Based on Enloe, Chpts. 2 and 8

International Development – IMF makes “fiscal austerity” and generating foreign currency as key development strategies

Seldom recognized:
***how fiscal austerity programs affect women’s ability to meet her families needs; force many women into the workforce.
International debt politics has helped create the incentives for many women to emigrate, while at the same time it has made governments dependent on the money those women send home to their families.  The IMF, which serves as a vanguard for the commercial banking community by pressuring indebted governments to adopt policies which will maximize a country’s ability to repay its outstanding loans with interest, has insisted that governments cut their social-service budgets.  Reductions in food-price subsidies are high on the IMF’s list of demands of any government that wants its financial assistance.  Keeping wages down, cutting back public works, reducing the numbers of government employees, rolling back health and education budgets – these are standard IMF prescriptions for indebted governments…These policies have different implications for women and men in the indebted country, because women and men usually have such dissimilar relationships to family maintenance, waged employment, public services and public policy-making (184).

These international pressures affect women’s workforce participation.

Tourism:
1) that tourism is the largest or second largest industry in many developing countries; examples where tourism very important: Tunisia, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Haiti, Jamaica, Nepal;  increasingly so for Cuba, China.  Also, think about Hawai’I – hotels as the “new plantations”
What role does tourism play in your country’s economy??  What kind of jobs does it provide for women in your country??

2) that the tourist industry is heavily dependent on women’s labor – in many cases, the comprise a majority of the labor force in these very labor intensive services
women as airline stewardesses, chambermaids, hostesses, masseuses, escorts, prostitutes –
Governments give these sectors of the economy benign sounding names like “the hospitality industry” or “the entertainment industry”
Government policies acknowledge that women are actually “sex workers” in these industries through policies requiring prostitutes to register with the government, have VD and AIDS tests.
In countries with growing nationalist movements, women’s sexual exploitation has become an issue at times, e.g., in Corazon Aquino’s government.  But the inability of these governments to generate viable economic alternatives for women hasn’t diminished the number of women forced into these industries to earn an income.

Enloe cites some instances of women’s organizing, i.e, NGOs devoted to improving working conditions for women or to training them for other kinds of work.

3) that the tourist industry is predicated on specific notions of masculinity and feminity , both for tourists and tourism workers.
Men tourists/conquerors, sexual adventurers – the majority of tourists to Thailand, for example, are men;
Women tourists as respectable middle-class adventurers, independent women.
Men natives – macho men in uniforms, machete-swinging hard workers with a smile
Women natives – passive, open-hearted, submissive, inviting

4) that tourism as a development strategy perpetuates inequalities between rich and poor countries (if the poor countries become better off they lose their competitive advantage in attracting tourism);

 
Women as Domestic Laborers – Nannies, nurses, maids.
Women a driving force in remittance economies and remittances a VITAL source of foreign currency for many countries (why do they need foreign currency??)

1986 – foreign earned currency = 78% of the value of Pakistan’s exports
     56% of Bangladesh’s
     27% of Sri Lanka’s
     25% of India’s
     18% of Philippines’
     10% of Thailand’s (185)

Dangerous and difficult work – want dangers and difficulties does going abroad to work pose for these women?

What patterns in the movement of women to work abroad do you detect? Which countries are large suppliers of women workers?  Which countries host large numbers of them???