19 June, 2011
On 8 March, to coincide with International Women’s Day, the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) released a report exploring the gender dimensions of the increasing move towards contract, agency and other types of precarious work. Entitled “Living with Economic Insecurity,” the report analyses global employment trends, including the global economic crisis, and concludes that the crisis has had a particularly far-reaching, but under-acknowledged effect on women. This has been exacerbated by the fact that women are over-represented in insecure forms of employment.
There are no global figures regarding the number of women in precarious employment, but the report details a number of studies which illustrate the over-representation of women in insecure employment. In industrialised countries, where the female employment rate in 2009 was 53.1% versus 68.4% for men, women are more likely to be employed in part-time jobs. In Japan, women represent two-thirds of all non-regular workers and 80% of the female workforce are in temporary jobs. In some developing countries, female employment is predominantly in export-orientated manufacturing sectors, characterised by low wages, insecurity and denial of trade union rights.
According to the report women are increasingly working in the outsourced public sector jobs, for example as cleaners and care-workers, where they are denied access to social protections and receive lower wages than their permanent counterparts. Jobs in the care sector are highly precarious and low paid. Many workers in the sector do have contracts that guarantee a set number of hours, and work on an “upon request” basis. Workers in the cleaning sector suffered due to the cutbacks brought on by the crisis, such as in Belgium where many office cleaning contracts were reduced from once a day to once a week, with negative impacts for the predominantly female, precarious workforce.
According to the ITUC, women suffer from a “double pay deficit,” firstly from gender discrimination and secondly as a result of lower pay for precarious work. In Korea, for example, 70% of female workers are in precarious employment and earn only 43% of the salaries of regular male workers.
The overrepresentation of women in precarious employment has become a key factor contributing to the global pay gap between men and women, and according to the report “Job insecurity, far from being compensated through higher wages, actually tends to go hand in hand with low pay.”
The ITUC has prioritised getting women out of precarious and informal jobs in the following ways:
1. Shifting policy focus to the creation of quality jobs, including by ensuring that the employment relationship is legally secure.
2. Implementing the gender equity agenda, including through investment in public services and taking steps to promote the employment of women in all sectors.
3. Providing universal access to social security through the implementation of a social protection floor for all, regardless of their employment situation.
4. Taking up the challenge of organising workers in insecure forms of work by removing legal obstacles and broadening collective bargaining strategies.
The full report is available here.