Abstract
This paper sets out a framework for understanding the impacts of the financial crisis and its aftermath that is based on the idea of three interacting spheres: finance, production and reproduction. All of these spheres are gendered and globalised. The gendered impact of the current crisis is discussed in terms of the impact on unemployment, employment protection and security, public sector services, social security benefits, pensions, and the real value of wages and living standards. Drawing on the analysis of the UK Women’s Budget Group, the paper demonstrates that the biggest falls in disposable income as the result of austerity policies by the Conservative-led government since 2010 have been borne by the most vulnerable women—lone mothers, single women pensioners and single women without children. Working-age couples without children have been least affected. The paper then goes on to discuss what an alternative economic strategy, based on feminist political economy, might look like. It utilises the notion of the ‘reproductive bargain’, first developed to understand the transition in Cuba in the 1990s. It sets out a possible feminist economic strategy that insists on the incorporation of reproductive and care work into the analysis of alternative economic policies and links employment, wages and social security payments to public provisioning of trans-generational reproductive services. It suggests feasible strategies to finance the proposed Plan F—a feminist economic strategy.
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Notes
This was first applied to developing countries (see Elson, 2010).
The G20 are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkey, the UK and the USA, plus a representative of the EU.
For a detailed analysis of the main austerity measures introduced since June 2010, see Reed et al. (2013) and Women’s Budget Group reports, available at www.wbg.org.
Estimated using data from the UK’s October 2012 Spending Review, revised according to any further spending announcements made between the Spending Review and the 2013 Budget (see Reed et al., 2013).
It should be noted that if we were to include the other £32 billion of spending cuts (which cannot be allocated based on household data on use of public services) as ‘flat rate’ cuts per household, the impact of the spending cuts would be even more regressive as a proportion of income than is shown in this section. This was the approach taken by Horton and Reed (2011) in their analysis of the distributional impact of the October 2010 Spending Review.
This requirement stemmed from the 2006 Equality Act, which set out a public duty to promote gender equality and to pay ‘due regard’ to gender equality in all policies.
The authors are both members of the Management Committee of the Women’s Budget group.
See the reports available at www.wbg.org.uk.
Office for National Statistics (ONS), ‘Labour market statistics, May 2010’ http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/lms-may-2010/index.html, last accessed 30 October 2014.
For details on the method used, see Reed et al. (2013).
For more details on how much different measures contribute to these losses, see Women’s Budget Group (2013c).
Office for National Statistics (ONS) ‘Labour market statistics, June 2014’ http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lms/labour-market-statistics/june-2014/index.html, last accessed 30 October 2014.
These figures are taken from a Women’s Budget Group Briefing Paper (2014a). For a full analysis, see Women’s Budget Group (2014b).
This was a term originally coined to analyse the rapid transition in post-1989 Cuba, when the state was starved of Soviet subsidies and had to reorganise the allocation of national resources. The Cuban state was forced to adjust the ways in which the different elements of labour, time and resources required to achieve reproduction of people, that is, biological, daily, generational and social reproduction, were provided (see Pearson, 1997).
The highest rates of employment of mothers in the OECD countries are in Scandinavian countries, where public investment in childcare is high; for example, in 2012 the female employment rate in Sweden was 77 per cent compared to 67 per cent in Scotland. The higher productivity and tax revenues resulting in enhanced labour force participation of mothers would make a substantial contribution to the cost of publicly provided childcare services (see Campbell et al., 2013).
See The Carers, Employment and Services Study (CES) (2006–2007), University of Leeds, http://circle.leeds.ac.uk/projects/completed/supporting-carers/the-carers-employment-and-services-study-ces/, last accessed 30 October 2014. Researchers: Professor Sue Yeandle, Dr Cinnamon Bennett, Dr Lisa Buckner, Dr Gary Fry, Leah Harris, Christopher Price, Amanda Rodney.
See UK Government, ‘Employment rights and pay for interns’, https://www.gov.uk/employment-rights-for-interns, last accessed 30 October 2014.
Eurofund, ‘International Women’s Day: 8 March 2013’, http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/areas/gender/iwd2013.htm, last accessed 30 October 2014.
The Robin Hood Tax campaign, http://robinhoodtax.org.uk, last accessed 30 October 2014.
Norton-Taylor (2014) also reported that a survey by WMD Awareness suggests that 6 per cent of voters believe defence spending should be a priority over the next ten years.
See Government of Germany, ‘Solidarity surcharge’, http://www.steuerliches-info-center.de/EN/SteuerrechtFuerInvestoren/Person_Inland/Solidaritaetszuschlag/solidaritaetszuschlag_node.html, last accessed 30 October 2014.
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Acknowledgements
Versions of this paper were presented to the UK Feministas Summer School in Birmingham in August 2013 and to the conference on ‘Gender, Neoliberalism, and Financial Crisis’ held at the University of York in September 2013. We are also indebted to the members of the Management Committee and the Policy Advisory Group on the Women’s Budget Group for lively collective discussions and meticulous analysis of the impact of UK government economic policies on women, particularly since the election of the Conservative-led Coalition government in 2010. We also appreciate the opportunity to write another joint article for Feminist Review some thirty five years after the publication of our previous joint effort ‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’ in Feminist Review issue 7 (1981).
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Pearson, R., Elson, D. transcending the impact of the financial crisis in the United Kingdom: towards plan F—a feminist economic strategy. Fem Rev 109, 8–30 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.42
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fr.2014.42