The Global Economy and Women
Whether working in a factory in Thailand sewing athletic shoes for less than $4 a day or in a Mexican factory making parts for U.S. cars at $10 a day, women are among the hardest hit by the global economy. According to the U.N. Development Fund for Women, most women throughout the world work in low-skilled, low-wage jobs. They are paid less than men in nearly every country in the world and they work longer hours.
Women account for 70 percent of the world’s population living in poverty—even though they make up 45 percent of the world’s workforce. Even in developed countries, such as the United States, women are working longer hours and making less than men, according to the 2008 AFL-CIO survey.
Their work often is dangerous and many women risk their lives each time they go to their jobs. In Juarez, Mexico, 370 young Mexican women have been killed in the past 10 years. Many of them were killed just outside their workplace in maquilas, foreign-owned plants that multiplied along the U.S.–Mexican border after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1994, according to the international human rights group Amnesty International. The Free Trade Area of the Americas trade pact, now being debated by Big Business interests behind closed doors, would spread the massive joblessness created by NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere and have a detrimental impact on women workers.
Women also are likely to face additional threats on the job such as discrimination, sexual harassment, physical abuse and pregnancy exams as a condition of work.
To ensure women workers and all workers can feed their families and contribute to their communities, the union movement is working to include rules in free trade agreements to protect women’s basic rights to form a union and to work without discrimination or sexual harassment.
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