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6 March, 2009How women's precarious work impacts on families and communities
Precarious work is the biggest threat to wages and working conditions that workers face today. Workers in temporary, casual and contract jobs have fewer rights and are less likely to become members of a trade union.
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. Women's overrepresentation in precarious work means that they have fewer possibilities to obtain regular, ongoing employment. This is as true in the metal sector as it is in other areas of the economy.
Women are already disadvantaged in employment, receiving significantly lower wages for the same work and being systematically denied access to promotions and better paying jobs simply because they are women.
Because of this ongoing discrimination, women are more likely to end up in precarious work. But forcing women into precarious work is not in anyone's interests, not those of women themselves, nor those of the families and communities that they support.
We all know that it still women that shoulder the primary responsibility 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.
Numerous studies have shown that improving the economic situation of women is a key factor in reducing poverty worldwide. For this to work, women need to have access to well-paid, secure jobs that give them the capacity to lift themselves and their families out of poverty. Regular jobs with a steady income help give women the kind of autonomy and economic empowerment that enable them to take decisions about their lives - whether to get married, when to have children - decisions that help shape societies. According to the ILO*, good jobs give women control over income and resources, ensuring they have a greater say in family decision-making, including fertility decisions. Women become less dependent on their children for security in their old age or in adverse economic conditions and families are more likely to see the value in educating girls.
Precarious jobs, on the other hand, confine women to continuing insecurity, which in many cases discourages them from participating in the labour market, leading to increased poverty for them and their families. Precarious employment prevents women from making long-term plans for their families' future. Financial commitments like signing a housing lease, taking out a bank loan, or even sending children to school are impossible without some form of income security. Precarious work really does equate to precarious lives.
This International Women's Day, IMF is working to raise awareness of the broader impacts of precarious work on all our lives, in order to strengthen our actions against it.