[fla-left] [labor/gender issues/corporate dominance] Women & The Wal-Mart Trap (fwd)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>forwarded by Michael Hoover
>
> > >From Dollars and Sense, Sept./Oct. 2000
> > http://www.DollarsandSense.org
> > Subscriptions to Dollars and Sense are $18.95 a year
> > Dollars and Sense
> > P.O. Box 3000
> > Denville, N.J. 07834-9810
> >
> > THE WAL-MART TRAP
> >
> > By Annette Bernhardt
> >
> >
> > For every woman shattering the glass ceiling, there are many more trapped
> > in lowwage jobs and working conditions that don't look very different from
> > those at the start of the women's movement. Since 1973, the gender gap in
> > wages has almost been cut in half, but women still earn significantly less
> > than men, are still segregated in traditionally female occupations, and are
> > less likely to have health and pension coverage - despite total parity in
> > education. The problem is especially severe at the bottom of the wage
> > hierarchy. In 1997, 18% of white men earned poverty-level wages, compared
> > to 32% of white women, 43% of black women, and 53% of Hispanic women.
> >
> > So where are all the low-wage jobs coming from? And why haven't they gone
> > away in the "postindustrial" economy? Most of them are service jobs, and
> > most continue ro be the territory of women and people of color: hotel room
> > cleaners, nursing assistants, data-entry clerks, hamburger flippers,
> > secretaries, childcare workers, cashiers, tellers, callcenter operators.
> > These jobs are not coming from dinosaur firms that somehow haven't yet
> > caught on to the new "hightech" credo. More and more, low-wage jobs are
> > being created by efficient, technologically sophisticated firms. The new
> > "high-tech, low-skill" business strategy is typified by the retail
> > industry, and particularly by the business model of retail giant Wal-Mart.
> > And because this model is so profitable, it will continue to dominate the
> > working lives of many Americans, especially women.
> >
> > SEGMENTATION IN THE RETAIL INDUSTRY
> >
> > In the private sector, one in five Americans (21%) currently holds a retail
> > job. Among the occupations with the largest projected job growth to 2006,
> > cashiers and salespeople rank first and fifth, respectively. Yet retail
> > wages for non-managerial workers averaged only $9.08 an hour in 1999. In
> > 1997, nearly a third (31.7%) of the workers living in poverty worked in
> > retail, compared to 15.8% of the overall population.
> >
> > While jobs in this industry have never been good, retail wages have
> > actually fallen as a percent of the national average, from 74% in 1973 to
> > 68% in 1999.

*****   Working Paper No. 297

What's Behind the Recent Rise in Profitability?

by Edward N. Wolff

December 1999

...The movement of the rate of profit over time is due to two major 
effects: changes in the share of profits in value added and movements 
in the organic composition. The latter, in turn, is due to movements 
in sectoral organic composition levels and shifts in the employment 
shares among industries. On the basis of equations (8) and (16), we 
can separate out the effects of shifts in employment composition on 
the movement of the overall rate of profit. Results are shown in 
Panels C and D for the two profit rate measures.

The results show rather persuasively that structural shifts were an 
important offset to rising organic composition on the industry level. 
Over the entire half century, rising organic composition on the 
industry level would have caused the net rate of profit to fall by 10 
percentage points and the gross rate of profit to fall by 14 
percentage points if employment shares had remained constant. The 
shift in employment toward the more labor intensive industries almost 
fully counteracted the increase in the organic composition on the 
industry level -- by itself, responsible for an 9 percentage point 
increase in the net rate of profit and a 13 percentage point increase 
in the gross rate of profit. The employment effects were again 
strongest in the 1958-67 and 1977-87 periods. In the 1987-97 period, 
falling organic compositions on the sectoral level, coupled with 
employment shift effects and a rising profit share in income, led to 
a resurgence in the rate of profit (both net and gross)....

<http://www.levy.org/docs/wrkpap/papers/297.html>   *****

The post-WW2 settlement between capital and organized labor (both 
male-dominated) deprived American women of wartime gains (women's 
employment in jobs & industries that had become male bastions) and 
pushed them out of manufacturing and into idealized motherhood and 
domesticity.  Soon, however, women got re-recruited into the labor 
force (even before the rise of second-wave feminism), but not as 
unionized factory workers but as non-unionized, often part-time 
service workers (which the ideology of femininity & material 
conditions of the double burden induced women to settle grudgingly 
for).  This re-gendering of work must have facilitated the "shift in 
employment toward the more labor intensive industries," which, 
according to Edward Wolff, "almost fully counteracted the increase in 
the organic composition on the industry level" and helped restore 
profitability.  Liberal feminism in America has been an ambivalent 
social force in this employment shift, being simultaneously complicit 
with _and_ resistant to capital's strategy for overcoming periodic 
crises in profitability.  That liberal feminism, not 
marxist-feminism, has been the dominant tendency in women's movements 
highlights the limitations of male-dominated organized labor that 
said "Good Riddance!" to the Reds & Rosie the Riveter.

Yoshie