong national system of paid parental leave; high quality, affordable childcare and a ramp at my local train station.
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This post first appeared on ABC Online on 8 May 2016.
The post The Best Mother’s Day Gift? Paid Parental Leave appeared first on Progress in Political Economy (PPE).
The Scandalous Economics of Crisis in Asia
From shock absorbers to resilient economic subjects
Widespread feminist research following the 1997 financial crisis in Asia pointed to the gendered origins and impacts of the crisis on women. These studies point to how women and their households played a role as financial risk and crisis absorbers—a perspective that has now come to be celebrated as women emerge as risk averse and resilient economic subjects in current discussions of economic transformation in the Asian region.
For many states across Asia, the so called ‘global’ financial crisis left them relatively unscathed. My chapter in Scandalous Economics engages broadly with the theme of ‘crisis’ from a feminist perspective. It focuses specifically on gendered forms of economic crisis in the Asian region as well as the work that gender does in framing understandings of ‘crisis’ as well as ‘recovery’ in analysis of Asian economies.
A key theme of critical analysis of ‘Asia’s’ financial crisis of 1997 is how the naming of the crisis as a uniquely ‘Asian’ event caused by troublesome crony capitalists served to undermine calls for broader reforms to the international financial system. Dismissed as a financial ‘tsunami’ or ‘tropical storm’ occurring in a far-away part of the world in which norms of respectable financial behaviour were less well entrenched, the events of 1997 nonetheless had significant negative consequences for the poor and poor women in particular. Numerous researchers demonstrated how women bore the brunt of economic retrenchment across crisis-affected states (especially those that also experienced forms of IMF-led restructuring following the crisis). Women experienced higher levels of unemployment, and those in employment saw growing gender wage gaps and dramatic increases in working hours, often due to the taking in of extra home-based work. The crisis also generated gendered health impacts. For instance, increased numbers of women moving into precarious conditions in the sex industry and household crowding, a key determinant of disease, increased as female migrant workers returned to rural areas and households sought to pool their resources.
Rather than seeing these gender impacts as inevitable outcomes of the ways through which economic crisis will always disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society, I argue that women’s experience of crisis reflects the very gendered assumptions that underpin the governance of financial risk. The feminist economist Diane Elson terms this, ‘downloading risks to the kitchen’. Elson writes: ‘the financial system had developed so that risk was off-loaded from those who took risks (mainly high income men) to women, especially low income women, who had to absorb the risks, because they could not liquidate their responsibility for their children’. The financial system is seen to operate within the context of a gendered political economy that both enables risk taking or acts of extreme financial mismanagement typically by men and shock-absorbing within households usually by women to take place.
Gender, of course, matters to the framing as well as the absorbing of crisis. If we take for example, the accusation of ‘crony capitalism’ in Asia in 1997/8, we can observe that it contains some deeply gendered as well as racialised, assumptions. For example, Lily Ling argues that the IMF’s actions to discipline crisis afflicted Asian states can be read as a mechanism through which Western elites sought to reimpose dominance over unruly ‘hypermasculine’ tiger economies. More recently, gender has been at work in the framing of many of the corruption and other financial scandals to have rocked the region. Yinluck Sinawatra’s ousting by the military as Prime Minister of Thailand under the cloud of a corruption scandal has frequently descended into deeply sexist and misogynistic slurs. Malaysia’s 1MDB corruption scandal – in which the Prime Minister has been accused of channelling funds from the ‘development’ fund into his personal bank account – rapidly came to be represented as a fight between the (female, sensible, responsible and risk averse) head of Malaysia’s central bank governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz and the (big haired, big spending) wife of the Prime Minister, Rosmah Mansor. This displacement of crisis onto sexualised relations echoes the themes of the section on ‘Scandalous Sex’ in Scandalous Economics. And, in another interesting/hilarious twist, it appears 1MDB funds were used to finance Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street film which provides us with one of the most recent depictions of masculine financial excess.
But the point made in my chapter is that a focus on crisis – be it a more systemic financial crisis or a specific political-economic crisis triggered by corruption scandals – serves to mask ongoing forms of poverty and injustice faced by many women across the region. The idea of the one off ‘traumatic event’ needs to be understood as operating alongside every day and ongoing forms of crisis that affect women’s daily lives. This everyday crisis that stems from the overwhelming responsibility that women take for social reproductive work. A positioning that precisely facilitates particular austerity responses to economic and financial crisis to emerge (such as state spending cut backs, societal assumptions that women can easily bear the burdens of economic hardship and so on).
The lived experiences of gendered precarity, poverty and even destitution need to be better recognised in the context of financial crisis and austerity. In the chapter I also sought to draw upon many of the ideas and issues that emerged in my co-edited collection The Global Political Economy of the Household in Asia. This includes discussion of the rise of poor women’s migration for marriage and domestic work within the region, the impact of pension reforms on poor working women in Sri Lanka, the daily struggles faced by middle class women to balance work and caring responsibilities in states such as India and Malaysia, as well as the deeply gendered nature of precarious employment that have emerged in higher income states such as Japan. These experiences run counter to the way that Asian women have emerged in a number of policy writings as ‘good’ neoliberal ‘resilient’ subjects, who are better at managing micro finance loans, sending remittances home, managing household budgets and engaging in ‘good’ forms of socially-minded consumption. The economic resilience of much of Asia has led organisations such as the World Economic Forum to suggest that women were ‘at the wheel’ of the global economic ‘recovery’.
My chapter, however, suggests that we must dig deeper and uncover how and why this celebrated female empowerment and resilience stems from women’s deeply, unequal economic positioning. For example, to what extent do women’s spending and saving behaviours reflect personal vulnerabilities that are the result of the overwhelming responsibility that they have for social reproductive labour within households and the unequal terms on which they are able to enter the paid labour market?
Why we need to look beyond Justin Trudeau’s ‘Scandalous’ feminism
Being both a Canadian and a feminist, I cannot help feeling just a little bit proud every time Justin Trudeau, Canada’s newly elected Prime Minister, proclaims that he is a feminist. When asked about his reasons for appointing a cabinet that was 50% women, Trudeau infamously responded: “Because it’s 2015”. A few months later, during a discussion on gender equality at the United Nations, he reiterated his commitment to being a feminist…along with his insistence that this is a normal and natural thing to be. Lamenting the explosion that occurs in the Twitterverse every time he calls himself a feminist, as if it were some sort of scandalous admission, Trudeau explained: “I’m going to keep saying loud and clearly that I am a feminist until it is met with a shrug”.
This discussion is exciting and important, and Trudeau’s leadership might have some genuinely positive impacts on gender equality in Canada. Though it is only one aspect of feminist struggle, gender equality in political representation does matter and a cabinet that is equally divided between men and women is surely a positive development. Trudeau has also committed the government to investigating the national tragedy of thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls. This stands in sharp contrast to the position of the former (Conservative) Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who insisted that most cases had been solved and that this was a ‘law-and-order’ problem rather than a social problem rooted in a long and complex history of colonialism, poverty, racism and sexism.
However, we also need to remember that there is no single feminism, and while few would doubt that feminism involves a belief in the equality of men and women, at least in part, debates continue to take place about what this means, and about how we get there, and about what gets left out when we maintain a narrow focus on ‘equality’ between men and women without considering how this is further shaped by the social relations of class, race, nationality, sexuality, ability, etc.
Critical feminists of various theoretical persuasions – many of whom are featured in Scandalous Economics – have pointed to the limitations of the way that gender equality has been mobilised by particular politicians and state actors, global institutions, corporations and business leaders, philanthropic foundations and others. A central concern of these scholars relates to the ways in which the ideas generated by a movement for women’s liberation have increasingly been articulated in terms of individual rights. As Nancy Fraser explains, ‘Where feminists once criticised a society that promoted careerism, they now advise women to “lean in”. A movement that once prioritised social solidarity now celebrates female entrepreneurs. A perspective that once valorised “care” and interdependence now encourages individual advancement and meritocracy’. Feminism, it is argued, has become quite commensurate with neoliberal capitalism, and might even be implicated in helping to legitimise this politico-economic project.
My contribution to Aida Hozic and Jacqui True’s compelling collection takes on some of the mainstream narratives about gender equality. Specifically, I seek to document, unpack and critique three overlapping narratives that have emerged in recent years regarding the supposed benefits of liberalised finance for gender equality. These narratives have been perpetuated by a coalition of public and private forces focused on promoting a particular version of feminism that I have called “transnational business feminism” (TBF).
The first “women as saviors” narrative asserts that the greater integration of women, particularly women from the Global South and emerging market economies, into formal financial and labour markets will help to alleviate poverty, to sustain communities, and to stimulate stagnating national economies in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis. I outline the ways in which this narrative engages in what Hozic and True call “scandalous gendering”, by positioning women qua women as uniquely qualified to assess and manage financial risk, while systematically ignoring the extent to which the extension and deepening of global finance has perpetuated inequalities at the intersections of gender, class, race, and nationality. In these narratives, gender is also deployed as a means of saving, rather than challenging, neoliberal finance-led capitalism.
The second “technocratic equality” narrative argues that new financial technologies have helped to eliminate gender-based discrimination in financial and credit markets by standardising risk assessment models and ultimately removing the physical markers of gender, race, and class that may cause discrimination. I argue that in so doing, this narrative performs what Hozic and True refer to as a “scandalous obfuscation”, which erases gendered and racialised bodies as constitutive of the social relations of finance. That is, while this popular narrative assumes that risk assessment models and other innovations have eliminated discrimination in finance, this ignores the fact that gender, race, class and other factors play an important role in determining who has access to employment, who is able to accumulate assets, who is able to use formal banking services and other factors that determine these supposedly neutral scores.
The third overlapping narrative is the “womenomics” narrative, which emphasises the profits, or “gender dividend,” that can be made by promoting women to the highest ranks of banks and investment firms. I argue that one of the problems with this narrative is that it scandalises reimaginings of approaches to gender equality that do not conform to the dominant neoliberal model that has been formulated by corporations and that understands empowerment in terms of individualised forms of economic empowerment through labour and financial market integration.
So, while I’m pleased that the leader of Canada isn’t afraid to call himself a feminist, I also wonder what he means when he says that “equality is not a threat, it is an opportunity”. What kind of equality are we talking about and for whom is it an opportunity? Does ‘equality’ entail the redistribution of resources in a way that is more gender-equitable and supportive of domestic labour (the majority of which is done by women)? The Liberal Government’s first federal budget doesn’t give much indication that this is the case. Is it an ‘opportunity’ for women’s groups to articulate collective visions for social change that might include the redistribution of power and resources between countries and social classes? Trudeau’s invocation of Sheryl Sandberg, Melinda Gates and Zhang Xin as “powerful and vocal role models” who show that “women belong at the management table, the corporate board, the science lab, or running large tech and engineering firms” suggests that the ‘opportunity’ he has in mind is an invitation for certain elite women to join men at the helm of the institutions of global capitalism. There is also an ‘opportunity’ for these companies to benefit from women’s labour and their growing power as consumers. As Jacqui True notes in her contribution to Scandalous Economics, “[c]apitalism is driven to bring everyone with purchasing power into the fold, while erasing the political salience of the unequal gendered relations that position women working double days for love and for money”.
While a feminist Prime Minister offers ‘opportunities’ for progressive social change in Canada, as I argue in my contribution to Scandalous Economics, contestations over the meaning of feminism continue to matter. I want Trudeau to continue to dismiss those who think of feminism as a threat. However, I want him to do so from a position that sees beyond the business case for gender equality and challenges the neoliberal commitments of Transnational Business Feminism.
Yulia Maleta, Advocating an Ecofeminist Sociopolitical Economic Model
Yulia Maleta (University of Sydney), 'Advocating an Ecofeminist Sociopolitical Economic Model'
This is the fourth seminar in the Semester 1 series of 2016 organised by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
Date and Location:
21 April 2016, Darlington Centre Boardroom, 4:00pm – 5.30pm
All welcome!
Scandalous obfuscations of crisis in Europe
Europe’s post-2008 landscape has obscured from view both the gendered, authoritarian nature of crisis responses and the genesis of political crises in the greater burdens placed on households.
My chapter with Stefanie Wöhl in the Scandalous Economics volume focuses on the role of the state at the national and European level in shaping the trajectory of Europe’s political economy before and after 2008. We ask two questions: what trends and patterns can we observe in crisis responses across Europe? And can these observations help us understand the growing political volatility and polarisation that we see across the continent? Our answers highlight the highly gendered and precarious nature of capitalist states.
If anything, our claims have become even more relevant since we completed the chapter in 2015. Spain and Ireland, featured in our chapter, have in recent years been characterised by widespread discontent with the status quo. Yet, these two countries are now among the best economic performers in the European Union, especially in terms of economic growth, meaning that they are being touted as the ‘models’ of successful austerity programmes that should be followed by Greece, Portugal and others.
We should not be surprised at this apparent contradiction. The gendered nature of the European political economy has been reinforced since 2008, with clear political consequences. For example, women’s disproportionate employment in part-time and temporary jobs has been exacerbated. The disappearance of ‘gender budgeting’ from state policies has demonstrated that gender equality is an optional ambition rather than a ‘necessary’ measure such as welfare cuts. Moreover, these cuts have affected women more than men and have forced households – and usually women within them – to take on increasing levels of unpaid care and related duties. And finally, there has been a strong bias in European crisis responses to protect financial institutions and neglect households with mortgages by bailing out the former, insisting the latter continue to meet their obligations. The impact of these responses has been to strengthen the public-private distinction drawn in the political economy, perhaps the key indicator of the unequal gendering of society. The artificial distinction between public labour (‘productive’) and household labour (‘domestic’) generates a continual devaluation of the latter work in both financial and symbolic terms, with much of it remaining unpaid and feminised. Hence the private household is constructed as a site which is ‘naturally’ more appropriate for women to dominate, for the norms and capabilities associated with women – such as care, emotions, passivity and sharing qualities – are also present in this construction.
Central to these processes has been the state. European states and the EU itself have gradually reconfigured into increasingly authoritarian entities, with many countries having constitutionalised austerity via changes to legal mechanisms that mandate a balanced budget. This makes it more difficult for future generations to reshape public policies and institutions in more progressive, equality-affirming directions. In tandem, the EU has developed a range of new legal mechanisms, such as the ‘Six-pack’ and the ‘Fiscal Compact’, which reinforce or prescribe such constitutional changes in member states (i.e. even in those countries which are not struggling). These developments violate European law, with, for example, the European Parliament being sidelined and proposed measures being implemented not if there is agreement, but only if no objections are raised within just ten days of them being submitted. Such measures regularly promote seemingly permanent austerity as the only game in town.
All of this reflects a masculine political and economic order that increasingly relies on unpaid household work and more generally on private households rather than the state to absorb the effects of crisis. It also promotes competitiveness and austerity on a symbolic and material level through the emphasis on ‘quick’ (i.e. undemocratic) decision-making and ‘necessary’ legislation (noteworthy here is the term Six-pack itself). Further, these reforms are especially painful for people in countries which were ‘bailed out’ by the ‘Institutions’ (the former ‘Troika’ of the European Central Bank, European Commission and International Monetary Fund), because the protection of banks led to large budget deficits and rapidly increasing levels of state debt. Ireland, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus were bailed out via the European Stability Mechanism, which imposed strict austerity measures in the name of balanced budgets. This has damaged public services such as education, health and care, as well as other public goods and provisioning, and overall has led to a rapid escalation of inequality. In Ireland, examples include the introduction of new, highly regressive taxes, and in Spain there have been savage cuts imposed on regions and therefore on public services.
In all, the combined pressure on households from unemployment, lower incomes, debt repayments and reduced state provisioning has left them increasingly the target for an intensified ‘accumulation by dispossession’, with consequences such as increasing levels of homelessness, inequality and emigration. Households are not infinitely malleable, able to absorb everything that is thrown at them, and examples can be found across Europe, not just in so-called crisis countries (see the rise in food bank use in Germany).
It is not surprising that there has been widespread discontent with these developments. Spain has witnessed massive resistance against austerity and especially housing evictions – notable are the Platform of Those Affected by Mortgage Debt and the Indignados movements and the rise of the new left-wing party Podemos, which won 20% of the vote in the December 2015 election. Ireland has often been viewed as more accepting of its fate, but there was an Occupy campaign in 2012, which has since diffused across the country, informing more local protests (such as against the water charges). Moreover, the continued fall in overall support for the dominant parties (Fianna Fail, Fine Gael and also Labour) indicates a gradual delegitimisation of the political establishment, as shown by the February 2016 election (combined, they won 57% of the vote as opposed to 73% in the ‘earthquake’ election of 2011). At the time of writing (4 March 2016), both countries are struggling to cobble together any kind of government: if one is formed then it is likely to be unstable, and if fresh elections are called then they are unlikely to produce a significantly different outcome.
Therefore, although our chapter paints a largely negative picture, it is clear that the growing entanglements between authoritarian governance practices and households which are the target of such practices are producing – and will continue to produce – new forms of social and political struggle. These struggles often seek to create and live in a different, more equitable, kind of world to the one being imposed on them. This story is far from over.
Scandalous Blaming of the Poor: UK austerity politics
As outlined in this series of blogs, Scandalous Economics is a collection of essays that explores “how scandals – and scandalous uses of and/or neglect of gender – have helped narrate the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) into political oblivion”, as Aida Hozić and Jacqui True outline in their introduction. Principally, there is the scandalous neglect of feminist insights on inequality in all major books on the crisis – whether by Mark Blyth, Daniel Drezner or Thomas Piketty.
Johnna Montgomerie and I argue that this is a critical missed-opportunity to challenge the root causes of the crisis: the very structure of finance-led growth that intensifies along established inequalities of gender, class, race, ethnicity and/or sexuality. Scandalous Economics is a corrective to the scandalous neglects in the GFC scholarship that brings together scholars whose work retells the story of the causes and consequences of the crisis paying particular attention to its gendered and racialised nature.
Our contribution in the volume highlights how historical memories of austerity as ‘difficult but necessary’ are evoked to rebuild silences around the deeply unequal process through which austerity is made possible. Key silences resonate around how ‘the household’ sector (more so than ‘private’ sector) has borne the majority of costs for bailing out the banks as well as absorbing most spending cuts to public services. Indeed, why the bank bailout policies were not a scandal perplexed even the then Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, in his testimony before MPs in 2011:
The price of this financial crisis is being borne by people who absolutely did not cause it…Now is the period when the cost is being paid, I’m surprised that the degree of public anger has not been greater than it has.
Feminist political economy provides the only relevant set of conceptual tools to understand how public welfare for corporations is justified and yet public welfare to households vilified. The non-scandal of public subsidies to the Financial Services Sector is in effect the ‘strategic forgetting’ in the political economy of welfare reform in Austerity Britain. This reform program in the UK has been designed and justified using the discourse of scandal and unsustainable costs to taxpayers. Our contribution challenges such forgetting by looking at how poor women with children were made targets of scandal in post-crisis Britain, depicted as burdens to the public finances. These women became objects and subjects of reform to fix ‘Broken Britain’ in the process. Austerity is a new form of ‘governance by lifestyle’ that has put a sharp focus on ‘families’ as subject/objects of reform. This is pivotal to the gendering of the process of welfare reform. We demonstrate the significance of these reforms showing how they evidence a fundamental shift in the role of social policy from addressing the causes of poverty to managing (or governing) the effects of poverty.
‘Governing by Lifestyle’ allows policy-making to design new ways of governing using crass stereotypes rather than actual evidence. In practice, this means policy makers are able to cast their bureaucratic gaze on the lifestyles of ‘private’ households. The ‘strivers’, the ‘skivers’, the ‘Troubled Families’ are not actually in receipt of substantial amounts of public money but they are at the forefront of the State-led moral reform initiatives. Bankers, by contrast, are in receipt of trillions in public subsidies and tax-payer guarantees; however, ‘Banker Bashing’ is strictly forbidden by policy makers because criticising professionals for their ‘coke and whores’ lifestyle is supposedly an anathema to rational, liberal policy making. However, the post-crash UK economy has seen a worrying shift in which a state-led (or the party political elite) initiative to morally reform the life choices of the underclass is causing harm to wider society. Indeed, this political norm took a dangerous turn with the rhetoric of ‘Broken Britain’ (although the rhetoric has now changed, the practices remain the same) seeking to legitimise the Austerity narrative through actual social policy. As a result, the ‘skivers’ and ‘generations of workless’ that actually do not exist in any empirically observable reality must now be found, identified and reformed with minimal democratic oversight and even less evidence of the rationale for such reforms.
Austerity in Great Britain shapes government and media discourses about the poor as being a burden on tight public finances, justifying cuts to welfare and design of new interventions targeted at disciplining the poor. These policies and cuts demonstrate how scandalous economics can be a classic bait and switch so infamous in the mortgage finance market before the 2008 crash; while it is the City of London and the failure of austerity-led growth that actually cause high public debt levels it is “troubled families” and the like, that require government intervention in order to bring public finances into the black. State policies here displace the real causes of financial crisis and obfuscate structural inequalities. They remake “society” by casting economic problems, which could be addressed through economic policy, as social problems, individual problems, and problems of troubled families, which to the anathema of Hayekian neoliberals can be addressed through social (engineering) policy.
Donna Baines, Moral Projects and Compromise Resistance
Donna Baines (McMaster University), 'Moral Projects and Compromise Resistance: Resisting Uncaring in Nonprofit Care Work'
This is the second seminar in the Semester 1 series of 2016 organised by the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
Date and Location:
24 March 2016, Darlington Centre Boardroom, 4:00pm – 5.30pm
All welcome!
The Scandalous Economics of Abortion Access in the USA
Abortion is routinely portrayed as a dominant feature of the American ‘culture wars’; yet this categorisation misunderstands the fundamental place that reproductive choice has in women’s economic position in society, and the way that lack of access to reproductive healthcare compounds numerous intersecting inequalities.
In the US today, the battle over reproductive rights is a primary site at which gender and crisis intersect. The framework of ‘Scandalous Economics’ illuminates the way that the normalisation of the current economic (dis)order also entails an economic reordering of gendered social relations. In this post, I want to draw out some of the volume’s themes to think about the crises of reproductive rights in the USA where the politics of scandal are being rapidly mobilised to erode women’s bodily autonomy and reproductive choice. The conceptual and empirical contributions of Scandalous Economics are timely and essential for understanding gender politics, even outside of areas traditionally understood as economic and as we move further away from the beginning of the (ongoing) Global Financial Crisis.
In 2015, anti-choice activists released undercover films which (falsely) purported to show misconduct by Planned Parenthood regarding the disposal of fetal tissue. These videos sparked a wave of anti-choice activity by legislators and activists, who began efforts to remove federal funding from Planned Parenthood. Perfectly encapsulating the productive power of scandal to “generate both new meanings and reassuring boundaries” (True and Hozic, introductory post), the Planned Parenthood video scandal functioned as a visible and emotionally charged vehicle to boost existing efforts to erode reproductive rights by cutting funding at the state and federal levels. This is but one indicative sign of a larger shift in the attacks on reproductive rights, which mobilise broader ideas of economic crisis, government overreach, and the need to defend ‘the taxpayer’ from misspending of public funds. In late 2015, then-Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush expressed this prevailing discourse when he said: “I’m not sure we need half a billion dollars for women’s health issues”.
The reproductive rights of American women, though tenuous and under constant threat, are due in large part to legal gains which protect the right to abortion under the 14th amendment right to privacy (established in Roe vs. Wade, 1973). Despite legal challenges which have led to increased restrictions, the core of Roe has held, guaranteeing women a constitutional right to abortion. Given the legal status of abortion, anti-choice advocates have increasingly turned away from the courts and sought to restrict access to reproductive choice through economic means, chipping away at the practical capacity for women to seek out abortions to which they are legally entitled.
Most visibly, this strategy has resulted in numerous state-level laws which restrict the ability of women to access abortion by requiring onerous waiting periods between initial doctor’s visit and the termination procedure. These restrictions are particularly harmful for women who live in states with few clinics that perform abortions, because they require most women to make long drives and stay several nights away from home to be near the clinic. Indeed, burdensome restrictions which force clinic closures mean that five states – Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming – have only one abortion clinic. Such laws make reproductive choice all but impossible for the wealthiest women who have the time, funds, and support networks to make these trips.
The attacks on Planned Parenthood therefore represent only the most recent example of efforts to erode reproductive choice for low income women in the USA. Planned Parenthood is an essential provider of reproductive healthcare for women; it is moreover the only source of healthcare for many low-income women. In December 2015, the US Senate passed a bill to de-fund Planned Parenthood. At the state level, Ohio, Wisconsin, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Texas and Utah have defunded Planned Parenthood. Planned Parenthood is legally barred from spending any federal funding on abortion services, yet this fact features little in the public discourse.
These examples, among many others, demonstrate that the numerous and sustained attacks on reproductive rights have increasingly mobilised an economic logic to restrict access. Moreover, they demonstrate, as the Reproductive Justice movement has long stressed, access to reproductive healthcare is the product of a broader array of compounding socioeconomic inequalities which render the language of ‘choice’ and ‘freedom’ wholly insufficient for conceptualising the experiences of women at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression. The right to abortion is constitutionally protected in theory, but the stark inequalities which stratify American women mean that access to abortion requires resources, not merely rights.
As the Scandalous Economics volume demonstrates, the American union of religious fundamentalism and neoliberal economics that has resulted in this multi-faceted assault on reproductive rights is but one manifestation of the way that post-crisis economic governance has eroded women’s access to rights and resources. The purported need to scale back federal spending provides a convenient cover for a strategic and concerted program of restrictions on the access to reproductive choice, the effects of which are concentrated on restricting the freedoms of low-income women.
Sex, Lies and Financial Crisis
Pervasive lies and scandals inflected by gender and race/ethnicity are the early-warning devices for financial crises and the symptoms of their wilful forgetting.
Over the last month the turmoil in financial markets underpinned by the slump in global – and especially China’s – growth has caused alarms to go off. Some commentators have speculated that this is the return of the financial crisis; that February 2016 looks an awful lot like September 2008 before the collapse of Lehmann Brothers; that even America’s economy is not strong enough to buoy the world economy up; it may not even be strong enough to keep itself afloat.
You thought it was over but the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) has not yet ended – the cycles of bust, apparent recovery, and austerity with no ‘boom’ in sight endure. Crises tend to be long-lasting because they are generated by structural tensions and political actions and because they have grave, painful, and often violent ongoing consequences; but crises are also construed by narratives, visual imaginaries and public performances that frame and interpret them in particular ways – compressing the time to respond and delimiting the possible responses. The consequences of the GFC should be apparent to all by now – high youth unemployment, extreme indebtedness, declining real wages and state services, ever increasing political and economic inequalities, high rates of suicide and domestic violence, stagnation and deflation, political extremism. But, at least in the rich world, we continue to be distracted by profoundly gendered and racialised debates about immigration and border control, affirmative action, Planned Parenthood and/or the nature of our family unions.
With all this white noise, how would we even know if a genuine financial crash is imminent or if we simply need a survival guide for the new normal of slow growth? In Scandalous Economics: Gender and the Politics of Financial Crises we argue that lies about economic decision-making, purported by powerful, often conservative, elite (fe)male subjects talking up rock solid markets, and scandals involving sex and moral outrage against ‘others’ are the early-warning devices for financial crises and the symptoms of their wilful forgetting.
What better early-warning sign of a possible crisis than the scandalous – gendered – narratives of wilful forgetting on display this January at Davos, Switzerland, where the global elite meet annually to plot challenges and solutions to problems of the world economy? According to the theme of this year’s meet, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is well under way and it will be delivered by women. So say Davos men who represented 93% of the participants at the gathering. Women were again a minority among the movers and shakers. But those who were there – the TED women of the global economy – had an important role to play: to share messages of hope and optimism in the face of political and economic uncertainty and to sell digital disruption as the panacea for the world’s increasing inequalities, including gendered ones.
Gathering at The Girls’ Lounge, “a really special place,” the women of Davos were also concerned that the narrative about gender in the global economy needed to be changed. They suggested developing “a different vocabulary for moving the needle so that gender equality can be discussed as a business, growth and diversity issue—not a women’s issue.” Thus it was suggested “gender inequality” could be substituted with “talent” or “archetype inequality” to help speed up diversification of corporate boardrooms, an imperative in the unending quest for better financial returns post-GFC. In short, proposed these CEO gals, among them Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and ‘Lean-in’ fame, if women could just forget about being women (“girl entrepreneurs” would suffice) – they could lead the world to the new dawn.
And yet the crisis has never left us.
As the doco-pic, The Big Short, nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards this month, exposes, financial markets are lies built upon lies where banking institutions pretend there’s value in the products they are selling us and we pretend to believe them. The fundamental flaws in this consensus only unfold in times of catastrophic economic downturns, thus confirming Mary Poovey’s analysis that financial crises are always also “crises of representation,” opening the chasm between value and its vernacular representation – money.
Scandals, we argue, thrive in times of financial uncertainty because of their productive power. They represent a specific genre of crisis narratives; as highly publicised stories about personal transgressions they are intrinsically gendered and the perfect stop-gap measures for the “crisis of representation.” When the ground seems to be shifting, scandals can generate both new meanings and reassuring boundaries. In the aftermath of the GFC, they have pushed financial crisis away from the political limelight where the politics of our economic life in common could be publically debated. Just think of the running headlines – from DSK to General Petraeus, from Julian Assange to Payton Manning, from Bill Clinton to Hillary Clinton, from Donald Trump to Donald Trump. Scandals put women back in their place by seemingly doing them a favour. And so, ever since the GFC, the ‘spectre of gender’ has been paradoxically visible in both scandals about the sexual exploits of men and in rational arguments about the returns from women’s inclusion in the financial order.
If this taster of the goings-on at the pinnacles of global governance is not enough to persuade you that gender is back – and with a vengeance at this ‘ensuing crisis’ moment, then we entice you to read the rich plurality of contributions from around the world in our volume. The feminist political economy analysis featured in Scandalous Economics promotes a way of seeing beyond the silences and the scandals that have constructed an impoverished field of policy options. Feminist analysis helps us think ethically about the global political economy starting from the social relations that constitute its institutions and practices. Let us share a hint from Scandalous Economics: when trying to understand the recurrent crisis follow the women and the narratives in which they are featured; where women are mentioned or neglected may tell us more about the future of the global economy than watching, or [worse] predicting movements of the stock market.