Week 4 Readings - Summary Gender and Women\'s Studies, Second Edition PDF

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Chapters 58-60...

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Chapter 58: Nickel-and-Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America Barbara Ehrenreich → A woman goes undercover to work low-wage jobs in an attempt to understand what it is like to be poor; she notices that most problems low-wage workers experience are extremely low wages, which prevent proper housing, nutrition, and health care. Therefore resulting in health problems due to stress, working too many hours and not getting enough sleep, etc. Chapter 59: Factsheet: Women and Restructuring in Canada Deborah Stienstra → Canada’s economy has undergone significant restructuring by private companies and governments; resulting in tremendou changes for some communities, families and individual lives. → Signals include: the significant downturn in the global economy in 2009, increased government involvement to address this, and the emerging public spending cuts to reduce deficits. What Is Restructuring? → A process of change that has been happening in Canada and across the world for the past decades; has roots in multiple sources, including globalized pressures on social spending, altered labor force realities, changing demographics and family relations, etc. What are the Issues for Women? → Effects are more intensely experienced by those who have been marginalized in Canadian society as a result of gender, race, immigrant status, disability, or poverty. → Single-parent mothers, women with disabilities, racialized women, recent immigrants, and poor women face increased intensified negative effects from both ongoing restructuring and the recent downturn. 1. Changing Labor Markets: Where are the Women? → Today women make up 47% of Canada’s labor force, and are much more likely to work part-time jobs (7 in 10 part-time employees are women), and are more likely to hold more than one job at a time. → Women: service-related occupations, administrative work, teaching, etc. Racialized women: 3x more likely to be employed in manufacturing jobs. → Women’s hourly wage: 84% of men’s rate; gender wage gap is reduced for unionized women (94% of men’s rate), but is higher for full-time women. → Women with children, especially single mothers earn less than women without children; immigrant and racialized women also earn less. → Visible Minority Women: racialized women are less likely to be employed even though they are better educated than other Canadian women.

→ Women with disabilities earn less than women without disabilities and men with or without disabilities → Aboriginal women are generally less likely than non-Aboriginal women to be part of the paid workforce. What are the Effects of Restructuring and Recession on Women? A) Impact on Women’s Jobs and Income: → Increase in precarious/insecure work: precarious work (part-time, temporary, multiple jobs) makes up 40% of women’s employment, compared to 30% of men’s. → This type of work is low paid with few/no benefits; when a woman loses her job they may not be eligible for Employment Insurance (EI). B) Impact on Women’s Well-Being: → Women with children: need to find childcare in order to spend more time in paid labor face challenges in finding quality care, and they have to juggle the expense → Single-Parent mothers: presence of young children shapes their employment and their income. → When women face changes in their work life, it has a ripple effect throughout their lives and is closely linked to their well-being C) Impact on Families: → Significant loss in men’s jobs, especially in the manufacturing and natural resources industries (boom-and-bust oil and gas industries and the forestry industry). Meaning women have had to take on responsibility for more of the family income in heterosexual families. D) Impact on Communities: → Increased demand for services, but there are fewer resources to deliver them 2. Restructuring Government Programs: Where are the Women? → Government programs: significant source of income for women, senior women, disabled women, and single-parent mothers. → Government transfer benefits received by women usually come from: Old Age Security, Guaranteed Income Supplements, Canada and Quebec Pension Plans, Child Tax benefits, social assistance benefits, and Employment Insurance payouts. → 1997: the rules to qualify for EI benefits were significantly changed to the number of hours rather than weeks worked; given that women work fewer hours than men, and are more likely to have precarious work without job security, the changes will have greater meaning for women. → Women are also significant users of public services (homecare, disability supports programs and transportation) and are also in a majority of public service workers and thus are affected as workers by changes to government programs. What are the Effects of Restructuring and Recession on Women?

A) Eliminating and Reducing Public Services: → Due to limited funds governments choose to eliminate programs, or reduce/restrict who can receive those programs; which directly affects women, especially elderly women, disabled women, and women with children. B) Privatizing Government Services: → Another way for governments to reduce expenditures on public programs has been to sell or transfer a service to a private, for profit entity, without the same degree of public accountability or regulation. → This affects not only the workers, but also their families, and those who use/depend on those public programs. C) Downsizing Public Service Employment: → Cuts to public service jobs such as health care, support services, education etc. were jobs held by women. D) Impact on Women’s Well-Being: → As public services are reduced, families are often left with ongoing responsibility for care that remains; increases stress, anxiety, exhaustion for informal care providers. Chapter 60: Provisioning: Thinking about All of Women’s Work Sheila Neysmith, Marge Reitsma-Street, Stephanie Baker Collins, and Elaine Porter Paid Employment: → the way that individuals and households are expected to acquire the resources they need to purchase the necessities of life → Today, welfare policy, pension policy, daycare policies, and virtually all social and educational policies and benefits are designed to ensure that women participate in paid employment, promise rewards if they do and make life difficult if they do not. → 80s-90s: employment changed under the powerful regulation of a new economic discourse of global economy, local restructuring and the need for a flexible workforce that allows industry to quickly respond to changing international conditions; this marked the end to the ideas of a stable job or a career ladder. → This new labor force gave women some time and work location flexibility as well as work/non-work options, but the majority of these jobs are dead-end, as well as short-term; therefore women are faced with the additional work of constantly looking for new contract jobs and reorganizing their caring responsibilities. → The expectations placed on women to be employed, and the insecurity of the types of jobs available to them, are important for understanding why women negotiate responsibilities and build community in the ways that they do. Household and Domestic Work: → While this work is high in terms of hours, it is consistently low in terms of the monetary market worth of the work; work that is associated with the household, the private realm, is undervalued.

→ Canada traffics in a global care chain of women migrants whose wages are important sources of foreign exchange to their home economies and whose labor meets the domestic demands of Canadian households. Caring Work: → A distinction needs to be made between caring for and caring about; Caring for speaks to physical and concrete activities (feeding, cleaning and attending to needs of others), while caring about captures the relational and emotional work. → The importance of this distinction lies in the challenge it raises for assumptions that equate the expectation that women will care for others if they care about them; undergirds social policies and practices that centre women as responsible for ensuring the care of dependants. Volunteer and Community Work: → People who work irregular hours, have childcare responsibilities, work multiple jobs in order to make ends meet, who are recent immigrants, etc. seldom belong to formal volunteer organizations. → Women, poor and wealthy, put much time, energy, and resources into their community work. They care for and about others beyond the household based on a collective, historical sense of what is important to preserve and struggle for; however, their work is not always seen or considered as volunteer work in surveys. The Third Shift: → This term is invoked to capture the multiple work demands that women juggle; stands to counterpoint to definitions that categorize people as being in the labor force or not. → Women may work one shift a day in a paid job and another shift at home, such as caring for children, elderly members in the family, maintaining an irregular contract job, and participating in community work. Provisioning: → A concept we that is being introduced into research on women, poverty, and communities to see if it opens new doors to thinking comprehensively yet succinctly about all the work women do. → Provisioning refers to the multiple tasks, time required, and relational dimension of women’s work in the context of the purposes for which the work is done. → Living in poverty increases the invisibility of the work of women because it robs them of a language for describing this work with words that are valued. → Provisioning is defined as the work of securing resources and providing the necessities of life to those for whom one has relationships of responsibility. Provision includes paid employment, and unpaid household and caring work. It takes place in 3 spheres of market, household and community and shifts between them. Provisioning consists of those daily activities performed to ensure the survival and well-being of oneself and others....