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When capitalism lapses into crisis, women are first to be attacked

The lay-offs implemented at Hyundai Motors in August 1998 were a major example of the collaboration between trade union, management and government, of how women workers were sacrificed during restructuring process. The tacit consent between the four parties was to include almost 170 women canteen workers as the foremost targets of the lay-off plans. The management’s proposal was accepted by the union, and it was decided that women workers be laid off and the company canteen be taken over by the trade union. In early 1999, the National Agricultural Cooperative Headquarters induced one out of 762 married couples within the company to quit during its restructuring process. In Korean society where the ideology of man-as-breadwinner lies deep and where the atmosphere that man’s working rights come prior to that of woman’s prevails, the ‘wives’ decided to quit their jobs. Women could not even think of complaining. A small number of women are at the moment fighting the case in court. However, at first ruling, the court justified the ‘sexist lay-offs’ of the capitalists by saying that man-as-head-of-household is merely a common sense, manifesting the discriminative nature of the legal system. The management’s logic that the lay-offs were inevitable, was proved to be a lie, as 66% of the 688 women laid-off where immediately re-employed as part-time workers. Now, the rate of irregular work, which is the major form of unstable employment, outruns that of regular work. In particular, instability of women’s work is becoming more serious. According to analysis done by the Statistical Office in August 2001, the number of irregular workers stands at 7.37 million, which is 55.7% of the entire workforce. More women than men are irregular workers, and out of the entire female workforce, more than 70% are in irregular employment. And these ‘official statistics’ exclude specially-employed workers. Capitalists have designated these specially-employed workers -insurance saleswomen, golfcourse caddies etc- to be ‘individual businesses’ and have shrewdly tried to hide exploitation of these workers. Also, the statistics exclude women who are employed in the so-called sexual services industry. If we were to include all these women workers, the rate of irregular women workers would be much higher.

Women are turned away from the welfare system simply because of their sex

For women, the problem with welfare is much more serious than one tends to think. Women are forced to be dependant upon “family welfare” (earned by the male head of family) and are forfeited from gaining direct access to welfare benefits. Whether or not her husband can actually support her, as long as she has a husband, as long as she has a son, women are denied from becoming direct recipients of social poverty rescue schemes. This is not all. Women are discriminated even within the four major insurances (pension, health, employment and compensation for industrial accidents). As for pensions, full-time housewives cannot obtain independent rights to receive benefits. She is subjugated to the male supporter. Even with employed women who do have independent rights, because the wage gap between the sexes and the number of irregular workers are high, the benefits are lower compared to men, or in many cases are deprived of the right altogether. It is also being proven that those women eligible to receive pensions are, in fact, surviving family members of a deceased male supporter.

Why is the reality of women’s lives as unstable workers left in the dark?

Livelihood and working rights of women has traditionally been categorised as a problem limited to women. Thus our struggle has been lonely and hard. We have had to face the patriarchal oppression at the same time that we face neoliberal oppression of capitalists. We were targeted as objects of negotiation with capitalists during restructuring, simply by the reason that we are women. We could not cry for help when we were deprived of our just working rights, simply because we are 'wives'. The workers’ movement, until now, has either chosen to continue to be indifferent to the attack on rights of women workers, or has argued that separate organising of women to gain working and livelihood rights will undermine the 'unity' of the entire working class. This idea of 'unity' has already historically been manifested to be one that does not include women, one that did not bring changes to women's lives.When we talk about the issue of unstable work, no one doubts the fact that separate organizing is necessary. The diverse actors within unstable work such as migrant workers and disabled workers have been given the space for their demands to be voiced out clearly. But why are the calls for women's rights been negatively responded, even when women are excluded and oppressed? This is because women's work rights are themselves denied. As was the case at Hyundai Motors, at the Agricultural Cooperative and in many other cases, women were easily laid-off because women's work rights are considered inferior to that of men. Capitalism, from its very birth, has collaborated with patriarchy to bond women to the private arena (the home). This enables reproduction of labour through the cheapest means possible, while giving men -as the breadwinner of the capitalist family unit- the right to control women. However, it is this very same mechanism created by capitalists that has infiltrated into the minds of male workers, the workers’ movement and other social movements. This infiltration has resulted in silence at the time women were unjustly laid-off, bureaucracy of the workers’ movement and compromise with capitalists. The important point to be noticed however, is that this type of discrimination between men and women will ultimately benefit capitalists in their strive to oppress the working class as a whole. Sexism is another language created by the capitalists.

Feminisism as an Alternative

Family wages have acted as an excuse to negate women's social right to work. Even when a family wage has proven inadequate especially in this era of vicious neoliberal attack where a majority of families cannot sustain on a family wage, it still acts as an ideology to justify the continuation and reproduction of the traditional gender division of labour. It is this same argument that justifies the generalisation that women's work is excess work. At the same time, women's domestic work and reproductive activities are deprived of the valorisation it correctly deserves. Devaluation of women's work is one of the core factors in attaining flexibility of labour, through casualisation of women workers and increased intensity of work. The slogan of the workers’ movement "no to flexibility of labour! No to restructuring!" can only ring empty if it does not resist the instability of women workers. Women's work had already been the target of restructuring and neoliberal casualisation from the beginning of 1990's, long before the ‘entire’ working class came to be under attack. During all that time women workers were being changed to part-time, casual, dispatch and other various forms of unstable work, the workers’ movement remained indifferent. It was only a small minority of women workers' groups that struggled against the trend that has now become a massive wave of attack on all workers. The workers’ movement was late in responding to this trend, blinded by the discriminating and divisive ideology of capitalism. We now know that the division of men and women, nationals and foreigners, disabled and non-disabled is in the interest of capitalists, not the working peoples. We also know that working men, who were thought to have benefited from the discrimination of women are also now being attacked, while the lives of working women have been undermined even further. It is imperative that we address the specific issues that women workers face in the era of neoliberalism, in order to mobilize the working class with its full potential. We must counteract the specific mechanisms of oppression that disabled, migrant and unstable women workers face. It is this specificity that will allow us to form a stronger united front against neoliberal strategies of labour flexibility and the instability of work that it brings.