Women'sNet newsletter: 2 May 2012: Women & Labour

Recently, the African National Congress (ANC) released a discussion document on communications, entitled ‘Building an inclusive society through information and communication technology (ICT)’, in preparation for its elective conference in Mangaung.
 
Many media commentators will probably focus on whether the ANC has varied its position on the statutory Media Appeals Tribunal (MAT). However, the document as a whole merits serious consideration, as it is likely to have an important impact on the nature of South Africa’s communications environment.
 
What is particularly noteworthy about the document is that, for the first time, ANC policymaking on communications focuses on the state of the ICT sector, and not just on the legacy media.
 
Any forward looking policy must also include an assessment of past transformation efforts. The document provides a very useful assessment of the gains and losses since the transition to democracy, and is, at times, highly critical of the lack of transformation. Many of the sector’s key institutions are in a mess, and South Africa is underperforming in terms of key ICT indicators. The authors blame these problems on fragmented and uncoordinated policy and institutional arrangements.

The call to decriminalise prostitution in South Africa by the ANC Women’s League (ANCWL) could lead to a more effective clampdown on human traffickers supplying the local sex trade, advocacy groups argue.

This follows the ANCWL’s mid-April confirmation that they will present an argument for the decriminalisation of prostitution at the ANC’s national conference in Mangaung this December.

Some opposed to the decriminalisation of prostitution have argued that such a move will lead to an increase in human trafficking into the sex trade. But according to several South African women’s rights organisations, this is not the case.

“Decriminalisation of sex work in South Africa will not result in an increase in sex trafficking or child sex work, based on evidence from New Zealand [which decriminalised prostitution in 2003],” says Stacey-Leigh Manoek of the Women’s Legal Centre. Manoek points to research which shows that decriminalisation in New Zealand did not lead to any increase in sex trafficking or under-age sex work.

The ILO launches its annual report “World of Work Report 2012: Better Jobs for a Better Economy”. The new study examines the performance of
different countries since the start of the global crisis through the prism of the quantity and quality of jobs.

Women and youth are disproportionately affected by unemployment and job precariousness.....

Non-income dimensions of inequality are on the rise. Additionally, there are non-income dimensions of inequality that are not reflected in the data coefficients. These dimensions of global inequality include inequalities in health, access to education, employment, gender, etc., which, apart from exacerbating poverty, also lead to greater marginalization within society.

The share of informal employment remains high, standing at more than 40 per cent in two-thirds of emerging and developing countries for which data are available. This Report calls for countries to put in place the necessary conditions for a dramatic shift in the current policy approach. It highlights the need for an approach that recognizes the importance of placing jobs at the top of the policy agenda and the need for coherence among macroeconomic, employment and social policies. This requires a significant change in domestic and global governance, which is a complex task. Though the task is demanding, even progressive steps in this direction will be rewarded with better job prospects and a more efficient economy.

We are far from easing the drudgery of women farm workers. But there is growing interest in designing technologies to improve their lives, report M Sreelata and Naomi Antony.

The seemingly simple act of removing the husks from maize cobs by hand is tougher than it sounds. A female worker uses her fingertips on average 522 times, her fingernails 144 times and her palms 55 times for every single kilogram of grain she produces, according to a survey carried out last year by India's Ministry of Agriculture.

Women — whether young or old, healthy or sick — can be found across the developing world working long hours without rest. They pick tea, process tobacco, shell cotton pods, spread fertilisers on fields and transplant rice.

In the developed world, this work is usually done by machines. But in poor countries, much of the labour is done by hand — and a woman's hand at that.

"It's shameful," says Anil Gupta, executive vice-chair of India's National Innovation Foundation (NIF).

"India can send up ten satellites in a single launch in different orbits. The science and technology capacity that we have is enormous. And yet when it comes to problems that women face, there's a huge silence, there is a huge indifference."

The meeting was organised by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR), the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, and the Asia-Pacific Association of Agricultural Research Institutions.

More than 700 participants from 50 countries attended the meeting, which took place in the context of two reports on the role of women in agriculture — one in 2010 from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation, and the other from the World Bank, released in 2011.

The UN report estimates that women contribute 47 per cent of global agricultural labour. But this international average is misleading. In many countries it is far higher; in Lesotho, Mozambique and Sierra Leone, for example, women carry more than 60 per cent of the agricultural workload. In Egypt women make up less than half of the agricultural workforce but account for 85 per cent of unpaid farm labour.

I spent a full day yesterday focusing on the intersection of feminism, activism, and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs). And I kept running into the same women (the feminist Twitterati?). And these women were mostly already known to me from my own work on the issue (alongside Miz Raftree). This worries me a little bit. Could it be that there are so few feminist / female Techies in the world that we all know each other?! This is an important space. As Valentina says ‘Internet is a strategic feminist issue’. Especially if u subscribe to the opinion that the web is just a new space for old kinds of bad behavior; then this is absolutely a space that requires our intervention. And this should be broadened out even more – technology is a feminist issue. We need to be wary of falling into complacency in thinking ICTs are empowering without recognizing how they have been co-opted. In other words, we need to differentiate between the practical uses of ICTs which are democratizing and the political uses of ICTs which are mapped onto existing unequal social relations.

At the CITIGen session Srilatha Batliwala posed a hypothesis – that ICTs have given rise to a new social paradigm – The Network Society. And this is a paradigm that requires a feminist intervention seeking social justice as it is reproducing power imbalances, and we are taking part in this reproduction. Anita Gurumurthy posed that women have been innovating within the Network Society, and these are sites of subversion, but not of struggle. Feminist activism has concerned itself with appropriating and co-opting of ICTs, but we have not treated ICTs as a determinant of the political economy. So we are trapped in the user discourse, while this discourse is being shaped by the ‘powers that be’. We are meeting, as ‘activists’, in a space that is a vector of capitalism. And this is actually de-politicizing civil society. We now see the rise of new actors such as the Gates Foundation who are hugely active in the areas of technological health innovations and human rights, and yet they are representing capitalist profit driven interests.