Globalization and the Working Poor
BY LINDA J. SELIGMANN
The commonplace expression “nickel-and-dimed to death” has taken on new twists and nuances in the context of globalization processes. Barbara Ehrenreich donned the persona of a working poor woman in various parts of the United States to discern whether it would be possible for her to survive with the barest of necessities from month to month. She found it almost impossible, and, as a well-educated, upper-middle-class woman, she could not resist “cheating” from time to time in order to find food and shelter. She was, literally, nickel-and-dimed, as the title of her book indicates, and she did not even have a family to take into account.1
Similarly, in his book, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, journalist David Shipler drives home the dismal similarities between the lives of the working poor in the United States and those countries that we commonly designate as part of “the third world.”2 While the working poor are a diverse lot, not easily placed in a single category, they share the similar indignities of poverty and powerlessness, and the world over, they include heavy concentrations of single women, with or without families. According to Shipler, half of all poor families in the United States are headed by single women. The working poor are stigmatized and experience the eerie sensation of being invisible. Paradoxically, while not recognizing the individuality and basic needs of the working poor, many members of society are also wont to engage in frightening and hostile efforts to sweep the poor off the streets, sidewalks, and border zones of the world.
The two faces of visibility/invisibility raise interesting questions about the lives of working people and the impact of globalization upon them. Structural conditions may either improve or degrade their ability to find employment and survive from month to month. Cultural practices and values also shape their lives. In my book, Peruvian Street Lives, I focus on one particular subgroup of working poor—women who labor in open-air markets—in an effort to understand some of the economic, political, and cultural conditions that, on the one hand, give rise to the inability of working poor women to be anything but poor, and that, on the other hand, provide the kinds of relationships and practices that allow these women to survive from one month to the next, and sometimes improve upon their existing economic regime.3 There is a tremendous challenge in doing this kind of research since, like so many of the working poor, the market women constitute a floating population that makes a concerted effort to avoid municipal agents and police.
What bearing do my findings have on gaining a grasp of the impact of globalization on the working poor? Globalization processes are not new. They are old, even as they change qualitatively. Some economists and policy makers suggest that globalization and free trade and neoliberal economic measures and structural adjustment policies will ultimately improve the lot of the majority of people globally. Desired commodities will circulate widely, and the manufacture of products and provision of services in demand will lead to greater employment. The open-air bazaar of the world will foster pluralism and innovation, encouraging economic dynamism.
On the other hand, those who are more skeptical and who have paid more attention to the microlevel impact of globalization processes, particularly among the working poor, paint a different and more dismal picture, noting the global decline in living standards and the ways that international financial and trade institutions, such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and World Bank lead to the weakening of many national economies. Even as people, commodities, services, and information circulate widely, even as geography and transport appear to matter less, transnational commerce brings with it cutthroat economics, horrendous working conditions, damage to the environment, a disdain for re- or up-skilling, and heightened consideration of what geographical location means, findings that are borne out in my own research. Compression of wages, de-skilling, a huge reserve army of people seeking employment of any kind whatsoever, and a growing inability of nations to protect in any way the continuity or productivity of their economies create a very different view of globalization. According to the International Labor Organization, worldwide unemployment affects one billion people or nearly one-third of the global labor force.4 Compounding these structural conditions are the specificity of institutional and cultural practices that have profound impacts on quality of life among the working poor.
Most likely, determining the advantages and disadvantages of globalization is not an either/or scenario. Rather, it depends in large part upon which perspective is used, what variables are emphasized, and how much complexity is incorporated into analysis. For example, economic growth has been touted as one of the major and positive consequences of globalization. Yet, this is true of only a handful of wealthy nations—wealthy in institutional, technological, and infrastructural consolidation and whose geographic location brings with it useful advantages.
In fact, the economic growth in a handful of nations may lead to greater unemployment within many other nations, both wealthy and poor. Excess capacity means that the latter nations find themselves faced with an inability to protect their own productive enterprises and a lack of purchasing power that could stimulate their economies. Indigenous agricultural diversity may be destroyed. While a fraction of the population in these nations may benefit from the opening of borders and the ready availability of previously scarce resources and commodities, the majority experience greater obstacles to upward mobility and overcoming poverty. These obstacles, in turn, create far greater tension among groups distinguished by ethnicity, gender, class, and generation, and further segments the labor force into those who are employed, unemployed, and partially employed.
Another consequence of recent globalization processes is the shutting down of internal markets, particularly within informal markets, due to currency devaluations and commodity dumping. In Peru, one successful niche among market women was the sale of clothing from Peru’s thriving domestic textile industry. Globalization caused this market to crash because of the enormous influx of used clothing, measured by the ton, from Europe and the United States. Much of the clothing that glutted the markets began its journey as a donation (with a tax write-off) made by unsuspecting individuals to charitable organizations in the United States and Europe. There are many other examples of these kinds of contradictions that accompany globalization. In the Peruvian case, in addition to the saturation of the service economy and informal markets, in 2003, 49 percent of Peruvians were living below the national poverty line, with 15.5 percent of Peruvians living in extreme poverty (on less than $1.00 per day). The unemployment rate was 9.4 percent, and 49 percent of the population remained underemployed. The latter is probably an underestimate, but it is very hard to measure. The Gini index in Peru for inequality of income distribution was approximately 46.2, amid notable economic growth of approximately 4 percent.5
A final aspect that needs further exploration and is most eloquently addressed in John Kay’s treatise on Culture and Prosperity is relevant to complexity theory.6 Only recently have economists recognized the enormity and (from this author’s perspective) fruitlessness of the task of arriving at predictive models that account for what Kay calls “path dependent” trajectories. That is, any number of organizational and cultural ingredients (including the impact of history) are stirred into the potions (or recipes, if one prefers) that, for example, contribute to the ability of one economy to succeed in distributing income more evenly and achieving economic growth, while another spirals downward into poverty and unemployment, and yet another has lower economic growth but far sounder social welfare policies. Culture matters in ways that ethnographic and microeconomic analyses best reveal. Social linkages among different geographical regions create unique economies and networks; members of society organize themselves into cities, villages, or suburbs operating at different scales and with different purposes; and hierarchies of power are embedded in histories of colonialism, indirect rule, and lineage dynamics. For example, he impact of globalization on the informal market economies of Peru is compounded by the far longer-term discrimination against women of mixed Quechua Indian and Hispanic ethnicity.
In short, the ways that cultural and symbolic values are assigned to commodities and practices all mitigate against a perfectly competitive market, which nevertheless remains the basis for many of the premises of economists. Macroeconomic analysis of globalization processes minimizes cultural factors in the interest of arriving at generalizations. In the end, powerful and tantalizing generalizable axioms remain ideologies rather than models that can be replicated.
Of course, those who have not benefited from globalization have not simply acquiesced to conditions of globalization. They have undertaken a wide range of social movements to keep track of free trade policies, to organize against policies that are deleterious to them, and to make more sophisticated efforts to reach world citizens in order to explain why their native resources, land base, and peoples should not be ravaged in the interest of free markets. Occasionally, a national government will engage in these actions. We also know that the destructive aspects of globalization (embedded in the kinds of histories I have mentioned above) can lead even those who are not impoverished to reject entirely the policies and the nations that have implemented and imposed them. Utopias turn out to be mirages and then become dystopias in the making. We need to study more why this is the case and what alternative policies might be better suited to taking advantage of the positive dimensions of globalization while improving the lot of the working poor, that is, most of the world’s population.
Linda J. Seligmann (lseligm2@gmu.edu) is a professor of anthropology (http://anthropology.gmu.edu/) and coordinator of the anthropology program at George Mason University. She researches transnational adoption, kinship, and the changing face of the family. A trade paper edition of her book, Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco, was recently released by the University of Illinois Press (http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/99ztg9hc9780252029011.html).
ENDNOTES
- Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Henry Holt and Co. 2001. [↩]
- David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2004. [↩]
- Linda J. Seligmann, Peruvian Street Lives: Culture, Power and Economy among Market Women of Cuzco. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004. [↩]
- ILO, Second World Employment Report, Geneva, 1996. [↩]
- United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report, Peru. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. 2003. [↩]
- John Kay, Culture and Prosperity: The Truth about Markets—Why Some Nations Are Rich but Most Remain Poor. New York: HarperCollins. 2004. [↩]
