VYTAUTO DIDŽIOJO UNIVERSITETAS
POLITIKOS MOKSLŲ IR DIPLOMATIJOS FAKULTETAS
SOCIALINĖS IR POLITINĖS TEORIJOS KATEDRA
Agnė Bagdžiūnaitė
ANALYSIS OF GENDER AND FEMINIZED LABOR RELATIONS Socialinės lyties ir feminizuoto darbo santykių analizė
Politikos mokslų studijų programa, valstybinis kodas 621L20008 Politikos mokslų studijų kryptis
Vadovas/-ė______(Mok.l.,vardas, pavardė) ( parašas) (data)
Apginta ______(PMDF dekanas) (parašas) (data)
Kaunas, 2016 Content
Abstract (Lithuanian translation) – 1
Abstract – 2
Introduction – 3
1. Neoliberal Subject...... 9 1.1 Constructing the Worker in Neoliberal Time...... 11 1.2 Two Labor Forms...... 12 1.3 Marriage and Labor Contract...... 14 2. The Feminization of Work...... 16 2.1 Welfare and Women...... 20 2.2 The Globalization Tales...... 23
3. The Case of Lithuania:
From Mother-Workers to Flexible Servants...... 30
3.1 From the transition to
Established Neoliberalism...... 33
3.2 Privatization...... 35
3.3 Foreign Indirect Disinvestment
in Labor Force...... 41
3.4 Does Flexible Mean Women?...... 45
3.5 „But How to Live, to Survive?“(Interviews)...... 48
Conclusion – 71
List of Literature - 74
Bagdžiūnaitė, A.
Socialinės lyties ir feminizuoto darbo santykių analizė
Politikos mokslų bakalauro baigiamasis darbas / vadovė doc. dr. J.Jonutytė.
Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas, Politikos mokslų ir diplomatijos fakultetas,
Filosofijos ir socialinės kritikos katedra. Kaunas, 2016. 81 p.
Santrauka
Ši studija analizuoja darbo jėgos ir darbo savokos transformaciją rinkos ekonomikos sąlygomis. Teorinio ir empirinio darbo tikslas buvo aptikti tam tikrus kaitos taškus, kurie paaiškintų feminizuoto darbo formavimosi procesą, pagrįstą konkurencijos ir individualizmo principais. Šis darbas yra grindžiamas perėjimu nuo valstybinio kapitalizmo į rinkos kapitalizmą, kuris priveda prie feminizuoto darbo formų Lietuvoje šiandien. Analizė yra sudaryta iš trijų pagrindinių dalių. Pirmoje dalyje aš atkreipiu dėmesį į darbo padalijimo pagal socialinę lytį problemą per Foucault homo-aeconomicus teoriją. Aš naudoju jo teoriją ištirti, kaip tariamai neutralus, laisvas socialinės sutarties, pilietinis subjektas yra glaudžiai susijęs su socialinės lyties ir klasės kontrolės galios mechanizmais. Toliau nuo Foucault homo-aeconomicus teorijos aš pereinu prie išsamios vedybinio ir darbo kontraktų analizės, paremtos C. Pateman knyga „Seksualinis Kontraktas“. Antroje dalyje aš integruoju patriarchalinį kontraktą ir neoliberalų subjektą į materialistinę socialinės lyties išnaudojimo analizę, remdamasi moterų reproduktyvaus darbo nuvertinimu. Aš išplečiu šią argumentacijos liniją prijungdama socialinės lyties klasės išnaudojimą prie globaliai veikiančios rinkos plėtimosi konteksto. Išvysčiusi teorinę struktūrą ir globaliai orientuotus teiginius, aš pasisuku į konkretų feminizuotų darbo formų eksplotavimo Lietuvoje atvejį, remdamasi politinės ir ekonominės tanzicijos periodo pagrindine charakteristika, kuriai būdingas greitas privatizavimas, tiesioginių užsienio investicijų skatinimas, ir griežtos taupymo programos socialinės apsaugos kryptimi. Paskutinis trečios dalies skyrius yra sudarytas iš interviu su moterimis dirbančiomis įvairius kvalifikuotus ir mažiau kvalifikuotus darbus Kaune ir Žiežmariuose. Šis empirinis tyrimas įrodo jog feminizuotų darbo formų steigimas ir plėtojimas Lietuvoje sėkmingai įteisina moterų engimą ir diskriminaciją, paremtą socialine lytimi.
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Bagdžiūnaitė, A.
Analysis of Gender and Feminized Labor Relations
Master Thesis in Political Science / supervisor Assoc. Prof. Dr. J. Jonutytė.
Vytautas Magnus University, Faculty of Political Science and Diplomacy,
Department of Philosophy and Social Critique. Kaunas, 2016. 81 p.
Abstract
This study analyses the transformation of labor and the concept of work under the conditions of free market economy. The aim of the thesis was to trace the changes that would explain the process of feminized labour formation based on principles of competition and high rise of individualism. The paper was organized around the transition from state-capitalism to market- capitalism, which leads to my definition of the feminization of labour forms in Lithuania today. The work consists of three main parts. In the first part I address the problem of the gendered division of labour through Foucaults theory of the homo-aeconomicus. I use his theory to explore how the seeming neutral, freely contracting, economic-civil-subject is immersed in gendered and classed power relations. Departing from Foucault theory of homo-aeconomicus I draw heavily from Carol Pateman‘s book, „The Sexual Contract“. In the second part I link the patriarchical contract and neo-liberal individual to a materialist analysis of gender exploitation which is explicated on the basis of the devaluation of women‘s reproductive labor. I broaded and contextualize this line of argumentation by linking gendered class oppresion with the expansion of the market as its unfolded under globalization. Having now developed my theoretical framework and globally oriented empirical claims I turn to the particular case of feminization of labour forms in Lithuania. I do this through analysis of the politics of the transition period, which has been charecterized by: rapid privatization, foreign direct investment, and austerity toward social securities. The final section of third part is made up of interviews with different women workers taken in Kaunas and Žiežmariai which I argue proves the hypothesis of the feminization of labour forms in Lithuania that is situated in order to oppress women and institute the discrimination based on gender.
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INTRODUCTION
In 1990 of March Lithuania declared it‘s independence from Soviet Union which entailed joining the western market system and disassociation from all aspects of Soviet imposed politics and centered economic system. The great celebration of re-entrance into the „Western world“ provided World Bank and IMF freely impose free market principles from the very beginning of state formation. The turning point was the most painful for workers of state industrial complexes which were immediately privatized and reorganized. Due to these rapid changes of post-socialist transition the Baltic region underwent steep decline. The impact of the privatization had irreparable consequences of high unemployment, deterioration of labour conditions and social rights. Yet, because of the new and old forms of gender discrimination in the spheres of production and reproduction, women have been more vulnerable to economic and social changes. Lithuania inherited the segregation of work based on gender bias from Soviet Union and combined successfuly with nationalist neoliberal politics and principles of free market economy. The latter combination made women the main targets of decline in labour rights and discrimination in labor market. The coined definition by Guy Standing (1999) of feminization in neoliberal times very much defines the concrete processes related to gendered market economy.
In my paper I tried to grasp the turning point which would lead to the defining what is the feminization of labour forms in Lithuania today. My aim was to trace the changes that would explain the process of feminized labour formation based on principles of competition and high rise of individualism. My work consists of three main parts, it begins with the part on neoliberal subject, then I go to the analysis of feminization of labour beginning with defining the work of women, the division between reproduction and production, the breadwinner model in Welfare state and then the flexibilization of labor in process of globalization of market, after that I move to the case of Lithuania and analysis of market and social conditions for the formation of feminized labor force and the end contains the interviews of women working in feminized sectors in Lithuania. In the theoretical I relied only on the foreign researchers and writers who would provide a consistent critique and analysis of neoliberal market economy and politics of labour. The reason why I used foreign theorethical research was to emphasize the lack of political economic critique or in other words feminist marxist texts and analysis in Lithuania. The empirical part with visualy recorded interviews of women from the feminized sector in Kaunas is intended to emphasize the lack of research and analysis of working class in Lithuania and also to trace the fact of changing working conditions in general.
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In order to analyse the transformation of labor and the concept of work, I have chosen to begin with the definition of homo-aeconomicus in theory of Foucault as focal point for the development of the „new order“. To address the problem of new economic subject was at the point where the question of how patriarchal contract theory immerses in the sphere of new economic subject. It was very important to emphasize the conjunction of the patriarchal right and economic right or the right of interest and the new patriarchal concept of human capital. The problematics of new entrepreneurial spirit which withdraws the social differences as unimportant and unnecessary coincides with the spirit of the capital and seeks to cover and veil the unpaid labor of reproduction and manual labour in general. Foucault‘s analysis of neoliberalism as well as his followers helps to signify the process of marginalization in relation to marketization of social relations. The marketization of social relations is based on the patriarchal tradition and creation of value which mainly refers to the activity of white privilleged man.
In the ananysis of marriage contract and two labour forms I wanted to highlight the gender oppression which originated from both the devaluation of housework and sexual contract (Pateman, 1988). The concept of work was created on the basis of value creation of activity of men and their participation in public life of civil citizens whereas such right was taken away from women who were ostracized from civil society by stating that they were civily dead. I claimed, that the devaluation of housework had a major impact on further developement of work relations. Feminist scholars in the 70s analyzed the nature of housework and how it exempted women from the struggles against capitalism. Kathy Weeks who analyzes work concept from 19th century to today also includes the virtues of feminist movement „Wages For Housework“ and their effort to denaturalize and radicalize the problems related to reproduction as the field of women and production or value creation of waged labour of men. It is an important part of my thesis as it is also important stage of feminist marxist historic developement. In section on labor and marriage contracts I use Pateman‘s analysis in order to emphasize the different developement of social rights of men and women which has a major influence for further augmentation of differences between women‘s and men‘s labor rights in free market economy.
Throughout my thesis I follow Kathy Week‘s concept that work has occupied the major part of human‘s and keeps on expanding. The amplification of work as such also diminishes the line between production and reproduction which puts the part of reproduction to the more invisible and marginalized edges of periphery. In my thesis I argue that feminization of labour can not be separated from capitalist transformations and forms of exploitation which usually are regarded to operate only on the ground of economic sphere. I also quote Gary Becker for his concept of human labour and esspecialy for his theory on labour division and labour of women who proves
4 very clearly that devaluation of women‘s work exists in market economy and it is based on females‘ „natural“ attributes. However Gary Becker is very fast to state that women‘s secondary labor is very needed for the expansion and „progress“ of capitalism which coincides with development of service sector. From Becker I move to Hochschild‘s theory of affective labour who analyses the service sector in the West. She marked the shift in the labour market as women‘s role in it was growing rapidly in the 80s and 90‘s. The nature of service sector is grounded on the features that are assigned to women as caring persons with „great“ experience of management of emotions. Moreover such management is appreciated on much lower level than let‘s say the management of people in the factory or company. This segregation explains why women are mostly hired as social workers, nurses or even waitresses (in Lithuania). In other words it explains within the expansion of capitalism and the need for caring labour the increasing inclusion of women in the market economy. The insecurity of affective labour forms is also part of women‘s life in general as for example you never know when the state going to decide to cut the social spending to, for example, hospitals or the bar owner will decide that to order from the bar saves him a bunch of money. The insecurity of work goes hand in hand with flexibilization of work as well therefore I decided to look at Welfare State model and woman‘s dependence on State and Man in so called „breadwinners“ times and show that essentally the woman‘s situation didn‘t really change as her insecurity was determined by the market.
The patriarchy was flourishing in the time of Welfare in the West. It was heavily institutionalized through different social provisions of the state and through prioritization of industrial work. To explain how women were subjugated by the state and the model of nuclear family I chose the feminist citique of Elizabeth Wilson who detects different tactics of control designated to discipline women. One of the tactics which started and successfuly continues to nowadays was using media as the tool for „advising“ and advertising. In the 70s women‘s role as sophisticated consumer and happy housewife dominated on TV and in the magazines. Second form was woman‘s dependency on man‘s wage and benevolence in order to obtain the better means for housework and childcare. The third form was applied when woman had to work a part-time job which put her under heavy surveilance of social workers, in other words, the state. The gradual inclusion of women into workplaces put them into the obscure situation related to their mother‘s and housewife‘s role which during the crises of Welfare state was even more controled and underlined in order to save State‘s social expenditure. There was always a lack of social provisions to help working mothers with childcare which also meant that women in order to take the career seriously had to compete in labour market with men as a man.
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Furhter in my thesis I go to the globalization to move away from the center of the capital that forms a sort of a gap between my former analysis of Welfare state and the critique of global structure of capital. However the gap will be covered with the radical change of centered market economy to the free market economy further in the text on case of Lithuania. Nevertheless the gradual change of the market in the West affected the peripheries as well as the center. In order to form a ground for the construction of feminized labour force in Lithuania the deeper analysis of global economic measures were needed. Thus we have more rapid inclusion of women‘s labor in the West and the process of globalization which both started with emergence of free market economy. These both processes are based on the expansion and domination of the capital. In the chapter on globalization I talk about the film „The Tales of Globalization“ which show the struggles of Indonesian workers working in the palm oil industry. I combine Massimo de Angelis‘ political economic analysis of globalization with some scenes from the film on Indonesian workers. The strategies of expansion are based on very radical conditions of extraction of raw materials and labour force in the peripheries of the capital. First and foremost the capitalism uses the cheap labour power when outsourcing it‘s production to the former colonial states or in the less developed countries from the centers of rather expensive and regulated labor markets. The price of labour force is measured and defined on the basis of progress and development. On the other hand the developement in the peripheries is restricted by the debt driven economy which means that the state goes more deeper and deeper in debt as control of international organizations and companies increase through depndence on the market principles. The grand economic plan is presented as one and indispensable. It also means that it uses the punishment measures for people who try to escape and use the alternative means for survival. People are put to the enclosed cages of poverty which is presented as the temporary transition towards the better future. The deregulation of state makes a developing country subjugated to the rules of center which demands to limit workers rights and abilities to organize. Such process is called in economic terms the „flexibilization“ of work which is directly „inspired“ by cuting social benefits and limiting the access to education and healthcare. The degree of poverty is the main excuse to make reproduction work invisible and place the emphasis on the efficiency of production which is monetized. To render the reproduction to work with no value put workers into most precarious conditions as I rely on the film to illustrate it. The investment into human capital depends highly on the destination the further it is from the centers of capital the less value is put on the labour force and at the same time the more women are included in the labour market. The more women participate in the labour market the more „flexible“ are the conditions of work. The flexibility of labour force also often coincides with capital intensive business which means the demand for un-skilled labor.
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To analyze the feminization of labour forms in Lithuania I chose to start with the historic role of women in Soviet Union that explains the segregation of labor base on gender which was extended after the shift to the free market economy in the 90s. I distinguish five stages of gender politics regarding women‘s role in Soviet Union. First and foremost is the ambiguity of women‘s emancipation which meant the full participation in the labour market and women‘s primary role as workers. Second was women as workers and mothers at the same time with full support of the state with social security designated only to women. However the housework and child-care stayed the sphere of women meaning that women had a double burden to carry. Third, the state excersized the control of women‘s life through different social provisions. Fourth is related to the power of the state and the increasing value of the family as the sphere of resistance against the state. And the final fifth is the secondary role of women in nationalist struggles of indepence which provided men the opportunity to draw women back into the families using the argumentation of former State‘s exploitation of women. However the transition to the market economy did not allow men to become the breadwinners of the most important unit for the state and for the economy.
The transition to the market economy in Lithuania was marked with vast deterioration of social conditions. The nationalist state took the advises of experts straight in to the practice without questioning the further consequences. The strict monetary policy and the rapid process of the privatization left many without work and social securities. In the chapter „From transition to established neoliberalism“ I put the emphasis on how applied „shock therapy“ created the new class of impoverished who were presented by the media as losers of the transition. The principle of competition naturalized the poverty as the consequence of laziness and the lack of entrepreneurial „spirit“. The income inequality was quick to create a new divisions in the society which also transformed the class composition of Lithuania.
In order to understand the development of the new class composition I analyze the privatization process in Eastern Europe. First I take social analysis of privatization of state enterprises and how it leads to mass deindustrialization thruogh lack of capital to restructure the factories according to the tendencies of Western market. Deindustruliazition also meant the mass unemployment not only of women but also of men altogether. The privatization affected the revenues of the state which was unable to fund the main social services for people. The unemployment put women in very unstable conditions as on the other hand the open borders let them to begin shuttle trading as the main occupation for the subsistence. Such trade stayed invisible for the whole time of transition which let families to survive through harsh social economic times. On the one hand the invisibility benefited women and let them to escape the
7 taxes on the other hand the work at the the shuttle trade was labor intensive and the invisibility of it allowed men to take full advantage of the economy that actually was driven by women.
The other economic strategy of most countries in Eastern Europe that led to the integration in European Union and the transformation of labour politics was attraction foreign direct investment. At the beginning of the transition the foreign companies were put on hold due to internal „problems“ of local market developments and lack of institutions for regulations of private property or private capital. Later on or in the middle of the nineties foregn direct investment took the other kind of pace and comfortably moved in after the Eastern European countries were integrated in the EU. The main attraction for international companies and other foreign capital was the cheap labor force which was in addition famous for loyalty and high skills. The social climate is also presented as steady, meaning that the union organizing is not very well established after the intensive deterioration of unions during the process of privatization and other legal enforcements. In time of economic crises the investment slowed down in Lithuania, the real estate bubble exploded and the unemployment again reached high numbers. That didn‘t prevent the state from establishing even better conditions for alluring the foreign companies to be the main job providers which would mean employing the cheap labor in un-skilled low wage positions also not paying taxes for five years and exemption for export taxes as well. The demand for unskilled labor force all the time is expanding in Lithuania and I try to ask in my thesis what is the consequence of this for women? I try to question and expand the theorethical work at my last part of thesis in the interviews with women workers in Kaunas.
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1. THE NEOLIBERAL SUBJECT
It is hard to analyze neoliberalism without the analysis of the subject, category of individual. To understand how the capitalist production processes attack our lives today, on what basis our subjection to this world should or must work according to the logic of capital. The processes of production very much coincides with processes of individuation; as we should not forget that individualized subject is much more easy to manage. As neoliberalism is so imbeded in competetiveness other terms such as: collective, commons, even society as such according to Thatcher - together with categories such as gender - should be abolished. Everything is dedicated to individual freedom which is only determined by individual himself. The way Kathy Weeks (2011) recites Lazzarato (2007) the slogan “become subjects” is far from eliminating the antagonism between autonomy and command but restates it at a higher level (Weeks, 2011:56). It means that the determination for the individual to become autonomous is limited to certain categories around work which is taken to an even higher level then ever before in history.
It has to look, as we created the neutral space, the rational space (the progress), where social categories melt into the pot of identities. We as subjects have to accept this reality and, how Foucault formulates it, we have to respond to it in a non-random way, we have to think systemicaly and respond to it according to the environment. It is probably the simplest way to explain why identity cannot be preserved in one form (Foucault, 2008: 269). There is no need to explain differences based on classical social categories, e.g. the working class is not the only one that works; women are not the only ones who experience discrimination. As Cinzia Arruza (2014) observes, capitalism is a social order that uses inherited historical differences and presents them as natural and eternal in order to take advantage of these differences whenever it needs it. The person, the subject has to be constructed, she is not born already knowing who she is and how she will manage her life or respond to the environment. However, the subject constructed does not have autonomy, some originary free choice, over their construction in the social field. Quite the opposite, the subject - if we take Foucault - is under control, to the minute details, in her everyday life. Jonanna Oksala writes that today’s subject is not directly coerced, is not ‚subjected to power‘, but rather finds themselves incorporated through detailed training in order to make the power enacted on her a part of her own authentic being (Oksala, 2011). In other words neoliberalism is naturalized through practices of internalisation. M. Lazzarato (2007) explains this naturalization process through two dispositifs. The first, a non-discursive formation that affects us through various institutions. He gives the example of “unemployment” which is managed through control methods such as expulsion or data gathering. He also refers to
9 welfare benefits, liken health insurance, which first depends on your abstract citizenship as legal subject, and only after plays on your individual subjectivity (gender, social status, living area etc.). The non-discursive practices regulate production, like production of unemployed subjects, the criminals. While discursive practices control the bureaucratic language, the organization of language in very particular way as to sound like an expertise, an objective analysis. This expertise is then applied as juridcal norms in, as one example, law formations The two dispositifs are interwoven in such a way that we can‘t trace which comes first, discursive or non- discursive, both are the effects of capitalism which has to be constantly instituted in order to escape the previous set of regulatory constraints.
As Joanna Oksala (2011) states that neoliberalism created a new subject, the one which hardly can be based in old marxist terms as someone against capital and the capitalist. She is sure and her assurance is based on Foucault’s analysis of neo-liberalism, that we all play the same game of profit as entrepreneurs, which has to be always in contempt with profit that constitutes “the society of enterprise”. But it is not that the entrepreneurs are the only ones, the chosen ones, who become a part of the market and economy nor it is that all the subjects just simply become a part of the exploitative system which reproduces itslef. As Lazarato already mentions capitalism is simply an economic reality that the law, norms, and discourses would subsequently regulate and represent. We need to take the disciplinary process into account that is also called institutional framework, which partially constructs the type of subject the person becomes (Aruzza, 2014). Foucault traces subject to the times of English empiricism and social contract where subject of rights obeys the contract refering to his own terms of interest but the obligation to it entails subjectification and constrainment (Foucault, 274). The shift from juridical subject to economical subject is marked by the total and spontaneous harmony of everyone’s will with others wills. In other words egoistic subject doesnt need to be constrained by some duties that are not of his interest.
As the choice of options for action is, or so the neo-liberal notion of rationality would have it, the expression of free will on the basis of a self-determined decision, the consequences of the action are borne by the subject alone, who is also solely responsible for them. This strategy can be deployed in all sorts of areas and leads to areas of social responsibility becoming a matter of personal provisions.(Lemke, 2002) you respect the contract because once individual subjects of interest have recognized the interest in entering the contract, the obligation of the contract constitutes a sort of transcendence in
10 relation to which the subject finds himself, in a way, subjected and constrained, so that, having become a subject of right, he will obey the contract.(Foucault, 2008: 274)
1.1 Constructing the Worker in Neoliberal Time
In this chapter I will try to trace the shift of subject historically relating her to labor market changes and arguing that the free subject elaborated in neoliberalism clearly can be originated from male category. What I want to state is that again when we talk about subject of neoliberalism it can not be neutral. Thus I already argue with Joanna Oksala that neoliberalism did not create a completely new subject. Foucault questions whether the subject in neoliberalism is only based on the concept of homo-aeconomicus in terms of art of governance. There is a double bind in a way that the subject is originated from juridic sphere and is shifted toward the sphere of economics thus the liberal theory made a soil for the homo-aeconomicus to rise but the origin of the subject is defined through the perpective of right whereas in neo-liberalism the subject puts rights into the background. Locke spoke of the civil society that would be characterized by juridical-political structure (Ibid., 297), but when the questions of political economy and of the governmentality of economic processes and subjects were addressed at the end of 18th century, the concept of civil society was thoroughly reorganized. The juridical subject is never out of the political landscape, Foucault states that this juridical problem remains within civil society but it’s position is reversed , meaning that first we have society as natural product and afterwards we have to find the means of limiting and regulating the power according to, of course, the interests. Now the question arises is the subject of civil society free from all the familial bondage, traditions, and norms? I think I already mentioned above that homo-aeconomic subject is nevertheless dependable on variables of his environment. If we to take the same example of health insurance in such location as Lithuania I “choose” not to work for the certain remuneration therefore I have to quit the formal healthcare that state is able to give for paying the taxes in exchange. Now the choice not to work is essential here, the relation to work is emphasized and essentialised through whole instances of human history, on such basis the choice of not to work can be equated with the ‚choice‘ not to live. Work makes subjects into ‚independent‘ individuals writes Kathy Weeks (2011); it is the entrance not only into the economic system “but also into social, political, and familial modes of cooperation”(Weeks, 2011: 8). If we do not enter the economic system we dont exist as subjects. Foucault also writes, in the civil society of neoliberalism rights of the subject take secondary place, appearing after the subject’s integration into the economic sphere where such rights are managed according to her ability to invest in herself and to be invested in . However, the insituted economic subject is very much different from what we would call the formal juridical subject, in that they are
11 rewarded their civil freedom based on posession of property as well as as the property of male gender; the later possesion being important to emphasize, if to introduce gender in the scene.
Carol Pateman (1988) theorizes the link between these two possesions through the concept of „patriarchal right“. During the “golden” times of social contract theory philosophers such as Locke, Rousseau, Hobbes, Kant etc, explicitly developed their theories of the subject of rights, i.e. the freely contracting soverign individual, on the possesion of women, a right over women, that gives the man of civil society their so called autonomy. (Pateman, 1988:171). I certainly wouldn’t claim that this patriarchal right suddenly dissapeared with emergence of the homo- aeconomicus, as juridical subject, we should assume, is already indoctrinated in the economic subject. However, it did chang the social relations rapidly if we take into consideration how the term work expanded and shifted. Or we could ask a radical question does the social still exist?
1.2 Two Labour Forms
Now why its necessary to take a step from the subject to work is to understand how production is imbedded into perception not only of exploitation relations between the subjects but also how the relations are created on terms of what he/she produces. Basically we are all reduced to the power of labor and to be more precise our labor power is abstracted and cut off from its human reality (Foucault, 2008:221). The labour power is effectively measured by time, put on market and paid by wages. Lets stay on this abstracted labour for a bit and put emphasis on what waged labour means. After the abolishment of slavery and within indutrialization the man enters into the sphere of waged labour. Furthermore the right to participate in public life “naturally” transfered into the right to get the wage for his work; likewise women’s “privilleged” status of being civily dead is founded on the “invissible” work in the family. However, and not without help of feminists, the slow movement towardthe neoliberalization of the labor market, which is to say the universalization of the market as human capital, guarantees the subsumption of women as well into the sphere of free egotistical subjects of interest (Oksala, 2011). However, those egotistical bosses were always men. The shift from wage slavery that is only accessible for man towards the more and more liberal market open for women is of great importance in my paper. Pateman claims that two different types of labor contracts exist: one of marriage that defines work of women and other is the labour contract defined for men by men.
My argument, to restate, is that this process of the expansion of economy into the field of social capital, the detaching of the free subject from juridical rights; has in consequence disolved the historical difference e between marriage contract and the labour contract.. The focal point of this
12 dissolvement would be the shift that Foucault observes in his theory of biolpolitics, emphasizing the abstracted labor in economic terms.
When Marx defines wage as price of labour power:the price for this peculiar commodity estimated in money, he makes a distinction between what is slavery and wage labour and how the time for waged work is based on time, so the rest of the time for the wage the worker gets can be spent in the tavern and in bed, thus the labour becomes a commodity of sorts (Marx, 1935) Most feminists from 1970s see marxist analysis of wage labour as simplistic and reductionist when it comes to unwaged labour of women and reproduction. Here I think is necessary to quote Sylvia Federicci:
At the center of this critique is the argument that Marx’s analysis of capitalism has been hampered by his inability to conceive of value-producing work other than in the form of commodity production and his consequent blindness to the significance of women’s unpaid reproductive work in the process of capitalist accumulation. Ignoring this work has limited Marx’s understanding of the true extent of the capitalist exploitation of labor and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class, starting with the relation between women and men. (Federicci, 2011:45)
According to Federicci, one of the reasons, why Marx didnt go beyond waged labour in his critique of Capital, was because of the mercantilist period he lived in, when the reproduction site, or the hours of the domestic work was very scarce; taking in mind the extention of the work day to the maximum of 20 hours per day so that workers were not able to reproduce, dying at age of 20 from overwork. Federicci sets historically the period when capitalists started to invest in the reproduction of workers, by any means to the minimum possible, that is from the end of the 19th century, when shifting from the light industry to the heavy, the capitalists needed more disciplined worker compared to the exhausted one. The other reasons that Federicci explains Marx’s blindness to the reproductive work was his emphasis on the monetary exhange for labour power and his teleogic view of waged factory worker as the only revolutionary subject. In consequence, as Kathy Weeks claims, is that the work ethic became a sphere for men only, while the sphere of “nonwork”, including the affective labor, was totally devalued and associated with a degraded femininity (Weeks, 2011:63). This devaluation was highly questioned in the struggles of the movement “Wages for Housework” in the seventies “revealing the umbilical connection between the devaluation of reproductive work and the devaluation of women’s social position”(Federicci, 2011:51). For wage to be turned into use-value, as another famous feminist of wages for housework Leopoldina Fortunati explains, it needs extra-work for the reproduction of male worker, in other words the male worker can not survive just by coming back home to
13 bed or getting a beer in the bar, someone has to make food for him, get his clothes washed, etc. The reproduction work entails bringing the worker as the bearer of the commodity labour power into the market as the use-value commodity. We have two gendered labour powers “corresponding to gendered workers – breadwinner and housewife”, who are put to work but in different spaces, while one is happening in the proper capitalist workplace the other takes place at home. The male worker participates in the process of reproduction by bringing his wage to the family to home, the wife uses the wage or the price of his labor power to use her own labor power for him to get the wage again so the circle of capitalist production closes within the same mode of production encompassing the reproduction. What we have here is the direct and non- direct exchange, which interconnects, defining capitalist mode of production based upon waged labor. However, we are dealing here with only one wagefor the work of two, the value of the reproductive work comes as non-value, in other words woman is the “natural source of social labour” who has to perform such determined social role in order to have food on the table. The entire cost of reproduction is unloaded unequally onto the labor force, because the biggest part of it is “naturally” inscribed onto the female biology to mask the origin of capitalist exploitation of reproduction.
I will have to repeat Pateman here on the two different types of labour contracts (almost a slogan of my entire thesis), one is dedicated to women as women and the other is the contract created for men by men. Wages for Housework made an important step in denaturalizing the reproductive work done by women, to denaturalize it means not only bringing women’s work onto the political, public scene but the process of such denaturalization also would mean destabilizing the capitalist social relations which go far beyond the factory floor. To attack capitalist mode of production is not enough to only attack the subbordition and exploitation of worker alone which would mean to give privillege to man as public figure who should direct all the struggle. Concentrating on un-waged labor at the same time includes many groups if we start with marxist analysis of what wage really mean and make a starting point that all labor/work is for reproduction of capital. Nevertheless the origin of un-free labor as one that is naturalized as such has to be analyzed, where does it come from and why for so long it wast questioned I think lays on how gender was subbordinated and how it was institutionalised through the contract are the questions for the next chapter..
1.3 Marriage and Labor Contract
According to Pateman (1988) the worker and the wife are not comparable subjects because wife does not contract out her labour power to her husband and labour power allows a man to enter a
14 contract as a wage labourer. While the labour of the wife was termed as domestic servitude, the housework as such was not recognized as ‘work’ consequently housework was something that goes in addition to male’s work that creates a value. For many years the man as the bread-winner was granted as the one who can fight the struggles at the workplace representing all his family or in other words acting out as the master of his family unit. Even if woman work for wage she never ceases her duties at home as housewife. Thus entering the workplace as woman still counts, claims Pateman, that woman enters man’s world and her gendered position is never abolished. Women, she states, were incorporated into the patriarchal structure of capitalist employment as women, not workers. Basically Pateman dissagrees with feminist movement “Wages for housework” idea about men appropriating their wifes labour power but first we need to understand what employment contract is really about. First and foremost the labour power as partial property that enables man to enter the employment contract as free man has to be rejected. For Pateman the feminist statement about men appropriating their wifes labour power means to acknowledge that employment contract is a free and fair exchange. The freedom of employment involves not the freedom par excellence but that of freedom to subordinate yourself. Pateman distinguishes four criteria that define the free labor contract: First is that the worker is juridically equal to his employer, then the labor contract is temporal, third worker paticipates in “free” exchange as he gets a wage for his work, and fourth the worker contracts out only “part of the property in his person”. Basically it is implied that the worker is protected from being a servant or a slave while for Pateman this distinction between the worker and unfree labourer is merely fictional. Pateman hence argues that labour power can not be sold as external commodity. The worker sells their whole being becoming: women, working-class, migrant, black, homosexual, etc. The defenders of cotract theory who are at the same time defenders of patriarchy have the material interest to make it look as external exchange which basicaly endure the relations of subordination. The emphasis only on the critique of unfair exchange relying on categories of “exchange” and “labour power” dissmises the main point of the relation that makes the “exploitation possible”; also admitting that it is possible to contract out the constutional pieces of his own person (Pateman, 1988:149). What comes out of it is that the worker is selling the right to be used and to be subbordinated by “(civil) master”. But worker or wage laborer is not the same as wife or women workers even if women enter the employment contract, it is (and we have to have this in mind) created by men. Not only the husband can have his own demand over his wife, we have the employer over our heads too. Liberal feminist thought still propagates that women have to become sexually neutral “individuals”, owners of the property in their persons and the contract is the only emancipation from patriarchy possible. Such idea is not new, Amy Dru Stanley (1998) confirms that it was an early feminist idea about marriage as the contract
15 which for them represented the opposite of slavery in 19th century after the slavery was abolished in United states. All the efforts to maintain the marriage as merely the employment contract was based on symbolic value of liberal individualism (Stanley, 1998:184). But Pateman already showed in her analysis of the employment contract that freedom to sell your own labour power is constrained by employer having a full right of subordination not only of the labour power but of the worker himself. Pateman is also certain that the category of individual is based on gender of man and since the category of individual is not valid without the patriarchal right over the woman, if indivdual as such dissapears the civil society consequently dissolves too, which also would mean the same fate for the contracts.
Having in mind both the critique of domestic free labor and the critique of marriage we can trace many parralels between the two. We can see how invisibility of the housework is interconnected with juridical thought of civil society. The sanctuary of marriage hides the gendered exploitation that Wages for Housework finally was able to reveal and expanded the conceptualization of capitalist social production. However in Pateman we can see how exploitation is fully legalized through juridical right or to put it more concretely, social contract. What Pateman basically argues in her analysis of contracts is the denial of the possibility of emancipation for women through the contract and this denial coincides with the demands from WFH in therefusal to work: "Slavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink" (Dalla Costa and James, 1973:33). To formulate it differently, to refuse to work as a housewife and as the worker of the factory means to dissmantle the social contract and go beyond it which would also mean to leave the family form. However we will see in the next chapters that it was never the case and the concepts and movements that challenged patriarchal capitalism were defeated in order to take even more radical turn towards work ethics.
2.THE FEMINIZATION OF WORK
The shift from waged work to human capital encompass‘ the transformation of family relations and the definition of subject as such as we can see in Foucault and his analysis of neoliberalism. I dont know exactly yet if its right to claim that waged labour was more situated on classical liberal mindset while neoliberalism redraws the waged labour in such way that the employment contract is exiting the stage of the privilleged man. Jason Read (2009) defines classical liberalism constituting the exchange where you can still make a boundary between market and civil rights or the principle of exchange of certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties also was established in the marketplace as well. The work is not the work at the factory anymore, it
16 has much broader much more expanded definition and the wage “become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment in one’s skills or abilities”(Read, 2009). We could also say that the feminist dream of contract that Pateman mentions is realized through economization of all spheres of our lives making competition the first and only principle. The individuals are governed and govern themselves on the operative terms that no longer consist of rights and laws which only comes as secondary to interest, investment and competition (Ibid., 2009). Lemke also emphasizes in similar manner marking a distinction between Fordist and post-fordist societies where the individual is rendered to have absolute personal responsibility for “social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc.” by transforming or legitimizing it as “self-care”. The entrance of women into labor market is highly intensified under neoliberalism, while the insecurity in the workplace for women in times of Fordism was compensated by various social benefits provided by the state maintaining the man as the main winner of the wage for the family. Kathy Weeks (2011) proves it by stating that many feminist insights about women’s work conditions proved to be even more widely applied to the forms of work in Post-Fordist economies. The insecurity and flexibilization of work depended on man’s ability to work and his benevolence towards other family members. Therefore woman had to rely on man but the situation has changed whereas today woman has to rely on the other man who is her boss, her manager or operator of the assembly line. As result, it is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish between production and reproduction “whether by sphere, task, or relationship to the wage”(Weeks, 2011: 28). Women are expected to work as women with all the attributes prescribed to them by men and patriarchal fantasies, their workplaces are separated from men’s assuming that women do not have enough managerial or bureaucratic skill to manage the bigger collectives, to run business or manage money while dealing with clients or filling up papers for bosses as secretaries have already inscribed lower evaluation in the form of wage. All the evaluation of the work women do is related to their ability to procreate. Their bodies do count when they work, “the ranking of women's jobs is often justified on the basis of women's identification with childbearing and domestic life” (Acker, 1990).
Situation of women entering the labour market does not extinguish the part of domestic labour. Women are still torn between work and home because both incentives still exist today and capitalism is interested to preserve the family form that conditions women as flexible worker who are often compeled to work a second shift of domestic labor (Oksala, 2014). Gary Becker (1985) in one of his article about human capital marks out the sexual division of labour and explains that Western economic developement started to become in need of women as participants in the labor market and it also coincides with the expansion of the service sector. For
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Becker the paticipation of women in paid labor is the main cause of the devaluation of marriage bond and increasing attractiveness of divorce, which also reduces fertility. Although in analysing such entrance of women he comes to the conclusion that traditional division of labor does exist but he is not sure of it’s reasons (“perhaps discrimination against women”) by trying to be “objective” as possible he also claims that the only problem is that women are not able to invest as much in the market as men because childcare and other household duties takes away a lot of effort-intensive energy, he writes:
Persons devoting much time to effort-intensive household activities like child care would economize on their use of energy by selling jobs that are not effort intensive and conversely for persons who devote most of their household time to leisure and other time-intensive activities.(Becker, 1985)
The sollution that Becker proposes is basically dominating in contemporary liberal feminist thought: if men would share more household responsibilities, then the married women would improve their time in their labor force and will be encouraged to invest more in market, human capital. Basically the proposition from the one of the fathers of neoliberalism is economically deterministic and at the same time very conservative – when it comes to the politics of the family. The free labor market works as a very Eden of the innate rights of man for him/her to make most of it and control his/her own fate determined as buyers and sellers of the labor power by entering the contract as free persons/men. That’s exactly how waged work becomes normative and the duty to work is being universalized through inclusion of every adult citizen into the realm of free market economy (Weeks, 2011:53). Ironically enough the dismantling of security touches more men than women, as women already, if to refer to Becker, are not safeguarded enough if we take low wages, part-time work flexibility, lower skilled jobs that take less effort intensivity. The woman in Welfare society is only protected through man that holds all his family very much dependent on the wage he is getting. All my assumptions here rests on the dominant analysis of the Western societies, certainly I do not claim that this kind of analysis is applicable to every corner or periphery of the world of which (Lithuanian case) I will write later. The generalization of insecurity in the workplace confronts the man but it is far away from the elimination of waged work as such. Kathy Weeks confirms that the willingness of workers to work wholeheartedly is at the center of the work ethics, which also differs from the form of work that was demanded in the industrial times in the factory. Kathy Weeks identifies one of the difference that would be called in Hochschild’s term the emotional labour. A new topography of the social includes now the affective labour which is very much related to the expansion of the service sector in the West. However Hochschild defines it more as the labour of middle class but
18 we have to have in mind that the book was published in 1983, hence the situation with service work has changed and now service work is I would state more affiliated with the working class or lower class or at least is much more diverse. For example the work of flight attendant of Lufthansa would significantly be in contrast with work conditions of the employee from Ryanair. Nevertheless the analysis of emotional labour is still interesting to read. Hochschild writes that affective labour is pegged to the women strata confirming that the service work is obviously gendered. She describes the reasons of the emotional labor as asigned to mostly women through woman’s lack of social position of her being less independent and less access to power and authority. Women are capable of managing the feeling as “women are more likely to be presented with the task of mastering anger and aggression in the service of "being nice."(Hochschild, 1983:112). Woman, says Hochschild, is seen as adaptive, cooperative and helpfull person, she is the one that supports the others- ussually thats men, who are used being on the public stage while women cheerleading from the backstage. The more she does it sincerely the more appreciated in the workplace she is (Ibid., 169). Probably to no one’s surprise the service sector jobs are usually put at the bottom end of the scale precisely for the reason that “individual has to perform personally for someone else”(Ibid., 171). What is visible in this analysis of affective labour is the commodification of feminine mystique features which was never thought of before the expansion of service sector. Capital does not simply exploit labor, says Jason Read (2009), it is no longer just the physical labor force instead it seeks to sweep all the social relations to the one category of commodity which happens to be at the outside of the factory and the firm. We can see it reading Becker also, that for him the social relation of gender does not matter or matters in capitalist terms to increase the labour force of women and we can not forget why but precisely because the service sector is expanding and so the features that were assigned in the times of nuclear family and breadwinner times became valued in the free market of labour. However that does not have anything to do with the generous idea of woman and man sharing the household duties, because service work will never be equivalent to the man’s job even if he is working at the construction site. The household duties and time spent for it is not shrinking in any way, Kathy Weeks states, that the privatization of social reproduction and gender division of unwaged domestic labor puts women in the position where if she can not afford hiring immigrant servant, she will have to spend much more time than women before in history. Not only because of pressure for consumption and the demands for vast flexibility of the worker but also due to the higher requirements to develop “the communicative, cognitive, and creative”. This new generation of workers demands the intensive parenting which coincides with ideology of investment into human capital” (Weeks, 2011:110). The scope and the intensivity of the domestic work can not be put aside as something different than capitalist production, it is the
19 same as to say that women should not leave the domestic sphere because they are good at it and can stay there fighting for better conditions in the kitchen, as many men today would still claim. This is not exactly a possibility today because the line between production and reproduction is very thin, which does not mean that the work of reproduction is gone, but it definetely is rendered as unnecesary and invisible in the market economy (Weeks, 2007). We have to take in mind that many forms of caring and household labour are now part of the waged labour in the service sector that successfuly integrate the “the labors of the hand, brain, and heart as more jobs require workers to use their knowledges, affects, capacities for cooperation and communicative skills to create not only material but increasingly immaterial products”(Ibid., 2007) which is also the capitalist excuse for ignoring the labour at home that women still do.
The line between gendered (reproduction) and feminized work (co-production: reproduction and production) form is necessary to mark here having in mind the shift in labour market that is marked differently in many sources. In Foucault the shift from labor to human capital, in others from Fordism to Post-Fordist times, also neoliberalism is called Post-taylorism, time of precarious, post - welfare etc. Even if women still are mostly responsible for the work of care also the domestc work is still largely secured for the women the affective labor or the service sector does not necesarily hold on the older binary of gender nevertheless the determination and specialisation of work is defined through gender. Noting that women working as housewifes did not really make a difference where their leisure time begins and work time ends; as Hochschild (1983) notices in her analysis about emotional work, our life is more and more colonized by work. I dont think that my statement would be entirely wrong stating that today we are dealing more and more with feminized forms of work. Hence I would also come up with the term defining the shift as the transition from gendered (reproduction) to feminized forms of work (production).
Everything what is now described famously as liberalizing or flexibilization of labour market has to do with generalized idea about how and what women should have been doing under the time of Welfare, at least in the West. In the West we have models of nuclear family, which inspired the rest of the golden states of Europe, that is why I will now immerse in how gender roles were naturalized, controlled by state and man and punished for crossing the boundaries of heteronormative family unit in the the times of Welfare.
2.1 Welfare and Women
I will try to prove that women‘s social agency did not change from the time of welfare and the insecurity and dependence on the state expanded in the labor market to such extent that it also
20 includes some groups of men as well. Neoclassical economists especially including G. Becker were convinced that to maximize the eficiency of their household family that consists “naturally” of man, woman and 1-2 children has to specialize in the work s/he does best. This kind of model they inherited from the Welfare system and accepted as most efficient one for the pragmatic purposes. One of them is the “natural” devaluation of women‘s work. Neoclassical economists were fully aware of the benefits and profit they can draw from cheaper labor force claiming that the wage gap between men and women is related to women’s double shifts.
Elizabeth Wilson (1977) in her book about welfare and women describes state Welfare as phenomena of the post-war charcterized by high employment and concessions made for “social peace”. She sees the Welfare State as being problematic not only for it‘s total compliance with capitalism, but also the highly conservative view to family and women’s role in this substantial economic unit. As I already mentioned, the state of post-war time in the West was not intersted that much in quantity of workers but more in the quality, as industrialization was the main zone of hard labor. Thus the main interest of capitalism coincided with the Keneysian State‘s interest to control and discipline people according to the the order of the factory, as Wilson claims some theorists of Welfare State are strongly convinced that welfare times came as outcome of long workers struggles the others always emphasize conspiracy theory that capitalism found the way to pacify the militancy of the labor force. The control of the state became two-faced, if one side gave the other subtracted, the most obvious of such principle was in the situation of women:
First and foremost today the Welfare State means the State controlling the way in which the woman does her job in the home of servicing the worker and bringing up their children. These constraints upon the way in which she does her job are less obvious than the demands of the assembly line, the rules and regulations of factory or shop work, but are for that very reason the more mystifying and insidious.(Wilson, 1977:59)
The State, all the way, was trying to convince women - even after gaining the right to vote - to leave the public space voluntarily and go back to kitchen where they can fully realize themselves as individuals with strong inside duty of mothering. The capitalist accumulation was also part of women’s duty to spend money on commodities, if to look at advertising and women magazines at that time; all of the glamorized housewife’s life was a fake mask that supposed to compensate the misery and dullness of housework. The mask served for the bosses of capitalism to save up for reproduction of his labour force and as we see later it is a good excuse to make women a cheap labor reserve army (Ibid., 62). The dullness of the household exceeded the degree of gloom in the factory the reason why we are not talking about work and life out of work but reproduction and work.
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There were studies constructed recommending married women to take part-time work, if they want to work, having in mind their first and foremost duty at home. However the most pleasurable for women was assumed to be motherhood: the pleasure related to rearing a child had to be something extraordinary. The other magic pill of nuclear family that was promised to women in 50’s was sex: for it to last endlessly, the absurd argumentation was augmented about steady and monogamous sex (Ibid.,65). Hence all the pleasure and entertainment was in the family but not out of it. When it came to terms of being a working mother and entitled to state benefits who could not afford to be a housewife and stay dependent on Man’s wage such family was under huge radar of State institutions mainly the social workers, as women were taken to be mainly responsible for the proper child care they had to experience a major surveillance as a punishment for being a working mother (Ibid., 75). In England social workers were the main tool of Welfare state for economic reasons. They were cheaper than housing or security payments; they were very important when there was social or economic crises or generalized unrest; they were guards of two main concepts that dominated in industrial society and formed the basis of ruling-class ideology: the family and the work ethic(Ibid., 91). The double face of the State was also prominent for providing a proper institutional child care facilities even when the women’s participation in labour market was considerably large the number of kindergartens was still comparatively minimal. State provided with other “help” including reccomendations for mothers how to take care of child, also girls in schools were taught cookery and dietetics (Ibid., 102). In work women were always reminded not to forget their femininity and the lower wage as well as low skill functioned as a good reminder for that matter. The questions were raised at a time about whether women were a reserve army of labour used for the economic booms or cheap labor substituted for men’s work in times of crisis (war). However Wilson emphasized the difficulty for statistics of women unemployment as “the majority of married women (nearly two thirds of the female labour force at the present time) are not insured in their own right, do not qualify for unemployment benefit, and therefore do not bother to register as unemployed (Ibid., 160). However the statistics of employed women shows that women’s participation in the market greatly increased between year of 1966 and 1974 because of the growing service industry which means women were not the substitutes but segragated from men’s workplace. Women at the time were regarded as flexible and cheap labor and easy to reabsorb, also they were not well unionized and most willing for part-time jobs.
‘Women workers, especially part-time workers, offer a number of advantages to employers who want to make a quick profit in an economic situation of long term crisis. In such a situation employers are unlikely to risk heavy investment in highly productive capital-intensive techniques
22 of production which would enable them to employ a high-wage labour force. They are more likely to prefer processes requiring a lot of cheap labour and relatively low capital investment. Women workers, and especially part-time workers… provide a suitable labour force in such circumstances, both because they are relatively cheap in employment and because they are more easily and more cheaply displaced when no longer needed.’(Ibid., 164)
Also the myth of part-time work going very well along with childcare only benefited the liberal ideologs or capitalists. The children holidays should not be forgotten or that part-time jobs in the day time takes much longer than children’s school. Thus it sounded more and more as a rationalized profitable practice masked by ideologists than reality. Elizabeth Wilson was writing that in the midst of the Oil crisis that hit hard in the United Kingdom, she already saw what we see now as no surprise, women doing more work while the wages and benefits are cut and the hospitalized people kept in hospitals for very short term, the senior citizens are denied with food on wheels, unemployed men from bankrupt big industries - they all require care from the Mother (Ibid., 70). The question why women were widely enslaved in home has had many answers already in this paper but the other question would be why the working women remain the heads of households Wilson answered that the burgeois State supported the family model with certain determination of child care. As economic unit family became more fragile than say in the pre- or early capitalist times. The dependency on one person or husband made family unit unstable and more unreliable which could not be maintained only ideologically under vast state surveillance of women. Hence here we can see what Wages for Housework were fighting against. However the patronizing and controling shifted today from the state to the labour market that defines, divides and normalizes women‘s place in accordance with investment in the „self-care“. The globalization of market goes hand in hand with the transformation of Welfare system. From feminist perspective it creates new division of labour which is sustained by the invisible work of reproduction, non-formal work, low-waged and unskilled labor.. The free market economy basicaly dictates all the conditions which are supported and carried out by State.
2.2 The Globalization Tales
What they once accomplished with Empires and Invasions, they now accomplish with loans and “economic reform” and “export led development”
From film “Globalization Tapes”
The Globalization Tapes is a film made by workers for workers. The story isn't told by experts, but by union members from palm oil plantations in Indonesia. Watching the video made by
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Indonesian workers is different than reading the text about globalization and economics, you get the message straight forward as one of the workers say:
“In their opinion, glabalization is our inevitable fate, but the globalization is their formation for profit.”
Using their own forbidden history as a case study, the Indonesian filmmakers trace the development of contemporary globalization from its roots in colonialism to the present. Then you get the idea where Foucault actually put the limit on his analysis of biopolitics. The limit was precisely to the point where political economy starts or in other words it is to the point when it comes with geneology of such politics within Western borders that is about the art of governance with engraved economics. This type of capitalism differs from the previous industrialization in that it is global. Second, it is structured largely around a network of financial flows located in a few strategic "global cities" (Sassen, 2000). Profits are mainly accumulated in the sphere of circulation and no Ionger in production. Whatever is extracted as profit "is reverted to the meta-network of financial flows, where all capital is equalized in the commodified democracy of profit-making"(Young, 2002:53).
Thomas Lemke (2002) talks about such domination that sets the relationships of power for subordinated persons in order to leave no room for them to manoeuver. The feeling you get from the film is exactly the outcome of those assymetrical power relations. People are caged in the cycles of poverty for the international companies to make the highest profit possible. You see the man who is asked by workers about his wage and labour contract confirms the paradigm, he has the contract of thirty yeas with minimum wage which is 1, 14 dollars per day from 32 dollars that goes to the company for raw material of palm oil he gathered in the palm plantations. The reason I am writing about it was more or less to illustrate the global capital processes which also would be exemplary for how capital moves and extracts the highest value in exchange for the cheapest labour power it can possibly get. The questions workers of Indonesia were asking could be asked in many places of world, maybe they were different in the begining after the struggles against colonization but after that, the expansion was constructed on the law of market and less with the direct power (military coups, or weapons of mass destruction). The questions are proudly rejected or considered as not-rational and in conflict and in contradiction with the logic of market developement. The workers in Indonesia ask the old man who works for one of the biggest corporation if he has experienced the progress in his life conditions as company would present themselves as pioneers in progress developement.
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Foucault is right about the remuneration for the investment into human capital, his analysis is helpful to understand the cycle of poverty and the periphery and the relation between center and concentration of capital. The market decisions do not measure any values except the market values in order to put everything on the objective mathematical plane or in Foucault words it is the invissible hand which does not seek other than just it’s own interest but it does good at the end for the whole society which is hard to grasp. The same is with those workers in Indonesia who naively put social interest above their own instead of competing each other to the bottom. Capital according to Massimode Angelis (2007) is only about expanding and growth therefore it sets the value system that can work only by subordinating the other value practices to its own type and in such mode things are worth doing (Angelis, 2007:37).
The growing and expanding directly situates the antagonism with declining and contracting but that does not encompass social subjects: life practices that have no price tag. The invisibility of such elements is the condition for capital to preserve itself. In other words the company can allow pesticides to poison the workers to produce a cheaper product which will thrive in the market because of the lower price. I would argue that today in global economic times the invisibility and detraction of labour has expanded to infinity, meaning: it took even more mistifying way than in times of breadwinners and losers as the so called unskilled labour, domestic work and other forms of manual labour are devalued and pushed away from the centers of capital (Sassen, 1999). Further I will try to uncover the veil of how it grew to the global dimension. We can talk about invisibility of ‘yesterday” and “the height of women’s enclosure in the patriarchal households”(Angelis, 2007:57). The economic division of the sexes was once strongly challenged by different feminist movements in 60s and 70s exposing the very essence of capitalist production that is the invisible work of reproduction that in capitalist terms do not produce any direct value; the reason why all the work was subbordinated to the needs and desires of a male body.
Capital's response to Western women's struggles in the 1960s and 1970s against housework and challenging family roles had a similar impact to that of the struggles for higher wages and shorter hours of waged workers in factories and offices: globalisation, externalisation and outsourcing (Ibid., 59)
We can say that capitalism has never been better because in the past the processes of co- production were less invisible and now it takes in the grand part of invisible labour extracted on race and gender basis. As Angelis claims, capitalist development depends on “the enclosure of the body” making it into machine that is obligated to deliver measurable output (Ibid, 60). If again to take back the human capital the output will depend on the investment the person can
25 put, which in return highly depends on how far she is located from the center. The closer she is to the center the more capital is in accumulation and the further she is from the risk that pesticides will burn her eyes. In the film I am telling about in this chapter the women are mainly working in fertilizing the palms without using any protection to their body or face except maybe the raspirator. I remember myself thinking while being in the village in Lithuania about the farmers or the tractor drivers who fertilize the fields but sitting in the tractor in relation to film you suddenly realize how far they are from risk or how close they are to the center compared with the women in Indonesia. The invisibility of for example, poisoned women, is imbedded in patriarchy and capitalism that are closely linked to each other through constructing the subbordination of subject as “natural” in relation to what she/he is doing whereas priorities are put to external measures separated from the same body. If to explain it through the example of Indonesian women the fertilising act matters only on the grounds of the harvest of the palms, her body is decomposing slower compared to time of palms she can “nurture” to give a more significant harvest. If her eye are hurt she still can walk and spray, the eye is not the main instrument this kind of “skill” demands. The company doctor told her that he does not have the medicine for her eyes or medicine for the rashes of skin that fertilizers cause meaning that body is in such enclosure or restricted in way to prevent the declining efficiency of the worker only if it directly affects the quantity of profits. She still can spray even if she is blind. The exploitative principal of the market is invissible as it is natural in the same way the men chained the wifes in homes or back in the times burnt as witches because also the nature is unpredictable and it needs to be constrained and controled “socially constructing them as housewives, waged workers, or consumers”(Ibid., 63) or palm oil industry workers.
The expansion of market policies didnt happen within one day but the ground points were already casted in the times of empirialism with invasions in the “South” and in organization of mass production under the times of Keneysianism or Fordism. Strangely enough colonialism is not mentioned in theory books about Welfare states at least not in the ones I touched. I already tried to describe what was Welfare state in terms of labour and gender relations. The shift towards neoliberalism comes with oil crises in 1973 in the West while welfare state was already on the verge of sunset with declining profits and increasing deficits. I would think that the final process of decolonialization had also a big impact on the crisis of mass production in the West, the other measures had to be taken because the labor force prices were increasing and human rights are put on the unprecedented levels.
There was a dirty story (Etienne, Garcia, 2008) about France that there was a moment when the immigrants were taken in large quantities to the country for the labour force and certainly not
26 because of the colonial guilt but for instrumental and obvious reasons they needed extra-labour force but it does not end there, so they build a lot of TEMPORARY barracks for them to live expecting them to leave and it did not happen. What happened instead is that they never rebuild it but rather invested in the businesses related to their former colonies where they can still enjoy the price of cheap labour. I think this story pretty much illustrates the moment in history when the market was declared independent. Privatizations took place in many fields and “flexibilisation” of production and labour supplanted the Keynesian agenda of full employment.
This period proudly and famously called the era of deregulation. Yet, It must be argued that the state was not undermined as such but went through a process of expansion on one hand (military, policing, prison) while detraction on the other (social securities and labor regulations). Neither Reagan nor Thatcher abandoned their political mission to spread the word of the “emancipated” market. In other words the state intervened through regulatory institutions and state subsidies to establish pro-market neoliberal policies and through intesification of surveillance, repression and military functions (Angelis, 2007:102). In the film about globalization process in Indonesia the wokers stated that investement in developement came straight into the pockets of military to control the mobilization and exploitation of workers to eliminate any chance of workers organizing. The latter was evident in 1970’s esspecialy in the West; demanding higher wages, more social benefits and securities, less work-time, environmental justice but instead the emphasis was put on the logic of the capital refusing to invest in such high demands which according to ‘Trilateral Commission” was the outcome of too much democracy (Ibid., 103). The conclussion within the state was dedicated to restrict such demands as much as possible in order to do it you would need to tell your son that from now on he will not get the pocket money just because he is going to school but he will need to struggle even to get dinner at the end of the day.
The policy of the government had to accommodate “the desires of international financial capital” handling the resources not in favour of the working class (Ibid., 104). The level that these policies were excercised became immense including the countries that stated their independence from former colonizers as they became “equal” players in the free market economy. In the film that in this chapter taking big exemplary role until I will go to Lithuanian example the debt for “third-world” countries played crucial role as they did not have the capital but had the raw material that before was used by colonial powers which was changed into pure capital and power of the market, anyway, in the film they explained what debt really meant for such countries as Indonesia. The scheme was simple, first you borrow, then you plant according to wishes of lenders, then the prices are going down because of the over-load of production and you are not able to pay back the debt, then the cycle starts again.
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Also there are many more demands from the lender that usually is IMF or World Bank in order to get the loan the conditions are put openly to privatize the state social service institutions such as education, health services, etc in addition of restructuring the state resources, cut social spending and the most important open up markets for competitive exports. The governments of such countries are interested in attracting the foreign capital because they do a lot of good for the upper classes while immiserating the poor. Governments set up tax regimes that are friendly to the foreign companies, also they establish flexible labour laws restrained from workers organizing.
People in such countries usually are highly dependent on the market for their survival and they have to work because they are also stripped from any other alternative, landless and pauperized. The flexibility of labour is closely related to restructuring production and reproduction, the capital is followed by precarious and disposable labour force. If the labour becomes too costly for production the company is able to transfer where the labour force is more devastated. The same is shown in the movie as the workers says, that there is no sense of making demand to raise wages because the company can easily transfer their bussiness to the country where such demands would be more difficult for workers to make.
The flexible labour also depends on the form of contracts with as litle social security for the employer as possible. The forms of the contracts are also used to divide the workers as one is made the regular worker the other work with temporary one for half of her life if lucky. In the same developed countries the flexibility is also used as the hook but not only for the company to save up on social expenses but also for workers who supposed to become autonomous and self- employed heros of “entrepreneurial revolution” (Ibid., 106). Thus there is no such thing as pure economy or pure competition, as I already mentioned the invisible hand and the good telos for the society as a whole, there is always the two sides of the coin which comes together. One side of the coin shows the interest of capitalists and the other side of the coin shows „the progress“ of the society.
In Lithuania the popular thought still exist that what Lithuania lacks for example is the middle class. We could claim that the class of intellectuals in Lithuania were intoxicated with the Western state model drug, such view of middle class is also based on the rights of civil MAN masking the fact of market liberalization which establish the rule of big winners and bad losers. The belief that from liberalization, flexibility and restructurization benefits everyone (that everyone will become middle class) has to be sustained and are managed through the statistical data of the happiest countries, the GDP growths forecasts and Peoples magazines. Angelis thinks that ‘economy’ is too narrow for describing the production process which is monetized and it
28 fails to include the reproductive labour of which majority is unwaged in economic terms and if it is not monetized then it does not count as work. The reproduction is easy to dismiss using various pretexts for example in Indonesia the great part of women work are not questioned at all because of miserable husbands situation which is equally unstable and unsafe, to empoverish the man is still easiest tool to make women powerless.
The invisibility of the material work culture has produced a change in the valuation of labor inputs. Increasingly, many of the unskilled jobs are regarded as irrelevant and no longer needed in the global economy. Saskia Sassen warns that the corporate culture with its emphasis on specialized information services is overvalued while other kinds of work cultures are devalued (Young, 2002:54).
In times of globalization the feminized work conditions are set not only for women however the degree of dicrimination based on gender within empoverished society is significantly lower considering women and men. With “help” of such organizations as IMF, World Bank, WTO there is no need for the center of capital to invest in the conditions of production, in safety of the workers and for reproduction, you can always blame the authoritarian, not democratic enough state. The “deregulation” of the state can be easily renamed in “re-regulation” that serves the bussiness and securitize the capitalist markets. The decisions by state are never made independently from interests of the market and can not be separated from the wishes of the elite.
The last remark about the film would be about the Indonesian workers meeting people (pretending to be representatives of IMF and World Bank) who go to the people who own little business and propose them to expand their busines with the loan. People are informed what measures they will have to take for actually doing it as exploiting children, displacing the poor communities, or buying out the lands from the small owners. The transnational corporations are able to write off the social expenditures by outsourcing strategies for flexible labour markets, capital mobility and high profits which also puts the local labour force of so called North or the center to give up the rights for social security and demand for higher wages. With the introduction of the NEW economic subject the labour becomes segmented and the reproduction question takes almost first position because of high competition and dissolved social security system, thus women’s role bares even more complicated burden to the situation where she becomes the care “lady”, the offshore proletarian, the domestic servant and immigrant in labour market and the main homeworker in the family unit for subsitence.
Saskia Sassen (2000) emphasizes the shift from women contributing to the “financing of the “modernized” sector by unmonetized “subsistence production” to women as a main cheap labor
29 for example in garment industry or electronics which Saskia Sassen calls “the feminized offshore proletariat”. The sites that incorporate large numbers of women in activities of strategic sectors have not much in common with traditional factory space and “labour aristocracy” of men, employers and especialy such oganizations as WTO know well that women with burden of household can‘t dedicate much time for the labour organizing. Thus Angelis already wrote that the state supports market driven social relations by guarding different aspects and punishing for alternative lives of susbsitence and organizing. I want to emphasize that support of religious heteronormative family unit coming from the state has little to do with preservation of national traditions. In the next chapter I will turn towards the case of Lithuania and it’s neoliberal establishment to analyze the feminization of labour forms.
The neoliberal "reprivatization discourse" (Fraser, 1989) seeks to repatriate the economic and social to the former domestic enclave. Reprivatization of the domestic, as Janine Brodie argues, has elevated and revitalized the hetero patriarchal family (Brodie 1996: 57). It rests on the dubious assumptions that the family is responsible for social reproduction, and that a family still consists of the male "breadwinner" and his dependents. Aside from the conservative and ideological premise of these assumptions, they neglect to take into account the changing reality of the family. The Fordist gender order no longer exists. Today's reality is that women - even if they wanted to - no longer have the "luxury" to remain as caretakers in the horne. (Young, 2002:65)
The main factor, however has been the changing nature of the labor market. The concept of regular, full-time wage labor as the growing type of employment has been giving way to a more diverse pattern, characterized by ``informalization'' of employment, through more outworking, contract labor, casual labor, part-time labor, homework and other forms of labor unprotected by labor regulations. Whereas traditionally informal economic activities were mainly the means of survival by the rural and urban poor, in recent years in both industrialized and industrializing countries there has been a trend in which even larger-scale enterprises have been informalizing their labor process.(Standing, 1999)
3. THE CASE OF LITHUANIA: FROM MOTHER- WORKERS TO FLEXIBLE SERVANTS
The grand industrial project of Soviet Union included every citizen in their labor „machine“, except children. The new Soviet woman‘s model was a total opposite to the happy houseviwe‘s
30 picture of the Welfare State. Soviet woman had to look strong and emancipated from all sexual objectifications. However under state socialism the “emancipation” of women did not coincide with liberated equal citizens but more as worker-mothers who carried the duty to bear and nurture the “the socialist citizens of the future” (Einhorn, 1993:40). Marina Kiblitskaya however does not confirm that first women were seen as mothers and houseviwes and work as secondary at least she states, it was not the tendency at time after WWII, but it ended right after Stalin died (Kiblitskaya, 2001:61).
From the 1970s demographic issues loomed larger and policies to encourage motherhood ensued, especially in Hungary, the GDR, the USSR and Romania (Molyneux, 1990: 27). Maternal ideology competed with the duty of labour. Women telling their stories about the Soviet times always emphasized how heavy their duties for housework and childcare was, they would always refer to it as second or even third job. Women’s contribution “to the idealized communist society of the future” was a huge burden instead of promised liberation, precisely because it did not go to eliminate the “natural inequalities”(Einhorn, 1993:44). Also the important element in the gender roles of Soviet Era was that women were never supposed to be equals to men in the workplace based on their constant sick leaves to look after the children, extended maternity and childcare leave (Ibid., 47). The natural innequality reverberated in the segregation of workplaces that was strongly supported by official propaganda in schools where women or mothers “appear” as dairy maids, doctors, primary school teachers, textille workers, draughtsmen, and supermarket cashiers (Ibid., 49). The main differenence between West welfare and socialist block countries, that I think is highly extended in today, was the amount of hours women worked, while in the West to preserve the family as main women’s occupation and to assure the breadwinner’s role to a man, in Eastern Europe women worked full-time jobs and their whole working day including work duties in home was estimated as high as 12 hours per day. Interestingly enough the mothers and in general full time house-wife in Soviet ideology were devalued and condemned as “burgeois relics” to oppose Western capitalist values, it would also mean the discrimination in the sense “that material social welfare entitlement came via labour force participation.”(Ibid., 58). However material sustainability gave some empowerment for women, in the interwies by Marina Kiblitskaya (2001) the women has noticable resentment to men being worse than children and not manly enough. Kiblitskaya claims it is related to conflicting combination of Soviet and traditional values while. Women are seen as more submited to the Soviet work ethic, they see their men as losers unable to provide for the family which also related to the old tradition of the dedicated breadwinner (Kiblitskaya, 2001: 65). Nevertheless I would see such conclussions misleading for taking up and symphatising with men
31 since we should not forget that women often had to do double or even triple shifts while men took their inability to fully maintain their family more as individual failure than social responsibility. It comes as no surprise that Einhorn mentions the rising statistics of divorces and women’s increasing repulsion toward marriage. The social programs and moral values stigamtized the unmarried women as well as single men, the benefit of getting the flat sooner being young newlyweds forcefully enticed men and women to conform the norms of socialist societies (Einhorn, 1993:57). In later years or during perestroika times the family more and more gained the important status in struggle against state repression:
The family was also regarded as fostering solidarity in an atomized society. It united “us”of non- existent or embryonic civil society against “them”in state power. (Ibid., 60)
Women took great part in securing this private zone from state interventions, also unconsciously providing men with individual autonomy at the same time depriving themselves from becoming visible in nationalist movements. Einhorn stresses women’s neglect towards Soviet forced “emancipation” programs which “ignored” the true womanhood and maternity. Basically, says Einhorn, there was no need for new formed states to impose the conservative family politics; women in Eastern Europe were voluntarily performing the caring role in the family and conceived it as responsibility to reconstruct this sense of community, the nation. The reality was very different from how nationalist movement imagined it and it was far away from Conservative-Corporatist model based on full male employment and high industrial productivity.
Economic damage to state revenues and political challenge to public services have undermined the social policies that supported women as workers and mothers: ‘The values underpinning social policy have become more delegitimated or more corrupted than in the stable liberal democracies’(Pascall, Manning, 2000)
Women of Eastern Europe had to deal with even heavier hardship than Western women dealing with capitalist crisis at the end of Welfare, this phenomenon is widely known as feminization of poverty: growing unemployment mostly impoverished single women as well as social cuts hit hard the retired women who were getting already a smaller amount of their pension compared to men. The impoverishment was also closely connected to the drastic reconceptualization of women’s role in the society, that was one of the way to take women out of the labor market and leave men to flourish in newly open enterprise of private businesses. Aneta Pavlenko (1998) also confirms it regarding Post-Soviet ideology to “patriarchal renaissance” or aggressive re- masculinization of society (Pavlenko, 1998: 89). The reconceptualization of women’s role for example in Poland was consecrated by the Pope defending “private property and entrepreneurial
32 initiative as bound up with human dignity and the consolidation of the family as well as with economic efficiency (Einhorn, 1993:67). In other words Pope symbolically opened the way for neoliberal market taking the route of 19th century liberal theory grounded on individualism with a “natural” gender based division of labour. When you converge the tired mother with triple shift and neoliberalism what you get is the sexual object good for housework and cheap for labor market.
The striking moment is the mythology created about Eastern European women wanting to stay feminine and sexualized as the opposite to the times when women had to refrain from their true femininity and induldge themselves to properly serve the duties that the new nationalist state prescribed them to. Once again the role for women was prescribed from above within restrained rights of secondary citizenship. The limits were drawn to pretty clear direction to continue the sacred life of the family which started as movement against official politics that has extended into the time of nationalism occupied predominantly by male figures who were happy to bring out the 19th century’s model of family as exemplary induction into national state of independence. Lithuania was not an exception, women’s role in the movement was more like cheerleader’s behind the stage filled with men proclaiming the great „come back“ to Europe.
3.1 From the Transition to Established Neoliberalism
During the end of the eighties the dissolvement of welfare state models in the West started with the new economic model in mind which was all about cuting the governement spending in regards to social benefits and free public services including: healthcare, education and other essential resources of well-being of the society as such. The system, after some time, gained it‘s neoliberalism name. The same challenge to neoliberalise everything was appointed to newly made countries after the collapse of Soviet Union. All three Baltic states inherited from the socialist system "fully articulated, mature system of social security that carried extensive financial obligations to their populations. These included old age pensions and sickness, disability and survivor benefits covering most workers and their families and financed from state budgets partly through taxes on enterprises, usually with no direct worker contribution.“( Bohle, Greskovits, 2012:114) The currency and tax reform in Baltic region took a big step towards radical neoliberal model which would mean a sharp break with communist legacies. Exploitating the enthusiasm of national rebirth and the nationalising project in domestic politics overall to show the West how serious the governments of all three Baltic states were about changing the whole economic landscape of their countries. This strict policy is tightened together with new national currency regime didnt help the social sector to develop at all. Indeed the effect was
33 opposite precisely because they locked in the goal of monetary stability notwithstanding the implied social costs (Ibid.).
For example one of the important officials in Estonia viewing strict fiscal discipline as a harmful restriction, expressed opposite opinion: „The stringent financial restraints made it easier for the government to decide what to do“(Ibid.). It should be mentioned that Estonia was like a shining star of neoliberalism for the other two Baltic states and it was chosen first of Baltic states to get accepted to European Union. However, in the first years after the fall of Soviet Union the monetary order, like many other orders, were in chaos, the chaos by many was called “wild capitalism” which entailed a rapid uncontrolable privatization process and the emergence of different small enterprises/businesses.
The rapid expropriation of state assets in the process of transition to capitalism was effected, in the main, via emerging business criminality. Privatization, the economic engine of the transition process, according to its most enthusiastic proponents, was supposed to make workers “co- owners,”and fulfill egalitarian “social justice”and equity objectives (Lithuanian Free Market Institute, 2000). Yet within a matter of a few years, sometimes evenm within months, the majority of privatization vouchers handed out to workers in formerstate enterprises were sold on the black market for cash. (Woolfson, Beck, 2002)
In Lithuania the official Soviet police was dismantled immediately (Juska, Paulikas, 2006) most of them were repatriated back to Russia as many of them were ethnicaly Russians. For some years at the begining of the nineties the police was in the stage of reorganization but the operations of privatizing and business making was in the process. As Vadim Volkov (2002) states in his paper on violent entrepreneurs, apart from that the police was failing to protect the private business the other factor that produced demand for enforcement partnership was high entrepreneurial risk which consisted of constant non-repayment of debts and failures to follow the contracts, not to mention frequent thefts (Volkov, 2002:42). The close relationship between social issues and public finances and financial markets were fostered and resulted in neoliberal formula, which is all about being active in the market economy. The degree of activity in the market is correlating with all the aspects of social life of every individual in neoliberal system. Your pension depends on how you are able to manage your private pension fund when you are working. Obviously the system which centers everything around the financial markets has it‘s losers who are not able to follow the rules of the market, those in Lithuania are ussually called members of „unattached society“.
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The articulation and representation of people who live from benefits of unemployment which are quite common throughout the West entered Eastern European discourse, as well now. This imagination doesn‘t go further than imagining the people on benefits as those who do nothing and just use the money of the class of decent citizens who pay their taxes. Dysfunctional families, alcohol abuse, suicide, and high rates of incarceration were a fact of the Soviet life (Juska, Paulikas, 2006) but all of it still persist and in much larger numbers. The new poor, a phenomena that Soviet society had never seen before emerged: homeless people, children begging on streets. In the city the living costs for dysfunctional families became unbearable as well as for people with alcohol abuse, they couldnt pay the utility bills, or they lost their savings by investing in pyramid schemes or gambling, etc.
Alison Stenning in her article „Where is Post-Socialist Working Class?“(2007) emphasizes that often the working-class, or now the class of poor, are reduced to representation of merely parasites of the society who do only harm for the rest of the society. However, almost never there is a structural critical view to the processes that underclassed people are participating in. Usually the depiction is very clear, basically concentrated in the criminal pages of the news. Thus the state politics which goes hand in hand with economic model is supplemented by media which is very one sided in support of the unambiguous ideological line.
3.2 Privatization
In 1995 more than half of state owned objects came into the private hands. At first everything seemed fair as the vouchers were distributed to every citizen in Lithuania to develop the “social justice” and equity objectives. In other words, workers were made into “co-owners” of former state enterprises within practically one day. Such ownership did not last for long since privatization vouchers were sold fast in exchange for cash or other exchange deals in the black market that was predominantly tuled by managers of enterprises, the members of nomenklatura and the criminal gangs (Woolfson, 2006). Privatization was presented as main engine for the transformation of the command economy into the market economy. Lithuania, according to the foreign “experts”, became the lion of privatization in the whole territory of former socialist bloc. The rapid privatization did not bring prosperity and welfare for the common citizens, sometimes people were even convinced to give the vouchers for free saying that the industry they worked for is worth nothing and especially does not have value in the market economy although that did not hurt the purchasers to use the industry premises as they wish.
According to economy proffesor Valdas Samonis (1998) privatization in Lithuania was interrupted by the election of Lithuanian democratic labour party which formerly was the main
35 strata of nomenklatura. LDLP party was chosen by dissapointed society who was in despair of sky rocketing unemployment, dropping wages and rising prices. Valdas Samonis shared the other opinion, he claimed that fast privatization was much less painful than taking slower steps towards it and in his opinion the LDLP made more painful and more corrupted as the owners of the big enterprises became the privilleged minority. In his view Lithuania took major detour and failed to benefit large part of the society. However, the same author still relies only on forms of privatization which for him is the basis that should at the end benefit the society in other words the invissible hand of the market supposed to benefit everyone at the end and the only obstacle that he names is the lack of efficiency and lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the mind of Soviet Bureaucrat (Simonis, 1998:52). Putting forward privatization he agrees to undermine the social policy which would include questions and demands about the proportionate distribution of common goods and fairness in the distribution of resources. The privatization and democracy should have been the pillars which hold the promise to Eastern European societies turn the backward socialism to the “normal” capitalism of the West. However, the growth trajectory was not that close and the promise was actually cancelled - experts have said the postcommunist governements did not listen to their advice carefully. Nevertheless it was “shock therapy” advice for most Soviet governments,‘ apply the policy fast and “less” painfull effects‘. In Lithuania they believed giving vouchers or coupons that could be exchanged for shares of privatized enterprises will gain a popular support and will help to avoid civil disobedience. The concentration on the privatization processes led the governments and their experts to some kind of amnesia that prevented them from creating various market institutions that would actually help private enterprises integrate into the market and help to restructure it. The local government had to restrict itself and give a way for private sector to make most allocative decisions on social policy; what in neoliberalism is called unnecessary expenditure. The reports from World Bank and International monetary fund experts do prove the optimistic statements that equated the developement and growth of economy to the well social being of individual. However the promised development was only in unemployment, wages and shut downs of industries:
The sudden opening of the markets and the abolition of capital controls made these industrial companies extremely vulnerable. The extreme vertical integration that was the norm in such companies meant that if one part of the value chain ran into problems due to the rapid liberalization, it easily brought down the entire chain. However, foreign companies seeking to privatize plants were almost always interested in only part of the value chain (a specific production plant, infrastructure, or location), and thus privatization turned into publicly led attrition of companies and jobs.(Rainer Kattel, 2010)
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The data of former Soviet Union and other Eastern Europe countries showed completely other reality as, Lawrence King (2003) emphasized,in the region “from 1988 to 1994, the poverty rate increased from 4 percent to 32 percent. From 1989 to the mid-1990s, the number of people living on less than four dollars a day increased by more than ten times, to 147 million” (King, 2003). No one has dreamed of such major collapse, the cuts of social welfare were followed by devastating situation of the former state enterprises that went through the same road with shrinking labour force, as there was not much of the orders and materials to get the production going. Privatization of firms resulted in a lack of capital for investment and massive “looting” of industrial machineries. Sometimes the military fatigues were hired to guard teritories of enterprises (Ibid.). Also the vouchers were massively sold to external or internal managers who were offering money just to buy food. In general the reprivatization happened with no capitalists around, who could help with restructuring, the factories were stripped of their assets just to be able to somehow pay to the workers; nor were there any infrastructure helping to get the information about business in other areas
A phrase frequently heard in the interviews with managers and union leaders from Russian firms is that their companies entered into a period of “standing still.” That is, the firms were technically bankrupt, paid no wages, and sold nothing. Firms typically responded in two ways. First, there was the massive decrease in wage payments, primarily through wage arrears. (Ibid.)
Naturally the state is not able to collect the revenues from the companies on the verge which ends up in substantial cuts of social welfare, it can not provide the support for basic institutions including education and healthcare. The organizing of subsitence for life became an essential task and major schemes imposed from above could not provide anything except the promise of better future for capital to develop; since all the enterprises were slowly diying, the future of deindustrialization brings the cheap labor closer to the borders of the West. Most firms also were restructured to produce on smaller scale. One example that was given by L.King was a TV factory in Russia which after privatization started begansmuggling details from South Korea and collected screens in the factory, which involves downsizing of workers and selling or renting out the unused property. The most confounding from King’s research was the directors of Russian firms telling the stories about coming to work with bottles of milk to help the workers to concentrate because they are destracted by hunger. Even more the factories would provide workers with land for subsistence farming or collective farming of potatoes which would help to survive for “temporary” time. A lot of workers left themselves the industries and took the petty trade activities to make a living. However the petty trade was taken over by predominantly women and not men for various reasons as I will look into it a bit later.
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In her research Christy M. Glass (2008) analyzes women situation in labour market in different Post-soviet Eastern European countires (excluding Lithuania) I think that such analysis is useful to define transition processes in Lithuania as well, but I would argue that service sector was not so much established in Lithuania compared to Hungary or Poland and later I will explain what it meant for Lithuanian women. She provides different theories to describe the situation of female workers in post-socialist transition. The first is segmentation theory which is about women and men working in different sectors, such theory predicts that women will be protected from losing jobs as already in Socialist time the jobs were segregated and women worked in lighter industry while men were working in heavy one. After labour market changed rapidly and heavy industry went bankcrupt women were able to save their jobs including jobs in trade, hotel and tourism, retail, communications, banking, finance, and educational and health services. She also uses Eva’s Fodor theory of revalued resources which claims that the expanding service sector will provide women long-term professional jobs and lift women above men considering also higher percentage of educated women in the service sector. First of all this theory is limited because most of the labour force in service sector today is rendered as unskilled work like retailing, food service work, room service or care work etc also looking at the transition times when people slowly were loosing their jobs or their wages were rapidly cut almost to half there were not many clients to serve. The other threory, that opposes such predictions, is reserve army of labour theory.This theory claims that women’s labour force is always more vulnerable than men’s and they are first to be fired from work and have less chances to be re-hired. Christy also includes the supply of women labor for stating that the change during transition was not only in the economic sphere but also the traditional family values resurrected in national dominating discourse. It would mean even if women could work they would have rather stayed at home and refuse double or triple shifts of work.
The state could easily cut the benefits as public childcare or maternity leave and transfer all the responsibility to employers thus such measures would ensure that women would stay as secondary workers who employers see as unstable, unreliable and expensive. In her article she does not analyse Lithuanian case but the conclusion she makes does make sense here and it is dominating similarly in Eatern European countries. However, the conclusion can not be deduced that all Eastern situation was and is identical. It is easy to assume that neither the segmentation theory nor theory of revalued resources would have come into the reality and proved to be long- term provisions for women. The social benefits for working women gradually were erased from States’ budgets together with women fading away from labour market esspecialy in low skill factory workplaces, textile industry and other vanishing workplaces mainly occupied by women.
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The division also remained that men had their workplaces and women had their’s and the place of the manager also remained the place for the man, which in the Soviet times was clearly defined and ascribed to men. In times of post-socialist transition women’s positon in terms of labour segregation hardly changed except that the unemployment was introduced and many low- skilled women workers were forced to leave to take care of their households; the others mainly in public sector stayed in workplaces managed by men.
The widespread access to vegetable plots even amongst urban dwellers means that growing food is now almost a universal bulwark against hunger. Shadow economy was part of Soviet time for years and it certainly did not dissapear in time of transition to capitalist economy since the wage became sparse,not enough to sustain aone family household; alternative ways were used to survive, which usually stem from the traditional black Soviet market ( Smith, Stenning, 2006). Women were going to the market to sell their grown products especially in countryside peripheries where officialy paid work was extremely scarce. Green houses full of tomatoes or cucumbers were the main income for the villagers, if lucky. Also the tradition to live in the house with three generations of extended family was also one way to survive as there were persons of older generations getting their pensions and taking care of children while their mothers working at low paid jobs or taking care of the food production. I remember myself finding my aunt baking cakes for various balls and getting the appointment with the doctor much sooner than others. I remember my friend’s mother, a lonely mother, having a room in the apartment full of sewing machines. I also remember the fridge full of chinese choclates brought from Poland to sell in Lithuania.
Adrian Smith and Alison Stenning (2006) conclude in their research about alternative economies in Post Socialist countries (which I find myself especially interesting) that most people who were enganing in alternative practices to increase their income were mostly people from urban areas or the richer farmers. The other aspect of such practices is related to the term alternative or shadow economy that basically is transformed later, if successful, into entrepreneurial projects or are left behind. We can not forget that shadow economy was constructed as capitalist in contradiction to (and in conflict with) the formal, state-owned, ‘socialist’economy (Ibid.). In terms of women in transition economy there was not much to enjoy being at home especially when poverty of the household with three generations in three room apartment made work for women as the escape (Pascall, Manning, 2000). In transition economies when GDP and tax revenues went to the bottom the social policies went down with it. Mother once again had to work but without the Soviet Union welfare politics that provided welfare through the job; in other words if mother worked (there was not much chance that she
39 wouldn’t) she got the access to nursery provision, family allowance, sick child leave and parental benefits, summer camps for children, holidays. ow the work had another obligatory dimension which was very much situated within the survival of whole family. The development of social networks was also a neccesity and a coping strategy in the household which was used as an alternative to the loss of job security, state services and occupational welfare (Ibid.). The same networks also could be called “survival networks”, within the the extended family women were exchanging clothes for children, grown vegetables, girlfriends were exchanging numbers of doctors, various services, sharing car for children to be driven to school, etc. Family became totally dependent on woman, her social abilities, her caring, her emotional state, she had to provide not only for family but also to use it for the services the state could not pay her anymore. There is no surprise that during shock
In sum, it is evident that whether unemployed or no longer part of the labour force, women’s legacy of strong integration in paid work has been adversely affected by the decline in publicly funded support for working mothers and children. Country reports show that women’s marginalization is closely associated with the growing conflict between their reproductive role and employment, and the effects of life-cycle changes on their ability to find and remain in employment.(Pollert, 2003)
Women did not leave their workplace and just stay at home “happily ever after”. The other road that was opened and spread like disease was so called shuttle trade where individual traders purchased merchandise abroad in small quantities and sold it back home in open-air markets. Most of these traders were women standing in the markets to sell Turkish or Chinese commodities. In Russia only around 30 million people were participating in shuttle trade and it provided 75 percent of all consumer goods (Mukhina, 2009). It does not come as surprise that women were dominant in such trade considering the social conditions at that time, in other words closing industries and financial insecurity didn’t leave much of a choice. The commercial activity of shuttle trade let people to get money directly from what they sell as they did not pay any taxes except bribes for border police. Trade in Soviet union never had a good name and the shame to stand and beg people to buy their goods was prescribed to women to handle. As Irina Mukhina (2009) notices women according to public opinion were thought as better and more honnest traders than deceiving men and had a “better” reason to do it because they had to take care of their children and at the same time were better at doing it as women who supposed to know better the tastes of the society. I think it comes as no surprise that women came to dominate such trade because we see a lot of women in markets today as well. The necessity to go to the trade occupation for subsistence is very different from today’s entrepreneurial business
40 agent. There is musch less affective and hard manual labor involved as women from markets would definetely tell the difference between company selling the goods and the woman at the market. hey had to bargain with border police to let them bring in the goods, also bribing the officers was an everyday practice but there was also not one and definetely not two kilos to carry. Thus lower back pains, hernias and other diseases prevailed in the backsground of financial profits that helped women to improve the house environment and they could allow a vacation trip (Ibid.). After all they really deserved it having in mind that caring the overweight was not the heaviest part of the job if we take into account sitting or standing in open-air markets through cold and hot, snow and freeze, bright sun and heavy rain the whole day from very early morning. I am not surprised that such trade was not taken into account as serious job and women were precisely those to take that job; as for men it meant shame and degeneration. It had to stay invisible and non-formal for a reason which actually means that all women’s work formal or non-formal supposed to be only temporary untill their husbands can regain their economic power but actually as Mukhina writes Soviet idylic family really began to crumble as women were traveling for weeks and “got involed in multiple short-term relationships”(Ibid.). Thus the transition period had nothing in common with nationalist fantasies about cheerful housewives saving family’s and country’s morals.
3.3 Foreign Indirect Disinvestment in Labor Force
In Lithuania like in other Post-socialist countries women became “symbolic makers as well as cultural and biological reproducers.” Women’s role after independence has been reaffirmed as that of biological mothers of the new, liberated nation. The national and economic project was set as primary one to accomplish while the social policies were left in the background. For women it meant leaving labour force due to the combination of the drop in real wages and loss of social benefits and services associated with employment. However in later period of time in Post-communist countries socioligsts like Eva Fodor compares the gender employment gap and affirms that “the Baltic countries represent what we call neo-liberal mobilization in which both men and women must enter the labor market”(Fodor, Glass 2010). While the other part of Eastern Europe like Hungary or Poland sticked to the policy of ideal breadwinner family model Lithuania together with other Baltic countries moved towards strictly neoliberal measures. Other important “detail” is that women in Central and Eastern Europe are in contrast to Western societies working full time this also can be guessed if its a continuous tradition from Soviet times when the concept of work was set as the first priority to everyone including women. However, it is not the only reason, considering how nationalists in Lithuania were opposing Soviet heritage including the welfare system and how Neoliberal reforms were imposed by central banks to cut
41 the state spending. The result was full inclusion of women into the labour market because simply the paid work in “neoliberal bloc of countries” (Bohle, Greskovits, 2012) was for survival that little has to do with emancipation. Neoliberal employment inclusive politics is very similar to Soviet one, both pretending to emancipate women just one on the grounds of socialist ideology and the the other on the basis of “neutral” space of the market (Fodor, Glass 2010). The inclusion of women did coincided with the globalization, de-industrialization, direct foreign investment and got stronger with integration into EU. At the begining of 2000 Lithuanian economic structures and extent of internationalization became very similar to the Western one. The markets were opened widely for foreign investment, especially after the mid-1990s (Bohlee , Greskovits, 2006).
Just after 90’s the situation was much different with labour market when industries were closing on massive scale due to the crash of whole Soviet market. With Unions disapearing, wages going down, masses of unemployed people were sent back to the household which meant for mostly women to find ways possible for alternative to survive. It is hard to estimate the degree of unemployment immediately after the 1990, however as Woolfson (2006) confirms, the rising unemployment was not simply just the short episode of transition.
However, mass hardship was not simply a passing feature of the early turbulent years of transition. In 2 years, between 1997 and 1999, as a result of ongoing privatizations in Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania, nearly one quarter of job positions disappeared in the largest five factories. In the Kaunas industrial region, where the biggest number of factories are located, the number of jobs in large enterprises decreased by about 40%.(Woolfson, 2006)
Another very important market policy that was imposed and very generously applied in Lithuania was Foreign direct investment, which is also related to the rapid changes in labour organizing which basically meant stripping of workers rights and restrain it from any kind of organizing. If you look at the information on Invest Lithuania webpage providing data on foreign direct investement you will see that the advertisement to allure the investments from abroad is based on the cheap and skilled labour force, which also presented as compliant meaning with no strong capability of organizing. The growing economy and political stability were praised by different experts of economics from the West, bey foreign capital flows in Baltics Lithuania takes second place after Estonia. The conditions “to invest” in Lithuania or in other words to set the business is very generous since it offers the tax breaks of capital there are also customs exemptions and road, property and VAT exemptions (Woolfson, Beck, 2002). The emerging transnational industries did not try to revive the dying heavy industry but instead were offering unsecure, low-wage, sweatshop jobs. Pretty fast Baltic bloc became one big garment sweatshop
42 area where main labour force is women (Bohlee, Greskovits, 2006). It will resemble in my interviews that I did as empirical part in addition to this work. However if to analyze what FDI (foreign direct investment) is bringing to the national economy many enthusiasts of neoliberalism can tell us very fast: restructure, “create” jobs, improve economic environment. During first years of transition Lithuania ike other countries were not exactly the paradise for foreign investment, as Hans-Werner Sinn and Alfons J. Weichenrieder (1997) from respective education institutions described the situation in 1996 that the investors still did not feel safe enough about the private property regulations, the re-election of ex-communist parties was also worrying, the partial replacement of police with mafia was taken in to the account as well. In general the lack of institutional safeguards created later with help of EU placed FDI on hold. The other disencouragement was related to EU directly:
EU restrictions on trade in 'sensitive sectors' (Rollo, Smith, 1993) has discouraged FDI in the CEE countries, since potential declining industries in western Europe are precisely those in which CEE countries often enjoy a comparative advantage over the west.(Sinn, Weichenrieder, 1997)
One more time it proves that introduction of free market economy is closely related to the government and it does not happen spontaneously just because some people are interested in it as we can not consider IMF or World Bank as just “some” people. The latter institutions set the ground for EU enlargement pushing the Eastern European countries to accept a specific, neoliberal reform model (Bohle, 2006). The mentioned neoliberal project specifically designed for Eastern Europe was special because it was based on the transnational capital ties and the all the problems related to the labour issues or social democracy in general was left out as secondary:
Initially, transnational corporations organised sub-contracting relations with eastern European firms rather than investing directly. Moreover, they engaged mostly in sectors that allowed for an easy exit option (apparel, furniture, textiles) (Ibid.)
Also if to quote more Bohle, she argues that the competition in EU between the older and “young” members are not equal at all as “the east specialises in the lower end of transnational production chains (Ibid.) which means that transnational companies are not very interested in developing the knowledge production or high-rate production which would mean lower value of for example german steel or other important western production. Not many scholars for clear reasons argue that Foreign direct investment does more harm than good to the societies in countries dependent on such investments. First of all they create the income inequalities with
43 capability to pay the management much more than the domestic local enterprises not to mention the lower chain labour working within the foreign sector but also I think there is a need to consider that the foreign investment also capable to hire a lot more cheap labour in quantities than domestic industries. Usualy these investments are made into the light industry and low- skilled labour. Bohle emphasizes the enthusiasm of international investors about labour organizing climate in Eastern Europe as after nineties the privatization process dissolved the large part of unions, for example in Lithuania today the labour unions have 7 percent of members from all the labour force. The legacies against communism helped to undermine such organizations like unions, leftits and anything that has to do with left or labour embracing the all- mighty neoliberalism that also became the area of hope for the worker. In other words the market at some extent hopefully should serve the interests of the worker, but will it or should it really?
The economic crisis of 2008-2009 disclosed the lie of the rapid growth during the 2000s in the Baltic region which was mostly glossed over by increasing domestic loans in the real estate market through international banks like Swedbank or SEB in Lithuania. From the early nineties to today all the economy especially in Baltics relies on the foreign direct investment and exports which does not realy give substantial returns (Kattel, 2010). In other words Lithuanian production level remain very much dependent on the outsourcer from transnational companies. Rainer Kattel is not optimistic about the Baltic and Eastern Europe economic policies “as domestic linkages are weak and so is the competitiveness toward the EU core economies”(2010). The reasons he gives was already mentioned here since the restructuring of industrial enterprises was very brutal and non-consistent spurred by global capital in the form of FDI inflows. Lithuania taking a big steps of deindustrialization and primitivization of industrial enterprises became a paradise for outsourcing of production which also would mean a demand for low skilled flexible labour force. Moreover before entering eurozone Lithuanian governement and central bank kept on resisting devalutions of currency that lead to high levels of unemployment, low wages and public indebtness. It just proves that liberalizing the market and containing the role of outsorcees put dependent countries in deep debt which can not be paid back because the FDI is not interested in local needs or developing domestic production as well as international banks do not care about making bubbles. What FDI considers as the most important are ‘the moderate wage costs and skilled workforce, together with growing market potential, geographic location and economic and political stability’(Woolfson, Beck, 2002). During the crises in Lithuania the flows of capital decreased and unemployment, social inequality and poverty increased significantly and that is the beauty of FDI or transnational companies that they always can retract their capital and choose “better” enironment. Nevertheless to this day it
44 seems that there is always an optimism about waiting for another and another flow of foreign capital from the so called economic experts and government officials:
„In the second quarter, foreign direct investment flow in Lithuania increased by three and a half times as compared with the same quarter last year. Foreign investors in Lithuania most attracted by several aspects: competitive workforce, convenient geographical location, well-developed infrastructure. Most foreign investors have criticized the Lithuanian Labour Code. So we hope that we will be able to improve the investment climate, when the Parliament will declare new version of the Labour Code, "- said Prime Minister Algirdas Butkevicius.“
Here Lithuanian Prime Minister is emphasizing the investors being unhappy about the Labour Code. The latter was already changed on the same basis in 2003. The changing of labour is also called the liberalization of labour relations. In the next chapter I will try to show how it can be seen clearly that the interaction among globalization, informalization, and transnationalization promote the flexibilization of the work force and moreover strengthen the gender specific division of labour. FDI and transnational companies have all conditions to raise the inequality in the region that already forged by privatization process from nineties in Eastern Europe.
3.4 Does Flexible Mean Women?
One example can be mentioned in Lithuania that also illustrates the certain global economic processes and rising inequality as big companies were privatized and restructured with investment of foreign capital. In 2006 big TV screen factory with 4000 workers had to stop their lines due to huge debts. The company was privatized in 1994 and restructured implanting technologically advanced lines to make flat screen TVs for Western Europe market. Officialy the bancrupcy was stated because of inability to compete with cheap flat screen TVs assembled in Turkey and made of liquid crystals. In some articles from the media at the time of bankrupt the angry voices of employees are visible and directed mainly at the director and administration of the factory. People were confused and were not informed about the situation but were sure that the factory was dying in relation to various activities of the administration. The workers were sure that director had some shady business going on with secondary companies as they look through the facotry window pointing out the new director’s luxurious half million litas costing car:
Here you can notice happening vague things. It is said that there is money laundrey goin on through secondary firms. People can see trucks leaving the territory, but do not know what is in it, "- he said. Others supposedly heard that part of the goods were transported to the "Screen" established company "Ekmecha 'warehouses.
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The most angry were the long term workers who did not know where they were supposed to go after 10-15 years of work in the same factory. However the interesting detail about younger female workers can be read in one of the articles about situation in factory which resembles the market labour conditions. When young women are asked about the future prospect they answered that they work only half of the year and they are totally sure that they can get work in service sector (“Eisime dirbti kasininkėmis, barmenėmis - darbo visada yra”) as they already earning around 200 hundred euroes per month which conforms that they were working as unskilled labour force. While for the long-term workers esspecially men were telling to journalist about the plans to work in other countries (“Pusseserė įsikūrė Ispanijoje, reikia jai paskambinti”) or in construction sites of Lithuania.
It is already possible to make conclusions about labour market from the articles on workers positions about alternatives at that time including expansion of service sector and gendered relations as none of men mentioned such work prospects in restaurants or shops except women. Also almost none of them expects to find work according to the speciality and skill they developed in the factory which also refers to the process of de-skilling which is greatly induced by de-instruliazition. As it can be seen from case of “Ekranas” factory” economic crises in Lithuania did not cause more factories to close down or go bankrupt as I already mentioned what generated the crisis in Lithuania. All the production today in Lithuania is a part of global market and the failure to compete in it mostly presented as the natural order of competition. The production of TV screens demands larger investment in the technology than in labor force the main reason why manufactures are traveling to the parts of the world where labour is cheaper and work regulations are much more flexible.
I would like to turn to the flexibilization of labour and how it is and was done in terms of changing labour code in Lithuania after independence. The “Baltic tiger” was able to curtail the rights of workers first with increasing unemployment that means the decrease of labor union members, also with it’s fiscal policy and the stagnation of domestic market that resulted in keeping the wages low “as average salaries and wages in Lithuania were less than 30% of EU average levels”(Woolfson and Beck, 2002). After the elelctions of 2000s the coalition of liberal parties came into the power which decided to propose a project to liberalize the labor relations on account of the workers, the proposed measures below supposed to somehow “reduce the unemployment”:
● an approved typical form of employment contract to be recommended but not compulsory; ● restrictions on temporary employment contracts to be gradually phased out;
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● statutory requirements for an employer to inform the social insurance commission (Sodra) on the employment of a person on the same day and dismissal from employment within three working days to be no longer applicable; ● mandatory working time records no longer to be kept; ● compensation for public servants and other employees as provided by existing legislation to be reduced in amount; ● workers who receive training at their employer’s expense to compensate the employer if they change employment.
These measures from 2001 at the time were proposed to target „the old“ Labour code inherited from Soviet times. The Law on employment contracts was changed into more flexible forms of contract as well as the compensations were reduced if employee is laid off. The other proposals were protested by trade unions and were postponed however the steps towards more felxibility in the workplace were made and big part of the labour law was modified including the laws of contract forms, holidays and trade unions which was officialy introduced in 2003. The same flexibilization of labour market served to open the gates wider for FDI in order to provide with amount of cheap labour begging for work. Liberalization of labour code shapes new inequalities situating and constructing new stratification that consist of„new elites, a middle class composed of commercial, managerial and professional positions, a large low-income class consisting of blue-collar workers, farmers and state sector employees, and the lowest social position, occupied by deprived and marginalised people“( Holscher, Perugini and Pompei, 2011). In other words the large low income class consist of people working for minimum wage or a bit more which coincides with the promise of skilled and relatively cheap labour but to make it even cheaper the certain measures also have to be applied especially in terms of labour organizing which can have be called measures for ensuring „social stability“ and at the same time refusal to unionize, protest and strike. Moreover social well-being does not include the social provisions rather the governement has to ensure that the ability to choose the life dependent on benefits of unemployment would not be a case.
The deindustruliziation and dependence on foreign capital flows demand the flexibilization of labour as well as the unskilled and low-income strata of people mainly comprised of female because they are female and their investment in human capital is much lower than men‘s. If women‘s work were less valuable in Soviet union but seen as obligation subsidized by state with public child-care services, free healthcare etc., in neo-classical times or in times of „race to the bottom“ women‘s work has been devalued and made into reserve army of cheap labour.
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3.5 „But How to Live, to Survive?“(Interviews)
At the beginning of 2016 I started interviewing women in Kaunas city and Žiežmariai about their work, the conditions of work, the relation of work and family. The intention that lied in making interviews looked at first very vague. First I thought to make interviews with women who are in the some kind of struggle in their workplace and the only workers who were in struggle at that time were teachers. Later I contacted the food producers‘ union and put me in to the contact with one o ftheir representative in Mondelez factory. She helped me to find more women who worked in the factory. I searched for women from different sectors to expand my research on the feminization of labour forms. The more interviews I did the more I noticed the environment dominated by working women. Especially when you go to shops, to hospitals, to universities, you see cleaners, nurses, etc. Overall I took around 17 interviews from women of different age and positions, none of them was very pleased of their position and always the critical points to share. Some of the interview here I selected for a reason to emphasize how labor conditions are changing to the advantage of market and that heavily affects women‘s jobs as much as their lifes.
The Union of teachers declared a strike and the leaders of the unions began negotiations with government. The strike is not an easy measure to take in Lithuania as I already mentioned in my thesis but the Unions of teachers prove to be strong organizations able to pass all the legal procedures. Nevertheless they belong to the public sector and their boss is government who is more abstract and public apparatus of power. This year probably was the first year when teachers and union were less demonized than during previous actions. If to look at the history of struggles, teachers were the most active labor organizing force in Lithuania. They were striking from early 1992 andtheir biggest victory was in 2008 when strikes raised their wages almost double; 45 percent and the minister of education had to resign. This year teachers were striking for higher wages because their salaries were cut during 2009 economic crises. Media and various experts long time ago declared the end of crisis but many workers, including teachers, got the same reduced payment. All in all the situation in the schools and education system is not getting better.
Teacher of mathematics and English teacher from „Santara“ high-school“
„More and more schools are closed every year due to the demographic situation as they claim.“ Teachers demanding higher wages didn’t feel they were reducing the education values to money since demands for better funding of education mean the demand to change the priorities of funding for government in general. I went with my friends to the only school in Kaunas that was on strike. We met with couple teachers, who were hanging out in teachers’ room agitating other
48 teachers to join the strike. „People are fired constantly with adminstrative explanation being that there are less and less students“. That is the reason why teachers are afraid to strike because they see the situation is very precarious. Other teachers are young unlike her, she jokes, and don’t have so much reserve of her body like she does as she could live for a while without food. She feels very safe about her position because she is an expert mathematician and she says if everyone would be fired she would be last one. Teachers can feel safe if they have this high expertise but most of them don’t. The public school system is more and more becoming like a company where competition is very high. The other teacher says there is always a demand to make students into good students. Also every student comes with a “bag of money” and such system makes situation even worse. The logic is everywhere the same to attract as many clients as possible. There are talks about equating teachers’ salaries according to the class bags system, assign money to the class in other words, but there is always complicated situation with schools in the village. They are all the time closing down more and more schools there and at the same time promising to raise teachers’ salaries, but they lie, no one knows where that money goes. Even if schools are closed down teachers say they have no idea where it goes because all they see is the waste of money like in case of their school when they fired a lot of teachers and had to pay compensations and at the end the director decided to increase students’ number in classes. The new director decided also to clean the school from teachers she didn’t like, around 10 teachers were convinced to leave and one teacher decided not to give up and stayed with help of union. That was the moment when teachers decided that they needed to establish the union in their school. „The students in the school are supportive and understand that teachers’ profession today does not make sense for young people“. One of teachers said she made an experiment and asked children who in their class would like to become teachers, after such question students just laughed. The aim of the strike is, as teachers claim, that no one would laugh. Then she asked students if you got 2000 euros and would be able to pick the subject you like for teaching the class raised their arms. One teacher says she really wants to prove that union is able to stand for their members and she is sure that if someone will be fired it will not be a member of the union. However the English teacher emphasizes the low level of solidarity in schools and she gives the example that if everyone would walk in the corridors with the badges supporting striking teachers the director would not be able to manipulate and divide the collective so easy.“The value of the education cannot be estimated in money and you feel that today education is devalued when you hear opinions of students or their parents because education does not give you a monetary profit immediately“.
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Later when strike ended I went to the other school in small town Žiežmariai. That school was always famous for whole school to be closed during strike, meaning that all teachers were striking unanimously. I met one teacher who is teaching Lithuanian grammar and literature and we started talking about how strikes affect teachers’ incomes.
Teacher from Žiežmariai:
„The problem with striking is that it’s never clear if someone will pay you the salary“. She says she will probably get only half of the salary and it will be around 250 euros. Somehow, she says, she will survive, she has a husband and some vegetables that she has grown through summer. There is mathematician who lives alone and has one room flat; she gets 400 euros a month although all “her” children pass the exams very well. She will get also less and wants to fight for her wage as she has to pay for the flat every month. The situation in Žiežmariai as in every smaller town in Lithuania is hard, every year fewer children come to schools the teachers have to be laid off as the other teachers would be able to get decent salary. The director in the school supports the strike although it seems more that she is forced to do it as the collective solidarity in school is very strong. They always experience the pressure from outside even mayor comes to talk to the teachers to press them to stop the strike consequently they get the notice from director asking to come back to the classes. The mayor like probably every bureaucrat was very polite when he came to school and sounded supportive but was also talking about last year students and their final exams but teacher says they always send them tasks and don’t leave them to do whatever as they imagine. The school in Ziezmariai is divided in two groups one is director’s group and the other is union’s group. The teacher is sure that one from administration is gonna be fired soon and she will want to join the union but she says it is not fair to keep the administration as they only make troubles for the teachers. She said that they are famous for suing the directors, one after the other were forced to leave the job. She also mentions a strong leader of the union who is teacher of mathematics and a man who knows the law pretty well. The new director knew the situation and tried to please the teachers by organizing trips and parties. Teachers union has old traditions in Ziezmariai School and became very active when regular teachers started managing the union themselves. Everyone should strike in Lithuania, says teacher in discontent, as she doesn’t understand why the stadiums were being built for sports and especially basketball. “It is too much you invest everything in one thing and nothing is left for others.” The strike was canceled after the agreement with government which promised to appoint more money for teacher’s salaries but the sum of money is ridiculous as teacher claims, she will not even get 20 euros more. Teachers were always getting small salaries but before, in Soviet union, the position of teacher was on the other level of respect. Today you do not get both as
50 teacher told with a smile in the eyes the story how one student got very low mark and she got the message from the father telling her how they couldn’t find a book and that the ones who read them are simply morrons. If to look at the future of village school she says, almost third part of school are teachers close to pension age and they soon will have to leave the school but the school is shrinking every year so the problem will probably be solved in the form of closure. When asked about the percent of men and women working the job she was very precise and stated that 7 from forty teachers were men. The village is small and everyone knows each other and talk about one another, everyone knows who is striking and who is smoking. She always has to hide in her yard if she wants to smoke, the smoking is strictly forbidden in school’s territory. The school just recently got multimedia technologies to use in the classes also teacher was happy about the printer but in general the teacher emphasizes they don’t provide teachers with anything except with changes of teaching programs and release new books for different subjects. She also described the system how school was saving the money on the account of teachers, she gave the example about two classes when one has 30 children in the class and the other 13, it means that you don’t need to divide 13 students in two groups for classes of programming or chemistry but no one thinks about the teacher who has to handle thirty students. The strike in teacher’s opinion was too short and the sum of money proposed by government was rather funny. She thinks that one more week wouldn’t have been too much. All the students suffer from the small funding of education but the most who suffer are children from villages when they can’t have additional classes, additional clubs they don’t have the possibility to go to theaters to cinema etc.
The other position which is even more underappreciated than teachers are workers of kindergartens. They get smaller salaries, they don’t have an opportunity to become experts and get bonus for it. Government always gibbers about how children and mothers should be cherished and protected as the progenitors of motherland but at the same time they imagine that childcare is inherent and natural process that women have to enjoy relying on their instinct of motherhood. I met the canteen worker of small town kindergarten.
Genutė, canteen worker from Rumšiškės:
She lost her mother when she was fifteen and since then she had struggle to reach something by herself independently. Her family lived in small village her father was working as shoemaker and didn’t make much money. She went to Kaunas to study in vocational-secondary school and tried to get into the university but her low level education as she says herself didn’t allow such luxury. Then she took accountancy courses and got a job in accountant-economist position in the prosthetic-orthopedic factory, before that she also worked in radio factory. Her salary was much lower than in radio factory but she had to take the position because she wanted to get the flat.
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Soon the director from radio factory called her and asked her to come back but they also didn’t want to let her out from the job she is working due, as she says, to her good ‘astrologic’ twin character. However she went back to the radio place, after some time she had her first child and while she was raising her first she also gave birth to the second. After she saw her child crying in kindergarten she decided to raise them at home. Her husband is an artist and she has started helping him with ceramic business, before that she also worked as exterminator as it was an easy job with short working hours. During transition they moved to live in the countryside as business went pretty well they could save up some money for the little house. While they lived in Kaunas she tried to find her children a better school different from Soviet rigid education. She sees work of motherhood as one of the most pleasant and thinks that women need to give a lot of attention to children in non-material form. She thought Soviet times were too oppressive and there was no heart in the system. „Today you can be as you like and it all depends on the individual“. She sees Soviet times as times when people were humiliated, there was all the time the problem to buy something you needed and she remembered one moment when she went to store to get in line for curtains and she saw someone cheating and getting in line before her. She tried to tell her to leave the line but woman immediately started yelling at her and called her “spekuliante” (the word regarded as negative in Soviet time which meant you were selling things in the market), she said she cried whole time standing in line waiting for cheap curtains to buy. After some time the ceramic business was not going so well due to cheap Chinese products. She also had some time left before she could get the pension therefore she went to cook’s courses and got the job in the kindergarten’s canteen in village nearby. She works there as the main cook and has the assistant to help her, the kindergarten is small and most of the staff is women except the specialist in healthcare and man responsible for fixing up the building. She is planning to quit the job at the end of the summer and again come back to ceramics to help her husband. She is certain that women hold all three corners in the house while men hold only one. She describes her man asa sissy and having a hard time to risk as his parents having one child were overprotective concerning the safety of the child. She also understands that it is not easy in his age to find new job since there is already problems with finding workfor the young people. She compares the situation in Dubai where they put a certain amount of money into new born child’s bank account. While in Lithuania the young people can get only minimum wage and the prospects are very low for such jobs. However, she doesn’t feel disrespected in her job but she has to demand for the respect as she for a while has worked alone in the kitchen and hasn’t had an assistant. They promised her to hire an assistant but for four months the workload was getting bigger and the promise stayed just a promise. After four months she delivered her request for dismissal to the director and after that the promise was fulfilled. She is not very happy with her job and cannot
52 wait until she can leave and be at the house, have time for work in the garden, ceramics, etc. I asked her if she was happier when she worked with her husband she said that it wasn’t at all easy because her husband is more like a child than a man. She is happy though that the pension time hasn’t been extended yet and she won’t have to work until 65 because she emphasizes that Soviet women worked under harder conditions and health care wasn’t very advanced like today thus she thinks they deserve earlier pension.
Nevertheless she was proud of her work and said that in all the jobs she worked she was appreciated as a worker. She remembered when she worked as secretary in prosthetic-orthopedic factory and one guy who didn’t have a leg came for prosthetic leg but he got to know that he will have to wait more. „He was very unhappy as the leg had to be for his wedding so I talked to him and listened to him very carefully and when there was a time to go to the director the guy got much calmer and director was happy about it“. When asked about difference between men and women she was sure that women had much more difficult life then men. „Women are expected to do the entire job and ask man at the end of the day: Dear, are you not tired?“. However she thinks that women cannot live without men. She says that women are happier because they have a present from God to bear child to feed her and to care while man thinks of himself as warrior who has to conquer everything including women.
There is a certain popular rule set in our lives that everyone who gets to do what they want are much more satisfied with their life than someone who has to be in the position with no prospects of career while the “lucky” people can climb up the stairs of career and reach the highest point. Such principle dominates in the regime of work, to discipline people. However there are less and less jobs that provide realistic opportunity to attain this pedestal position and this serves to make the competition even higher and put the unskilled work on lowest level possible. In the men’s world the job of social worker is not exactly linked to the wide prospects and international career, but in the commodified affective labor women also are forced to navigate and seek better conditions for themselves and that happened to one of my interviewees who graduated from social work Master studies and was very passionate about it.
Lina, social worker:
She knew even where she wants to work. She wanted to help people with mental disorders. She found an institution for children and adults with mental disorder/disabilities. She got an internship at the same place while she was studying but she didn’t get a job immediately after she graduated. She finally got a place there and was very happy, so happy that she didn’t even notice how hard that work was. She worked with two groups of 16 men with two assistants in
53 one shift. She was responsible for their hygiene, their look and even for their leisure time including the responsibility for expenditure of their personal funds. She worked from Monday to Friday and from 10am to 6pm. In summer time when assistants would leave for holidays she would work with both groups alone and the shift would be from 8 in the morning to 8 in the evening for two days, then two days were free. She never worked in night shifts but as social worker she said you always felt responsible for how your “child” spent the night because your work-day very much depended on it. She would also get calls from the “clients” during the night. The emotional relation was very important for her and it wasn’t included in the definition of her work however, she claims, it was very hard to avoid thinking about it at the end of the day. At the beginning she all the time was thinking about work and she couldn’t imagine how it was possible not to think about her “children”, she called them her children even if some of them were older than her. The division line between work and life was very thin for her. The breaking point was when she started her own family. Before that she went to work even on weekends and would also stay overtime after work. She would go to work on holidays too as she couldn’t imagine otherwise how to develop their social skills without knowing when to go the cemeteries or how to celebrate Christmas. She emphasized that institutional position was very degrading towards the persons with such disabilities as they would claim that there is no difference when and how these “fools” will celebrate their Christmas one week later or earlier, it doesn’t matter. She couldn’t understand such position however when it became important to spend holidays with her family she found very hard to combine work and duties as mother. The enthusiasm was going down when you saw that others didn’t feel such responsibility and attachment to their work. When she started working there were only two professional social workers at the time. Others mostly were older workers from Soviet times and they really had hard time understanding what the new workers wanted. The collective was very big over two hundred people and 150 of them had direct relations with clients. She felt a lack of belief from her co-workers and felt as an outsider until there came more and more social workers with degrees who she imagined were more like her. I asked her about the term “clients” as for me it sounded somehow strange. She said that this term has negative and positive sides but some workers were really overstepping the line and explanation that they felt like mothers to them however was very ambiguous because mother could beat her child and abuse him/her in other ways. Often she claims people for this kind of work would come from the streets although some clients had really peculiar disabilities and you needed a special knowledge to work with him/her. Nevertheless the formal relation is very hard to keep in such profession. The funding mostly came from the government in addition there was always charity from different companies or even individuals. There was always a lack of means in the workplace like gloves which were provided only once a month. The salaries
54 were always too small and everyone had a complaint about it. However when she left her workplaces and started to search for the other one she said that the wages after all in her previous workplace wasn’t that bad as the situation is really worse in other similar places. The biggest problem was and probably remained with client’s personal money when client is not able to express the opinion about where he would like to spend it.“The staff used to decide for the client and bought diapers for her which was a very big issue as staff had to use pieces of cloths, wash them, dry them and it was never enough of it, also they would buy rubber gloves, soaps, and toothpastes from the same money“. After a while the staff was forbidden to buy such stuff as all of it had to be provided by the institution. She also was a member of the union for a while because the union was promising to press the ministry for higher wages but nothing has changed; instead union started a conflict with other union of the same place. The other problem was the aggressive behavior of the clients and risk for the staff to be physically hurt. They started to collaborate with Netherlands and made workshops for workers to teach how to deal with aggressive behavior but the staff turnover is very high, it is impossible to expand the knowledge and it becomes just a waste of time. Especially men do not want stay because of the low wages and nature of work itself. When I asked her about the balance of women and men in the workplace she told me that only 3 men out of hundred were working directly with the clients and none of them was social worker. „The difference between social worker and the assistants was more hierarchical in formal way as they got very similar wages. Sometimes they would get even more because they had night shifts“. Conflicts between the social worker and her assistant was inevitable but it was natural and even healthy as everyone had their own opinion and way of working. The relation between social worker and her assistant she thinks should be more like in the family between husband and wife. When she worked later in position of personnel manager she would pick person not for the high qualification, education or experience but for her personal qualities. The main quality she distinguishes is the goodwill towards the clients, the co-worker and administration. The empathy would also be important but not the compassion. To empathize means to try sitting in the wheelchair of the disabled to actually experience what he would feel. When someone complained to her that the child couldn’t sleep she would advise to lay in child’s bed and see how it felt maybe the light from the street was bothering him. The other big problem is medicine as it was faster to correct behavior with medicine because there always was a lack of staff. Sometimes you had one child crying about something and the other with the attack of epilepsy and 14 more who also demand the attention. At the end she got really tired as the last three years of her work was only about the scandals, then she already worked in personnel division and writing explanations and apologies to the ministry was her main job. The explanation sounded always very apologetic to convince them that no one in the workplace had
55 any intentions to hurt people. She remembered when she decided to leave the job after 15 years they made farewell party for her and she cried all of that time. „Probably nobody from the staff understood why I was crying“. Nevertheless the job that she worked took a lot from her as she described her maternity leave as holidays because even parents couldn’t understand what was going on with their daughter. She was very thankful to her mother and her husband’s mother for help in childcare because she never wanted to take free days when her children were sick because she knew how hard it was for the assistants alone to take care of such quantity of people.
In public sector there is a certain degree of security although from teachers’ side you would see that tendency is definitely going towards more precarious conditions. 30 percent of population in Lithuania works in the public sector and institutions for childcare, education including care labor in general in hospitals, child care homes are filled with underpaid women who first see their job as a duty. One of the teachers I talked to was also very worried about the children more than she should as one male teacher stated that sometimes teachers are immersed too much in their job and have a hard time to divide between life and work. Women are used to work for free and they should be used to giving more than just a professional service. The government, in a patronizing way, if you were to resist will come and remind you that you have the responsibilities; if you are social worker they tell you that there are always limits and it is always better to use more medicine to increase the efficiency in the workplace. If government acts like fathers for their poor women employees, the private companies act as good doers for everyone especially in terms of providing jobs. The hand of market does not discriminate and accept people according to their investment into their market capital which means also the high degree of „objectivity“. The same principle is valid in Mondelez factory in Kaunas. I went there to meet the union representative Rūta. At first I was very surprised that we were meeting inside the factory. The factory makes candies for a long time now. It was one of the first foreign investment in Lithuania in 1996 when Kraft Foods company came to Kaunas to invest in the chocolate factory. Rūta started working in Kraft Foods that changed into Mondelez later.
Rūta, the head of union in Mondelez factory:
Most often Rūta says Lithuanians are very patient people and it takes a lot of time when people realize they were actually exploited in the workplace. „After crises people realized that they don’t get paid enough even though the factory or other company are getting lots of orders, they still get enough profits. Employers change cars one after the other, organizing parties. Then people notice that their work conditions don’t improve. This is often when they approach unions to tell about problems“. Most often people decide to organize something and get disappointed very fast, many of them are young and decide to emigrate soon after. During crises directors of
56 the companies ask people to agree voluntarily on smaller wages or they would fire people, people agree but the crisis ends, the profits getting high but the wages still are cut. She already works in the union for 8 years, when she came into the position she got interest in work safety, also she organized some cases for women who had the professional diseases. There is a myth about professional disease. It is impossible to get the status and the employer is always motivated to fire sick workers. She says that almost in every factory at least in food industry everywhere the assembly line is filled with women while men usually work as operators which is physically easiest job to do. „Women work in those areas where you need to lay out or to stack something. It is also the least paid job and employer popularly describes it as un-skilled work“. Physically this is the heaviest work and if you look at quantity of tons you need for example to get sacks of candies put them into three kilos bags then you put candies into packages and at the end of the shift you had thirteen tons of packed candies and it was the norm. Ruta worked at the production line for around 13 years first she worked under terminated contract and after a while she got the permanent contract. She did a break and went to the other job where they organized a union but it did not last for long because employer started to press everyone in the union until they were just two members. After that she came back to Modelez and got the permanent contract and became member of the union and a bit later the chairwoman of the union in Kaunas. At the beginning the administration did not want to recognize her as the legitimate union representative because they all saw her as regular worker from production line. She worked on assembly line for three more years. According to the collective contract the union had an office in the factory. So usually she would be working morning shift and after shift she would go to the office to look through files, labor code, work with computer. At first she did simple jobs like approving schedules etc. It was hard to combine two jobs at a time. There was always a possibility from the administration side to use pressure methods on her while she was working in production line. She felt always under control when they wrote her poor evaluations regarding her work and her discipline of work. „Every worker two times a year is evaluated for the work results. They also evaluate your discipline. They started telling me that I was late for work or went out earlier than I had to“. She thought it was normal that administration was acting that way. I asked her about people who works with temporary contracts if it is easy for them to organize and if they can join the union. She said that they can and with them there is much less problem than with other kind of workers who now are hired through private agencies. She called them precarious workers and emphasized that most of them were women because men usually have stable positions in the factory while women most often have temporarycontracts and now those temporaryworkers are taken over by private agencies. It means they have most precarious work conditions, they never know in advance about their shift situation. The confectionary
57 business is more or less seasonal, some lines in the factory work all the time but some are opened only for holiday season and Rūta understands the need for temporary workers. However there is a huge difference when people are hired directly by the factory and indirectly. The workers under terminated contract still get the salary as it is agreed in collective contract between union, employer and employee; the worker gets all the social security including holidays, sick days, payments in case of death etc. There were around two hundred temporary workers in the factory and three years before they were dumped to the agencies. Since then they get minimum wage and no social guarantees. „Most of the terminated workers left the factory work. Now there are all kind of temporary workers who come to work from students to pensioners, from alcoholics to homeless people. They usually don’t care about the work quality because they know that in all cases they will get the same shit money“. If former temporary workers/women knew how to work fast, knew the operations and where everything was today every time there are new workers who always have to adopt new environment. For example one line has six workers two of them are permanent women workers and 4 of them are new young women, the line is running fast; sometimes people even get sick from looking all the time at the candies, going like crazy. Newcomers always can’t make it with such speed and permanent workers have to work triple shifts at the same time. The temporary workers from agencies are not interested to stay and work moreover to go to unions and to organize. It is definitely a winning situation for the employer as he saves money escaping all the work related to the hiring and firing as well as he doesn’t need to pay social expenses. Ruta also claims that there are a lot of restructuring in the company. They divided the company into many firms now; the production has its own firm, retail, logistics have its own. „The divided smaller firms are easier to sell. Moreover it is obvious that company saves up a lot having temporary workers from agencies. All the games that company play don’t do any good for the workers“. There are three shifts in the factory; morning shift begins at 6am and ends at 2pm, the afternoon shift is from 2pm to 10pm and night shift begins at 10pm and ends at 6 in the morning. The schedules are floating therefore everyone works in all three shifts that affects mostly women with smaller children as Ruta herself told me that when she used to work through night shifts then would come from work have a nap on the kitchen table and prepare breakfast for children before school then go to nap again until children finish their classes. The wages in the factory were always rising every year. Ruta cannot remember the year when wage would stagnate even during the crisis. For some time the wages were rising for everyone but now it depends on your evaluation on your personal discipline and efficiency. „Also the wage depends on the level you are in. There are five levels in production section, first is the lowest level then second is a little bit higher, third level is for workers in kitchen who cook the mass (dough) for candies, the operators are in forth level and fifth levels belongs to mechanics and engineers who
58 take care of machines“. Ruta emphasizes that work efficiency grew 16 percent in five years but the wages didn’t. Also the raises are always higher for the higher level workers who already can’t complain opposite to the lowest level except the load of work for them that was always rising in tons. She wouldn’t consider that the average wage of workers are high it gets higher because people work at night and during holidays. Work at night is considered to be work at risk. There is a high possibility of accidents and it happens very often that worker gets hurt. If there is an accident during the shift people don’t get raises regardless how well they worked and the tons of candies they packed. Ruta knows that Belgium workers of lowest level at the same company get 1500euros while the specialist in Lithuania doesn’t get 1000 euros. When Ruta tries to demand for it the employers start talking about closing down the factory. The last thing we talked about was the temporary labour contracts where for example the article about work hours specify the hours the worker has to work and the law Ruta says is that if worker works more than it specified in the contract those hours should be counted as overtime but in Lithuania the law works in special way. The law has to be challenged and then the law of the hours has to be announced as illegal. She is happy that someone is brave enough to go through all the process so that the law would be in place. The person who decided to sue agency through the commission of labor disputes was Roma who I met a bit later in the same office of the factory.
Roma, now ex-worker of Mondelez:
When Roma graduated university she went to work in the fur factory where she spent around thirteen years after that she worked at the advertisement business. She worked as technologist directly with chemicals and lost her kidney therefore she left. The factory went bankrupt after she left. She had to reshape her life and chose to work in advertising for 18 years. However for the pension it wasn’t enough because in 2011 the government extended work time, she still had 2 years left since they didn’t count the years she spent on maternity leave. Before 2011 she was sure she had enough years to get the pension and after 2008 economic crises she lost her job at advertisement therefore she together with co-workers decided to go to other country to earn “second pension”. So they left to England to work but couple years later she found out that she is not going to get the pension in Lithuania as the age was extended. She decided to stay in Kaunas and find a job there after nine months working abroad. Her son was working in Kraft Foods Lithuania factory and found out that they are hiring. He proposed to his mother to try it out, she thought after her experience as emigrant and 13 years of work in factory she was ready to work anything. She listened to her son and went there. The people were nice, everyone was smiling even standing by assembly line and the work looked so easy but reality was completely different. She tried to learn as many operations as possible. She always thought of herself as good worker
59 who never hid behind others’ backs. “You came you worked what you had to and left” – she said and the consciousness she felt was clean. She worked with temporarycontracts and was hired whenever there was a job. Suddenly the job disappeared, in December everyone saw the announcement in the factory that from the next year the temporary workers will be hired by private agencies. They all went to those agencies; she has had the experience with the same agencies in England so she thought the same would be in Lithuania. They had to sign contracts to which nobody paid very much attention as for Roma the two and half year gap was desperately needed to be filled in. The representatives from the agencies presented themselves as very important employers and they practically refused to discuss the contract. Also she could not believe that some workers actually worked in temporary positions in the same factory for 8-10 years and still were temporary with terminated contracts or from that day the agency workers. She said that she was working in England and was hired by the agency but after three months she got a normal work contract. She realized that she had no other choice because the situation of labor market was still very scarce. The other young women who worked with her sometimes would leave the job at the factory but then came back again complaining about employers avoiding to pay wages for their workers. She called the employers liars as they say that there are no qualified workers in Lithuania - in reality they don’t want to pay money for qualified work. So the hell has started as the older people were discriminated by the agency and would put only young people on the shift that sometimes missed their shifts on purpose and sometimes even three people were missing in one shift. Although Roma understands that such jobs are not for everyone and most of the young people leave because they find such job simply too hard. They hire them for night shifts, without any discussion, if these people don’t show up their workloadgoes on the shoulders of people with non-terminal contracts who work the job constantly.“Everyone becomes a prisoner of such situation“. Usually, claims Roma, you would get your work schedule on Thursdays before your shift starts next week. The schedule you get by text message, sometimes the shifts are so hard that at the end of the day you are not sure which part of body is healthy. They put you on different lines every time. Sometimes in three days you have to change different manufactories every day. Roma is convinced that young people cannot be blamed for missing the shifts and never coming back. You really have to try hard to argue with agency people about shifts, schedules, working hours and you still would not be sure if something is agreed on. Roma cannot imagine who is actually benefiting from all of it, and asked why she thought it happened. She stated that Lithuania was country of relatives. Staff is changing all the time the load of work is huge, the speeds of the assembly lines are very fast and what comes out of it is loads of candies on the floor. The constant workers used to get bonus from the resources they saved for the company.“They would claim for the media that they pay
60 more than minimum which is totally not true“. Roma also stated that the agreement that seemed to be reached every two weeks again was canceled as her shifts one more time would be through every manufacture the schedules again horrible and when you object they start threatening you that they would take one more day from you. „But how to live, to survive?“. Everything is discussed through text messages and if you didn’t see the message and didn’t confirm your shift you can lose it in a second. You cannot sign for doctor. You cannot be sick. You work whenever they need you.
The other ex-worker, Leonida (the name is changed) of Mondelez also agreed to tell her story.
“I worked for thirty years in the production line.”She left her job for reason caused by job itself. She was diagnosed with occupational disease and it was officially declared that she got disability from working in the factory formerly called Kraft Foods Lithuania. She defines the reasons of the disease as heavy load of work, changing shifts, unstable schedules, and huge demands. The discrimination from technologists and from administration started immediately after she was diagnosed. The concrete example was when she was already sick and she only could work in certain lines where work was a bit easier but once she was told to exchange with one temporary worker, she resisted and refused to leave her workplace, at the end of the conflict with the technologist she was told that there are too many disabled people in the factory and no one wants to work. If you get sick no one looks at you the same. They look at you as you would be a scab. Someone also told her that she does not need to work here because she is not a worker anymore. Instead of telling her that she didn’t deserve it or that the workplace didn’t deserve such a sacrifice she had to hear insults and complaints about herself. She did not buy the disability somewhere as she didn’t get the disease from somewhere else than the work she was doing for thirty years. „It was really hard to get the status that would declare my disability that derived from job. It takes time and a lot of effort to do it“. After the government declared the source the meeting was called and they had to find her a suitable place in the factory according to the demands of the work safety commission. Nevertheless she experienced humiliation and insults even after the government’s declaration. Sometimes she would go to administration and just wanted to leave and after five years she finally left. The disability related to the workplace is different than disability in general and the compensation is paid according to the degree of disability. They check risks and safety at work as it takes a long time when all institutions go through all the process. No one knew that she and the representative from union are working on getting a declared occupational disease. „Just after the factory got a call from the work inspection the technologist stopped the line and told everyone that I was doing nonsense and want to sue the company for my disability“. She also remembered getting threat calls from
61 technologist. She told her that she won’t get anything from it and she has to stop everything she is doing and she is going to hurt only herself. It was clear that company was not happy about that. The company pays the tax into the fund of professional diseases and as the number of diseases in their workplace increase their taxes also increase. She is the member of the union and very much believes in unionism. She thinks that her union made a lot of effort to improve the conditions of workers concerning salaries, breaks in the workplace, safety etc. She emphasized the impossibility to plan your leisure/family time when the schedules were very unstable and you got to know your next schedule only at the same day when leaving the workplace. „Sometimes you came in the morning and saw that your shift was changed into afternoon and no one called you“. When asked about maternity leaves she said she had to go twice and one was in Soviet times and the other time was after the independence, it was very different security wise, because in Soviet times you knew that after the leave you will find your workplace right where it was. „You always were sure where you work, with whom and how, you never thought you can be put in other shift on other line with different operations. You didn’t need to call and ask about the time and place even after the holiday you knew where to go and when. Everyone was friendly and didn’t compete or report about each other, the night shifts didn’t exist either, there were two shifts and no one complained about the efficiency. If you needed free days you could openly ask the directors and there were no problems. The solidarity between the workers was much sturdier. There was much less administration one director being in charge of whole factory“. I asked if she wanted to work more after such long period of time and she said she would take some “easy” part-time job in the kitchen or maybe in other factory. However she wouldn’t like to work on assembly line where speed is high and you always felt the pressure from above to do it as fast as you can. Sometimes workers yell at other workers if they’re falling behind. Sometimes you would think that some of them would be very good at whipping slaves. She also told about the caste structure where there were some groups of people who were the technologists’ favorites. They belonged to the higher caste. Also she was ignored and harassed because of belonging to the union. She didn’t see anything bad that if you had the problem with workplace you go to talk to the representative to the union but others saw it as something criminal. I asked her too about the life of women compared to men’s and she responded that women have more responsibility with children but men in these times also have to do much more in order to maintain the family to support children etc. But she admits that salary is different for man and woman working at the same position. The conditions for subsistence she says get harder every day. Man has more material responsibility for his family whereas woman has to do the rest and combine childcare, flexible job and housework altogether. She never had a help from her parents or her husband’s and when she worked morning shift husband was the one who took children to school and
62 kindergarten. After the night shift she would sleep couple hours and would go to pick children herself on the way to grocery shops.
Mondelez is a special factory which has old tradition of union organizing. It wasn’t dissolved after it was privatized and you could even state that it became more and more active thanks to the head of the food producers’ trade union in Kaunas. However you can see a desperate situation concerning the temporary workers hired through agencies. They mainly specify in hiring the unskilled workforce represented by women. The growing tendency towards flexibilization of work is very visible here while in other places it is already a fact and undeniable condition. The sewing factories or garment sweatshops in Lithuania are not something new but mainly stay invisible. Just recently there was a case of bankruptcy in one Danish owned company in Vilnius. Workers were so desperate that they wrote a letter to the president stating that the company faked their insolvent situation to outsource the jobs to Ukraine. I met with Kristina who worked at a sewing manufacture in Kaunas for a while.
Kristina, sewing factory:
The woman, a former worker at the regular sweatshop type sewing factory, now works in Scandinavian factory where she says the work relations are warmer comparing with former workplace, but the salary is lower because she again has to start from lowest position. She claimed that she chose that way in order to learn more. The company is big with 250 workers in addition hiring subcontractors to fulfill the orders. The company works mainly for exports to foreign brands of sportswear including sport suits for runners, swimmers etc. She works in administration and doesn’t know how shifts are organized for the garment floor workers. She thinks that they have to work in two shifts. While she was working in other garment manufacture she remembered that she worked one shift from 7am-4pm, overall nine hours because the load of work was not that heavy and intense but sometimes you had to spend weekends without any holidays and nights at home. In general the work conditions were much worse in former place. The specifics of work says Viktorija is that if you want to earn more you have to make more units that can take up all your day and night. There were 50 workers in the manufacture and there were 2 men in the whole collective while in her new company 90 percent of all workers are also women. I asked why she choose sewing she said she liked scrabbling all her life and would often sew something for herself. She thought it was a good idea to learn a craft which would help to find a job. After maternity leave she graduted vocational school for sewing and got her first job. Although she says there are women who learn the craft from their mothers or grandmothers and they learn additional specificities at factory. Also Viktorija is raising a 5 year old child and while she had a previous job it was very hard and stressful for her
63 to give so little attention to her as she had to work also at nights sometimes even if she took the job to home. The new job is much better including more relaxed working environment and relationship within the collective. She emphasizes that difference between say constructors or technogists and seamstresses are very visible for her. When she came to her older job for her it was a cultural shock to see how they were talking and what subjects were for conversations. She was surprised that people actually watched TV and talked at work about tv shows as it would be all their life while her social circle was completely different more bohemian and intellectual. Now she says is a big break from the former collective as she hears the discussions about classic music concerts or something similar. The wage in the former company was minimum because she was new to the job and had to learn the operations and she wasnt so fast to make more than just minimum. „Other women worked much faster and got double than minimum but no one talked about their wages loudly because the competition was high in such places“. Now she works more technical job and as beginner still gets the minimum job but all she does is collecting the data and filling in the excel form. In the sweatshop every woman had her own operation and if for example there was an order of 2000 units she wanted all those units to make herself with her operation and didn’t want to share with anyone else. That was the way to get a higher wage at the end of the month and by making all those 2000 units she knew what she would get in money. As a newcommer she only had auxiliary jobs like puting the buttons in shirts but still the demand would be to put one button in 20 seconds which also seemed impossible. When I asked about her perspective she told that the current job again had much more prospects than former one, afterall she liked sewing and she liked the job. She enjoys observing all the processes as she is now able to see how the orders are made and how it goes all to the manufacture as in other job she only would see the pile of textile and they would know that they have to make 2000 jackets out of it. Also she noticed that many women have a fear to leave the job even when they know that other companies pay more but for them the risk is too high. „The staff turnover in such comapnies does not happen that often and women ussually stay for 15 and more years at one manufacture. The environment of the work is very noisy and people sometimes use earplugs which is forbidden officialy“. Most of the work was in sitting position but there was cutting manufacture where Kristina liked more as it was more dynamic. The workload depended very much on the season like in September there were no orders but it gets more intensive towards winter and only then you can hope for higher wage. I asked Kristina how she survives from the minimum wage raising the kid. She said she was lucky because her husband earns much more while she couldn’t imagine how other women in her previous jobs could do it without well established husbands and with more kids.
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The situation in garment industry is precarious and based on cheap labor of women who learnt the craft assigned to their gender. It is hard to imagine that women working in such industry would be ever replaced by men therefore it is only women who are able to struggle for better conditions and better wages in wokplaces designed only for women but I don’t claim that it is only women‘s problem that they are forced to race to the bottom. The other sector which is even more precarious and flexible due to frequent staff turnover, labor contracts and low wages and is presented as perfect job for students and young women and then men is service sector. I talked mostly with women who would be famously counted as young „flexible“ workers.
Dovilė:
Dovilė worked in Prisma for two weeks; her official position was cashier-waitress at the special café of supermarket. In addition she also had to work with food, prepare it and serve it to the customers. As newcomer she didn’t feel very welcome as she felt pressure to learn everything fast without anyone’s help. They didn’t want to train her or were more or less skeptical about it. The manager worked in the same place with her and did the same job she did. The administration was invisible since all the work for managing workers seemed like it was done by the workers among themselves. Dovile really felt stressed and worried. She had a problem being vegan since they always were commenting about it trying to make her “taste” cold red beet soup or other dishes. She would also prepare day lunch with soup, the second and a drink. She didn’t mind making non vegan dishes but she always would get the same comment why she couldn’t try the food to see if it was good. They were older than Dovile and she felt it regarding clothes and view in general. „The philosophy of that workplace prohibited everyone to sit. It was an open kitchen and clients could see how we were cutting things, preparing food for them and the chairs for sitting behind the bar were forbidden as someone explained to me that it was not aesthetically proper for the customers“. The hope to get some rest was lunch breaks but you get to eat only after busy lunch when you felt already awfully hungry. „They have very comfortable and big lounge room for workers with music and everything but you are not able to stay there for long because in Prisma you enter everywhere with the special card. The card is for counting your time spent for lunch breaks, for smoking or bathroom“. Dovile noticed that they had unwritten rules for example smoking breaks. She was told not to go too often to smoke while the older worker could easily go whenever she wanted. In general the workers were controlling each other as if the management did not exist. Her working hours were from 8 am to 4 pm. Her staff was responsible for the lunch time and the other shift was making dinner of burgers and hotdogs. Her whole staff was only women who called each other “girls”. The collective seemed to have workers who worked there from the very beginning of Prisma’s opening. The solidarity was
65 visible between workers who worked there for longer. The mood of whole shift depended on one dominating person, if she yelled on everyone that the rest of the day would be stressful as well. „There were myths about the place where administration worked. The main communication between them and us, workers was through pay slips“. They all were emphasizing at the beginning the teaching they provided for Dovile and told her if she left all the investment will go for nothing. At that moment she really believed it and was afraid to leave but not for long. It seemed they had trouble with finding more workers and many left before she came. At the end they saw Dovile’s low enthusiasm and started talking about her leaving the place. The manager wasn’t surprised when heard from Dovile about quitting. Dovile thought they just didn’t like her and thought of her as a bad worker. It was collective relations as the main reasons why she left job. For example it was very cold in the store but Dovile only had short sleeves uniform and she was told if she tries to wear something in addition she will be punished but then she saw one worker wearing a jumper underneath her uniform and she asked her about it she answered that her jumper fits with the color of the uniform. She felt like everyone was afraid of something that did not exist and scared other people with it. After Dovile left Prizma she got a job as a waitress in university canteen that had the ambition to become a restaurant therefore they were hiring waitresses. The collective relationships were much better, seemed that everyone was ready to help, also her friend was working there as dishwasher. There were more trouble with work itself, the workload and intensity of it. The mornings were pleasant as everyone would have coffee and then during lunch everyone was rushing everyone, got angry at each other, several people even were crying and shouting on each other. After the lunch everyone would calm down and make peace. Every day it was the same. There was one man as manager the other was in the kitchen and the rest were women. The job was with cash machine, to serve clients and to clean everything every day. The manager was also organizing banquets so if the canteen had the ambition to be café then with the banquets was something even bigger. The food, the look of the staff and the space were different than usual. However she was not allowed to serve in the banquets and when she asked the manager he said that her look was too strange, too informal. The wage was as usual the minimum but they had overtime and the work at the banquets that were paid with the black money. The café/canteen belongs to the university therefore they couldn’t officially pay more than minimum. The tips didn’t exist as it was more canteen than café. The contract was terminated for the semester. In summer the canteen didn’t work. Dovile was worried about her health and she had to travel through whole city to get there therefore she decided to leave the job. Work was from Monday to Friday. The wage depended on how many banquets the canteen had. The winter rent was rather high and if Dovile did not have savings she wouldn’t be able to survive only on wage. The discussion about money among the co-workers
66 was not very intensive. Only the assistant in the kitchen was the one who complained all the time every time planning to leave the workplace however Dovilė wasn’t very interested why her co- worker made these kinds of statements.
Dovilė worked in Prizma only for couple of weeks and it comes as no surprise because young workers are expected to change jobs and choose the “right” one. Also such jobs are designed for younger workers in a way that would excuse the employers from paying them a higher wage. We could call Maxima the biggest forge for such flexible jobs. My other interviewee was Milda who worked in Maxima two times, one time she worked in small town Maxima and other time it was in Kaunas.
Milda:
At first she got a good shift with later morning hours and didn’t have to take a section for additional work. Other workers had also to clean and refill the sections they were assigned for. From her first days at work she was not accepted to the collective because she didn’t know all the gossips and wasn’t very interested in it. However it didn’t provoke big conflicts as she remained just a stranger eating her own food alone in the corner of staff room. The conditions weren’t so bad as if you had minus in your cash register they tried to even it with others who had for example plus. Also they would write off the food at the end of the day and let you take it. Everyone understood they were getting shit for the hard job that was why they felt they had a right to take something more from it. In other Maxima she tried to get a job through filling the application and she was admitted again to cashier’s position. They were happy about her experience. This time she got the section of cleaning products and it was a big responsibility as you had to clean it, see if everything in order etc. Every day the cash register had to be strictly recalculated and registered. If you got minus or plus in your register you had to write the explanation and if minus to pay for it personally. She would collect the cents that customers left accidently to compensate her minus. She worked 12 hours per day and usually had just one break while officially she had two, one lunch and one dinner. She almost had to beg for that one too because whenever she called, someone was already eating at that time. „Half an hour of lunch would pass very fast as first you had to walk through whole Maxima then the food that they were providing for workers was very poor and usually my lunch was of buckwheat, potatoes and rice in one. Nothing could be taken from food they wrote off, they threw out everything in the trash“. Every morning and evening every worker was checked by the guards. You would have to bring your own coffee and Milda noticed that wherever she worked the coffee was a luxury commodity. In Maxima though there wasn’t any time to drink coffee whatsoever. Her break depended on the vice cashier while also you had to call to get a permission to the toilet from the
67 guards. It was formally necessary because the cash register had to be surveilled if it was empty. Everyone knew that if manager was coming you had to pretend you were cleaning your register but everyone in cashier section was afraid of vice cashier person. All in all most of the staff were women; men were only in alcohol section, or fruit and vegetable section and the guards. The wages depended on the bonus you earned. Usually it was a bit more than minimum wage if you showed good results. She left bigger Maxima after one month although she planned to work more but she couldn’t stand the pressure of everyday recalculations, explanations and tragedies made of 50 cents plus. After three explanations they told you would get the fine. All the threats and unfriendly guards made her leave the place. Also you had to check the clients’ carts because it was your full responsibility if client would leave with “stolen” goods. There was big competition between cashiers and they would compete who first would go for lunch break or if you need a code you could call the other cashier but she would always respond that there was not a time. From time to time they would check you secretly on purpose. You had to check all the boxes that customers buy or the carts including the clients’ ids for alcohol and cigarettes. Once she was set for this kind of checkup and she sold alcohol to guard’s under-aged nephew. They also tricked her with nephew coming back and saying that she gave wrong sum of money back. „They always manipulated with those checkups to scare the workers and to cause the tension“.
As Maxima is the biggest employer probably in whole Lithuania I also made the interview with other ex-worker who had even more critique. Aiste can only work in big collectives therefore she wanted a job at Maxima where she could be easily replaced because she is a lonely mother with disabled child.
Aistė, worker at the Food Bank:
Sometimes or more often than other people she cannot go to work because her child doesn’t feel well. She worked in McDonalds before and it worked for her well while in smaller company she didn’t feel right that if doesnt come to work someone had to do extra job for her and it created unpleasant environment. She also thought that “unskilled” work will not affect her too much. Her mother worked in Maxima for longer time and she thought it was a good place as you didn’t need to spend much time and money to go there as you could just walk there by foot. illing up the application process wasn’t very pleasant as people from information point were commenting on her inexperience and part-time need. She started working just before Christmas and her training time was very stressful as there were loads of people. The training time is short and too short, claims Aiste, because you have to learn a big number of operations, some of them you don’t use and forget how to use it. The collective was friendly enough to teach her how to work. „The workplace wasn’t very comfortable, the register machines were old, and the chair was not
68 adjusted to long and intensive work“. She worked every weekend day for twelve hours. The food provided for lunch was cheap made of old products and didn’t have enough ingredients or it was not nutritious enough. Sometimes they would give fatty pea porridge and after that everyone would suffer from pain in the stomach. She noticed not only the bad food at the workers’ canteen, she also noticed different intrigues and talks going on in the canteen that would end up somewhere in administration office. It meant basically that someone would listen and report about who and what someone else said. Her mother also warned her about that. First she thought that people were just paranoid but after some time she noticed herself that if you complained and told someone about it then you understood that it came back to you through different tactics like pressures, threats or simply the reduction of breaks. If they noticed that you are weak and that basically meant you were polite and friendly person then they could use you very easily but if you yelled and fought for something then it meant they were going to stay away from you. „The hierarchy is very clear with vice cashiers and managers at the top who give or take away the privilege from you“. She thought that calling and asking to go to toilet was ridiculous as she saw that vice cashiers put the priority to customers and not to your basic needs as a worker. „It is very important to know the rights, to read the contract and to know the time that you have for breaks lunches and other“. They knew that Aistė had mother working in the same Maxima and they knew her mother as the one who really fights for herself so they did not risk with Aistė as well. However Aistė was not the silent one too if she needed the toilet she wouldnt ask for it but demand for it threatening that she gonna do it at the workplace. The worker had one hour break for her needs. Aistė tried to use as much of that hour as possible. She describe the work at the cashier as really hard one even if it is not accounted as qualified the worker has to do various operations and always have to be concentrated. The vice cashier sometimes used other cashiers to drain her anger and if you tried to oppose that she would always remember you did it. The argument that the customers came first had to beat all the physiological and personal needs of the workers as they first saw the customer and the worker as the secondary person. „You try to help people to purchase their stuff you make profit for them but for them you dont count as a person more like a robot“. It needs a lot of diplomacy in the work of cashiers Aistė claims, there are different moods different characters. The biggest friendship in Maxima between workers is when you have people that you know, you can agree about schedulechanges etc. The biggest friction she felt was between her and guards, she didnt like their sexist jokes or their comments as most cashiers were women and the guards were men. Therefore, Aiste thought, they felt superior. The most important for her was to find a way to reply to their comments in a way they would feel confused and lost. She thought of guard as police who were always observing you especially if they didnt like you. It constantly happens that the codes of new products dont come so fast in
69 cashier‘s desk therefore Aiste‘s mother every day before work would go around and look if there are new products in the shop. The wrong codes could get you in trouble as you would be reported by the guards and then would get a warning. Also the vice cashier with managers do a lot of tricks with workers, like with counting the money and closing down the cash register. They want you to work overtime for free. It should be that half an hour before the closing you start cleaning up counting money and give the money to the vice cashier, take your trash and go home in time while they usually don’t come in time for your money and they dont let you close earlier. After some time Aistė got in the car accident when going home from job. She got her leg hurt and couldnt walk for couple months. However when she came back she still felt bad and after some days she found out she had pneumonia.After that she wanted to work one hour less but they didn‘t let her and she left. Workers leave their workplace very often and your work becomes three times heavier. There are 25 cachier registers in Maxima and only half of them usually work therefore workload is always bigger than actually it should be for one cashier. „They always would repeat that you cannot eat, cannot go to the toilet, cannot have a break, because of customers“. Aistė would always respond that it is not her problem and her concern if they cannot find more workers. She thinks it is also the responsibility of workers as they accept all the rules and let humiliate themselves while instead they could collectively resist. In her workplace the wage was minimum until workers heard that other Maxima shops pay more for their workers. „People started leaving massively until director realized she had almost empty shop without workers“. Bonus are paid for the workers who can work really fast and serve more customers where the possibility as a newcomer to get higher wage is very low. Aiste noticed that there were workers who had more privileges than others like men cashiers had more rights than women and older women had more benefits compared to younger women. „They could have longer breaks and they would only get verbal warnings“.
My interviews with different women workers taken in Kaunas and Žiežmariai prove the hypothesis of the feminization of labour forms in Lithuania that is situated in order to oppress women and institute the discrimination based on gender. More over it tracks the shift of labour market towards the flexibilization and insecurity of the working women. In my chapter of interviews I moved from public sector to private sector that also coincided with age amplitude from mature women to younger women which roughly shows the tendencies in the labour market which go from the most secured position as it can be secure in these times of feminization to the most „flexible“ service sector.
From the interviews, the closer analysis of globalization and the case of Lithuania I would finally suggest that the idea of neoliberal subject is based on white privilleged man. He remains the
70 subject who dictates the conditions for others who mainly depend on him. I tried to define the rules of subjugation in my paper and how it even expands and masks the hierarchy and domination rolling the responsibility to the invisible hand of the market. However to state that everyone is against everyone and everything is a sphere of economy of the interests is to reduce the space and at the same time to reconstruct the power of the center and that is what globalization is doing to the peripheries. If we still know where the center is we can not pretend that we are not affected by it. The neoliberal subject is the center of the market economy, the market economy is the center of our lifes which is nothing but work. Work is the tacky term in the neoliberal vocabulary but the word does not lose it‘s meaning only because the elite avoids to use it in their conversations about their „passions“ of life.
CONCLUSION
The growing insecurity and increased flexibilization of labor place put neoliberal subject in front of us as the carrot far away in the horizont that we are able to reach it only if we take work as the only telos of our whole life. Work is affecting our lifes in unpredictable way, it is mistified and is taken for granted like in the anecdote about the worker who writes to the company to ask about the conditions and the salary, the director answers to him that the shifts are always from 8am to 10pm and the the salary is like everywhere that is minimum, the worker responds that he is greatful but he is not going to work for minimum and the director regrets that nowadays the workers are materialist who only care about money. The story resembles the reality of today‘s work which more and more internalized as „more than work or more than speciality“. In my thesis I went though different historical times, struggles and locations to unravel how work has always been gendered and divided in order to put it in patriarchal hierarchy and at the same time to devalue one for other‘s value. If the time of welfare in the west beginning after the IIWW to the end of 70‘s took women‘s work of reproduction for granted, it was exactly the time when the feminization of work has started with part-time jobs, expansion of service sector and light industry jobs. Free-market economy took the opportunity to take the advantage of women not only in home but also at work and not only at the hometown and very far from it too. The commodification of reproduction labor did not eliminate the housework for women but enforced wider economic and social inequalities of women, meaning that the hiring of emigrant women for domestic work spread wide in the West. The domination of feminized work forms push the work of reproduction to even more precarious margins in the hierarchy of work relations. As Saskia Sassen already wrote, that the free market economy takes the manual un-skilled labor as
71 non-existent, pretends that it has vanished from the surface, but it only vanished from the lives of privilleged white males with highly developed entrepreneurial spirit. Instead it expands and is encouraged at the peripheries of the capital.
The flexibilization of the labor market was successfuly instituted in Lithuania as well through processes of privatization, state‘s monetary policy, nationalist propaganda, increasing unemployment and poverty. The foreign direct investment also „encouraged“ the state to curtail the rights of workers and keep the wages at the lowest level from almost all European countries. The economy which is based on export and foreign capital forms the mass of un-skilled flexible labour force which is highly dependent on the market. The cuts of state funding of the social programs and benefits mostly affect women who are forced into the labor market as the main low waged „un-skilled“ work force.
The proverb that work is not a wolf and it wont go away goes against the values of the dominating work ethics of today. The shifts, the transformations, the deregulations, the flows, the privatizations make the work to leave but to come back in other forms created by the same processes not of life but of market. The free market economy did not make work easier and work relations more friendly as we saw that the conditions of competition were created not only for the top floor workers but more or less the homogeneity of individualism did win its fight to the bottom. However the homogeneity of individualism in the terms of what the individualism provides for the white privilleged men is contestested mostly in peripheries and mostly by not white, or not men starting from marxist feminists of the 70‘s to the Indonesian workers or to the Mondelez factory workers in Kaunas. The factory is not anymore the place of the fight for men workers, the „aristocracy“ of labor, while men, as the head of the union in Mondelez factory claims, are not working on the lowest floor of the production line. „Men should not work as cashiers“ – the worker who worked as cashier for 16 years in Kaunas supermarket told me. Clearly they shouldn‘t and they mostly dont work as cashiers, they work as managers, as guards, as directors, as operators etc. The segregation of work goes hand in hand with the other processes to transform the certain relations of work and to preserve the others. Segregated work is easier to manipulate in terms of gendered positions while the director almost all the time leaves the place („Is fired“) the last.
Feminization of labour forms creates a mass and the minority. The mass live under conditions of constant control of their life in relation to work, as Roma already told about the text messages whcih tell you when to work Kristina who would always had to bring some clothes to sew for the night or Aiste who can get the „un-skilled“ job because her son is sick. However to work „un- skilled“ job for thirty years can leave you with damaged back without the ability to cover. When
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I asked Leonida about her free time, she looked at me attentively and told me that now all her free days are spent at the hospital. They also dont get much because all the time they tell them that the work they are working is un-skilled and she can easily replaced by other, also woman. When I asked Lina, the social worker, if she liked her maternity leave she said it was more than a pleasure because the work was becoming hell. The work of reproduction is represented as pleasure, the woman has to enjoy the motherhood, has to enjoy cooking, has to enjoy because un-skilled or work designated for women is allegedly adjusted to women whose work has to be the least entertaining sphere from which women would always to rush home. The golden rule that women should be more flexible easy to reabsorb to the labour market also reflected in the interviews, for example Genutė was always accomodated someone else‘s wishes. She went from the factory to the other, then the kids needed her, she was with the kids, then she needed to work, she learnt to be a cook and after that she is planning to help her husband in ceramics. All the interviews illustrate the conditions of feminized labour which is established on the basis of segregation, insecurtity, flexibilization and low wage. In other words all these women are the kernel of today‘s working class in Lithuania and their struggle against the harsh conditions of work has to be regarded as the precondition to other struggles against market domination, alienantion and discrimination.
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