THE crisis of neoliberal globalisation has manifested itself in the resurgence of right wing politics throughout the world which is now signified by the vicious campaign of Trump in America. Despite the obvious signifiers in the last few years, it is also well acknowledged that the impending crisis is not new and has had a cascading impact on the life of the working classes of the world. As the Global Wage Report 2014-15 shows, the productivity and the profits within world capitalism may have started growing once again in the post 2008 crisis period, but the real wages have not risen enough to reach pre-crisis level. Hence if China is excluded from the statistical analysis, the real wages in the world grew only by 1.1 percent between 2008-13, even though productivity grew at a much faster rate. With the inclusion of China too, this percentage goes up only to 2 percent in the same period. Hence it is obvious that the share of wages as a proportion of profits is falling within the world and this is reflected in the destitution of the working class. The vulnerable situation of women workers and its worsening trend has to be seen in this overall context.

INCREASING VULNERABILITY

OF WOMEN WORKERS

 The latest available data in the Women at Work: Trends 2016, shows that the there has been a decrease in the labour force participation rate of both men and women. While the women’s labour force participation declined from 52.4 to 49.6 percent, for men it declined from 79.9 to 76.6 percent. The gender gap in labour force participation narrowed to about one percent, largely because the decline in women’s labour force participation rates were lower than that of men. This contrast can be explained by the greater informalisation of employment in almost all regions of the world. As the World Employment and Social Outlook: Trends 2016 show, vulnerable employment (largely consisting of casual, self employed, and contributing family workers) is substantial in almost all regions in the world. It is particularly  acute in emerging and developing economies, affecting over half and over three-quarters of the employed population, respectively. In both Southern Asia and sub-Saharan Africa the rates are roughly 73 percent and 70 percent, respectively.

In this context it is significant that women workers outstrip male workers in the proportion of self employed and contributing family workers in developing economies particularly in sub Saharan Africa and South Asia. It is significant that women’s wage work is particularly low (and certainly lower than the world average) in these two regions, with a majority of the women being in underpaid jobs and performing unpaid work. Thus the labour force participation gap between men and women has in fact increased in these regions with South Asia exhibiting a gender gap of 4 percent in the last decade alone. Within this overall trend India represents one of the highest gender gaps in work participation in the world. The women’s work participation fell from 35 percent in 1990 to 27 percent in 2014. In the same period the male work participation rates fell from 85 percent to 80 percent. The gender gap in work participation rates increased from 50 to 53 percent between 1990 and 2014. This was accompanied by the fact that rigidities in occupational segregation remained intact and showed no signs of reducing as far as the gendered nature of work is concerned. This increasing gender gap in work participation rates is reflected in the conditions of work of women workers, 93 percent of whom are governed by informal labour relations.

GENDER WAGE GAPS

AND CONDITIONS OF WORK

What to worsening conditions of work and quality of jobs mean for the inequalities between men and women within the labour market. The data presented by the Women at Work report shows that though there is a significant gender-gap, there are signs of moderate reduction especially within the developed world. This is methodologically significant because the results for the estimation of gender wage gap vary according to the nature of employment. As the report shows, two aspects of earnings may be considered while analysing the differential impact of the labour market. The first is wages from salaried work and the second, income from self employment. There is lack of comparative income data on both these aspects, but some generalisations may be made in accordance with prevailing trends.

First, it is possible to surmise that gender-wage gaps are lower in regions where the majority of workers are salaried as compared with economies where there is a growing self employment. In keeping with this trend the developed countries, with 90 percent of employment in salaried work exhibit lower gender gaps than emerging and developing economies where levels of self employment are quite high. The mean gender wage gap in the world is about 23 percent, which means that women receive 77 percent of the wages of men if you take out the average of the world economy. But regional differences are enormous, in developed countries the gender wage gap does not exceed beyond 15 percent and sometimes even enters single digits, where as in developing and emerging economies it is relatively higher. Even within this broad classification, the gender wage gaps within developing and emerging economies vary significantly, with South Asia actually exhibiting an increase in gender-wage gap and India having the highest gender wage gap of 26 percent within the entire Asia.

The second proposition that can be advanced is that gender-wage gaps are structured by the divisions between formal and informal labour relations. While informal employment constituted less than 12 percent of the workforce in developed countries, in developing countries it constituted about 46 percent of the workforce. The highest share of informal employment is in Asia with two thirds of the informal employment coming from Southern Asia. The overall figures for informal employment for southern Asia are about 72 percent and 83 percent of all workers and more than 90 percent of the women workers in India are in informal employment relations. The existence of such relations in fact accentuates the gender wage gap as social institutions, cultural attitudes and traditional division of labour structures wage setting patterns. Further, the unpaid element of self-employed work (where women workers outnumber the male workers) is higher in countries like India, thus resulting in increased gender-wage gaps. Hence it is safe to say that all aspects of gender wage gap, particularly in a situation of informalisation, cannot be explained only through the labour market, as the labour market itself is unregulated and follows no norms. In this situation, the NDA-II strategy of boosting employment through a strategy of Stand UP and Start UP India is likely to back fire and in fact have negative consequences for women workers.

Finally, the role of labour market reforms and labour market flexibility in the creation of labour surplus cannot be ignored while analysing the problem of gender inequities within the labour market. The dilution of the Minimum Wages Act and the Equal Remuneration Act through the introduction of Labour Wage Codes by this government is likely to inspire competition for who can do higher labour at lower wages. This is particularly the case because a ‘labour reserve’ has been created through the process of displacement of people and livelihoods and this surplus labour supply will in fact lead to a depression of wages. In this scenario, it is the women workers who will be the most disadvantaged as their mobility and ability to work for longer hours will always be limited by social and cultural institutions.

Thus the question of addressing gender wage gaps is not merely an economic problem that can be solved through the regulation of labour markets, but it has to be addressed through the transformation of social institutions and division of labour within the family itself. Hence the complex interface between patriarchal institutions and labour markets has to understood and tackled by the working class movements of the world.