[asia-apec 1163] Solidarity message to women's conference against APEC

[tpl at cheerful.com]

>Message of Solidarity
>Fourth International Women's Conference Against APEC
>June 19-20, 1999
>Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
>
>by Elisa Tita Lubi of
>GABRIELA (National Alliance of Women's Organizations in the Philippines)
>BAYAN (National Patriotic Alliance, Philippines) and 
>APWLD (Asia-Pacific Forum on Women, Law & Development)
>
>
>GABRIELA, BAYAN and APWLD send greetings of solidarity and friendship to
the organizers and delegates to the Fourth International Women's Conference
Against APEC. I would have been with you if not for the revival of a
decade-old case against me. This is an example of harassment and
intimidation that the Estrada government resorts to against Filipino
activists who criticize the state for its adherence to imperialist
globalization and its violations of human rights and international
humanitarian law. Estrada's Philippine National Police and Armed Forces of
the Philippines are no different from Cretien's Security Intelligence
Service, Mahathir's National Security Agency and, definitely, Jenny
Shipley's SIS.
>
>We congratulate you on the holding and timing of this Beware the
Miss-Leaders conference. It will be an effective foil to the Women Leaders'
Network Meeting and the 'Women as Leaders in Business' Conference being
held to deceive women into thinking that  'women can have a greater voice
in the APEC process' and that APEC will mean more jobs for them. Making a
mockery of what the global and national women's movements have achieved
through relentless struggle, APEC passes itself off as a 'gender-sensitive'
forum aiming to 'feminize' economic development.
>
>Looking back, one of the resolutions in the 3rd International Women's
Conference in Kuala Lumpur was Actively expose the fallacy of the World
Bank-APEC strategy of mainstreaming women in the globalization model.
GABRIELA specifically proposed this after the 1998 APEC Ministerial Meeting
on Women, which theme was "Women and Economic Development and Cooperation,"
was held in Manila in October. APEC leaders made the ridiculous boast that
"women have clearly benefited from trade liberalization and globalization." 
>
>On the contrary, 'mainstreaming' women in the neo-liberal economic model
has meant women workers for low-paying employment in export-oriented
sectors, where women in the APEC countries today comprise three-quarters of
the workforce. Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are actually
sub-contracting and home-based work arrangements under the labor
flexibilization scheme characterized by depressed wages, no benefits,
terrible working conditions and fewer unions. 
>
>Or, they are small income-generating activities which women resort to in
their earnestness to augment their diminishing family income, which is
hardly enough to meet the family's basic needs. They are increasingly being
included in statistics as 'small entrepreneurs.' Thus, unemployment is
obscured and women's longer work hours are glorified as taking on 'viable
economic activities and sustainable livelihood sources.' 
>
>Peasant women are utilized as cheap and flexible labor for the contract
growing of cash crops, which are raw materials for TNC/MNC products.  An
example is that of peasant women being 'organized' into supposed
cooperatives and contracted as growers of coffee beans for Nestle products.
>
>While women's community-based and self-help projects such as health-care,
child-care and crisis centers help a lot of women, we should not allow
government to abandon its social responsibility and pass it on to the women
in the guise of 'mainstreaming.' The state, especially in Third World
countries, has never been able to provide sufficient basic social services,
and the situation worsens because of cutbacks in government budget for
public facilities and the privatization of basic social services.
>'Mainstreaming' makes use of income-generating and self-help community
projects that are delinked from organizing, education and political
mobilization of women.  The World Bank (WB) encourages and supports such
micro-projects to direct women's attention to the hand-to-mouth everyday
economic struggle and make them forget about awareness raising, bonding
together and taking action to emancipate themselves.
>
>We should never allow this 'mainstreaming' strategy to depoliticize the
women's movement and take women's initiatives away from the struggle for
emancipation. It is part of the over-all strategy conjured by the forces of
monopoly capitalist globalization. Their aim is to keep women and men under
their control and negate the gains that women's and peoples' movements
worldwide have achieved.
>
>We cannot allow the situation to continue where more women workers lose
their jobs as factories shut down or retrenched workers. Job security is
subverted by the shift to contractualization and casualization under the
policy of labor flexibilization. Wages are frozen and are way below cost of
living. Unions are busted and strikes are violently dispersed. Union
leaders are harassed and trade union repression makes up most of the human
rights violations in the urban areas. Because of intense competition for
employment, sexual harassment thrives along with unbelievably oppressive
workplace regulations such as: no smiling, curtailed visit to the toilet,
checking of underwear when entering and leaving the premises to ensure that
those being sold are not stolen by the supermarket sales personnel. 
>
>A lot of women are forced to take jobs abroad for lack of opportunities to
earn income in their own countries. The labor export policy continues,
despite so many cases of physical and sexual abuse of women, because OCW
remittances are a major source of revenue for Third World governments whose
balance of payments is usually in the negative. Trafficking of women,
whether for slave labor or prostitution, is unabated. 
>
>Opening up of land ownership to foreign mining, logging and other TNCs
intensifies landlessness of the peasantry and the indigenous peoples. The
scheme of 'corporative farming' overrides land reform with stock options
instead of land distribution to farmers, who become landless agricultural
workers of agrocorporations owned by TNCs and the local big
business/land-owner. Food security is endangered by conversion of
agricultural land to tourist resorts and supposed industrial enclaves; and
conversion of staple foodcrops to export crops. 
>
>The youth's future under imperialist globalization becomes limited to
being underpaid, overworked workers constantly bearing the TNCs/MNCs on
their backs. Education is commercialized and tailor-fit to the needs of
monopoly capital. 
>
>Even the professionals and local entrepreneurs reel from the impact of
trade and investments liberalization, deregulation and privatization.
>
>We have to fight globalization until it is totally discarded. We have to
rout completely the monopoly capitalists and the retinue of neoliberal
apologists who have been discredited by the global recession and are at a
loss on how to save the sick global economy. But as Jose Maria Sison wrote,
we "should diagnose the fatal disease not only of 'free market'
globalization but also of the entire capitalist system, whatever policy
stress it adopts."
>
>Let us resist imperialist control by the centers of global power -- the
US, Japan and EU. Their conduits are the multilateral agencies such as the
IMF-WB-WTO and regional formations such as APEC and NAFTA . Let us protect
our economies and patrimony from the insatiable multinational firms and
banks.  Their eager partners are our domestic ruling elite - local big
business and the land-owning class. Let us question and take to task our
governments. They are the most effective instruments by which imperialist
globalization is institutionalized in our countries. 
>
>Women have been in the forefront of the struggle against globalization.
This conference is a continuation of our resistance.  
>
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