6 March, 2009In honour of International Women's Day, affiliates of the IMF and EMF will meet to discuss how women's precarious employment impacts on families and communities.
GENEVA: In a statement issued today to mark International Women's Day, IMF General Secretary Marcello Malentacchi makes the link between women's overrepresentation in precarious work and negative impacts on families and communities.
Calling attention to continuing discrimination against women that forces them into substandard employment, Malentacchi states that "Throughout the world, women are increasingly finding that their only employment options are through precarious work, in jobs which are insecure, temporary and give no rights to social security, pensions and other conditions."
He goes on to point out that women continue to be discriminated against in employment, receiving lower wages for the same work and being denied access to promotions. This same discrimination results in women being pushed into the most precarious jobs with the worst pay and conditions.
But it is not just women themselves that suffer the consequences of their precarious work. As Malentacchi observes, "We all know that it is women who are primarily relied on for raising children, caring for the elderly and providing other community services that keep society functioning. When women's only access to employment is via precarious jobs, the impacts are necessarily felt by those that depend on them."
As part of its continuing actions against precarious work, IMF is working to raise awareness of the broader impacts of precarious employment on families, communities and society in general. On March 18 in Frankfurt, a joint IMF-EMF meeting will take place on the theme "Precarious work = Precarious lives: how women's precarious employment impacts on families and communities". The meeting will provide a first opportunity for unions to share experiences of the broader impacts of women's precarious work and to develop strategies to address these issues through their union campaigns against precarious work.
This theme will be taken up again at the next IMF Women's Conference to be held in Gothenburg on May 22 in conjunction with the IMF Congress.