Many of the critical discussions taking place regarding neoliberalism in academic, activist and policy circles focus on the contrast between neoliberal policies and other ways of organizing capitalism – in particular, the models of Keynesianism, and state led developmentalism - which these policies have effectively dismantled. From this point of view, critiques of neoliberalism have tended to be essentially defensive in nature. While the work carried out within this framework has been valuable, from a Marxist perspective it is clearly necessary for us look at neoliberalism as a strategy of capital, developed at least partly in response to strategies of resistance by labour, and to focus on the alternatives that these forms of resistance imply or explicitly propose.

This perspective is implicit in a focus on rural labour, since rural labourers have been excluded and marginalized long before the establishment of neoliberalism as the dominant economic model, even though their labour has been vital to processes of capital accumulation. Agricultural labourers’ movements have therefore always been deeply political in nature – they are compelled to be progressive rather than defensive, projecting a vision of social and economic transformation, rather than seeking to protect an existing order. This also leads to a questioning of unequal relationships between those who are struggling for change.

Neoliberalism is also in practice embedded in specific states and social relations. In the Indian context, rather than destroying existing structures, global capital has frequently drawn upon and incorporated existing unequal relations of power, such as gender relations.

Finally, we need to recognize the way in which neoliberalism as an ideology is not static, and in particular its capacity for appropriating concepts and transforming their meaning. We can observe the way this has happened in relation to ‘rights’ and ‘corruption’ in which ideas and preoccupations which came out of progressive peoples’ movements have been incorporated into neoliberal formulations. Here I focus on how this process has occurred in relation to the concepts of gender equality and women’s empowerment.

The article looks at the role of development NGOs and in particular the promotion of microfinance initiatives targeted at rural poor women in the context of both the corporatization of agriculture and the ‘feminization of survival’. It contrasts the specific notions of women’s agency and empowerment embedded in these initiatives with those which emerge from women’s participation in rural labour movements and considers some implications for future struggles for social transformation.

Gendered aspects of rural labourers’ experiences of neoliberalism during the last two decades

A feature of the globalisation of Indian agriculture has been an acute employment shortage for those dependent on agricultural wage labour for survival. The collapse of non-farm rural employment, the crisis faced by small cultivators, and the decline in access to land among the rural poor associated with the corporatization of agriculture as well as state-backed corporate land-grab have all contributed to the increasing numbers of agricultural labourers. As a recent study notes, ‘the deprivation of agricultural labourers is aggravated by the fact that not only are their wages lower than wages in non-agriculture (about two-thirds of that level), they have also grown at a lower rate in the recent period, thereby increasing the gap’ (Srivastava and Srivastava, 2010: 53). Agricultural labourers have always suffered from legal invisibility in the eyes of the Indian government -- there are still no labour laws relating to agricultural labourers, and at best they are recognised as an unorganised sector occupational category for minimum wages, which, in any case, are never enforced.[1] The unemployment rate for agricultural labourers is very high, and increased over the period from 1993-94 to 2004-05 (NCEUS 2007).

*Some sections of this article were presented at a workshop on ‘Rural labourers in Neo-liberal India’ held at the Xavier Institute of Management, Bhubaneshwar, December 18-19, 2010

[1] The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) had proposed two Bills - Agricultural Workers' Conditions of Work and Social Security Bill and Unorganised Nonagricultural Workers Conditions of Work and Social Security Bill for comprehensive coverage of the unorganised sector and these were taken up in Parliament during 2008-9. Ultimately, it passed the Unorganised Sector Worker's Social Security Bill which was a combination of the two bills but in considerably modified form.

One of the key processes associated with rural labourers’ experience of neoliberalism has been the feminization of agricultural labour. Feminization of labour as it is occurring globally has two interrelated meanings. Firstly, it refers to the increase in women’s employment in relation to men. Secondly, it refers to processes of casualisation, informalisation, and growing flexibility and insecurity of labour for both men and women which characterizes neoliberal globalization.

‘Feminisation’ of agricultural wage labour is a result of a combination of regionally diverse processes which in many regions began well before the 1990s. In paddy cultivating regions especially, women’s labour has always been the major basis of production. But the collapse of rural non-farm employment and the growing crisis in the agricultural sector is leading to massive long-term, long-distance migration by men from rural poor households in areas like Bihar and Eastern U.P. where earlier processes of feminisation had relatively little impact, leaving women to survive through agricultural wage labour. (Ironically, while diversification of earning opportunities for rural households in the 1970s and early 1980s was a cause of feminisation of agricultural labour as men moved out into other activities, the collapse of these opportunities along with other factors is today in many regions forcing men out of local rural economies altogether and thus further increasing feminization).

Women’s dependence on agricultural wage labour as a source of income has also increased with the destruction of many household based industries employing mainly women. According to a study based on NSSO unit-level data for 2004-05, 29.2% female rural workers were engaged as casual agricultural labourers in 2004-05, compared to 23.2% of male rural workers (Srivastava and Srivastava, 2010).

While rapid mechanisation has been attributed to the decline in labour supply in some regions, it has also been used to counter labour organising and successful demands for improved wages and conditions. For example, an investigation by AIPWA in Bihar found that in several areas where women had successfully fought for wage increases, employers had attempted to undermine these struggles by introducing harvesters, and by bringing in male workers from outside to do paddy transplanting (traditionally done by women) on a contract basis . Activists from Bhabhua district in Bihar reported that the employment available to women in transplanting and harvesting declined from one-and-a-half months to only 5-10 days in some villages during the last decade. However women were actively resisting these moves and demanding that where there are enough women to harvest, harvester combines should be prohibited. In places where employers who used harvesters subsequently tried to recruit women to do the weeding, they refused, telling them to invent machines to do the weeding too. In East Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh too, women labourers physically prevented harvesters from operating. Similar protests took place in Ghazipur and Chandauli districts of Eastern U.P. (See Liberation, February 2003)

Patriarchal ideologies and relationships legitimise the exploitation of women labourers. There is significant gender segmentation of operations in agriculture. While men predominate in activities such as ploughing and harvesting, women’s share is much higher in operations like weeding and transplanting for which wages are uniformly lower. Overall, women’s wages are estimated at 69% of male wages in 2004-05. Women also get fewer days of work: only an average of 184 days a year compared to an already low 227 for men agricultural labourers (Srivastava and Srivastava, 2010).

The National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector (NCEUS) has shown that more than 95% of female agricultural wage workers received wages lower than the minimum wage (NCEUS 2007). In Bihar, an AIPWA workshop in which women from 15 districts participated revealed that the wages for transplanting work have increased very slowly, and in 2003 remained less than half the official minimum wage for agricultural labour. ‘Even such increases had occurred only in areas where struggles have taken place. The only areas where men and women receive equal wages are those where wages are extremely low. Unequal wages are justified on the basis that women’s work is “less arduous” or women are “less efficient” even though this is evidently not the case’ (See Liberation, February 2003)

Gender and Agricultural Labourers’ Movements – some experiences from Bihar

Dalit women agricultural labourers in Bihar have been at the forefront of the movement being waged during the last three decades led by the CPI(ML). The movement is centred around demands for a living wage, land redistribution and an end to caste-based oppression – demands which strike at the roots of agrarian power in the region. Women labourers have played a central role in wage struggles, as the agricultural tasks carried out in the period of peak labour demand when wage demands are put forward are largely those performed by women. It has therefore frequently been women who have initially placed wage demands before employers, and subsequently collectively refused to work. Women have also led marches of thousands to physically occupy land for redistribution, and have been at the forefront of resistance and protest against the repression unleashed by the landowners and the police. It is women who, armed with bricks, small scythes or household utensils, have driven the police out of their villages when they have arrived heavily armed in midnight or dawn raids, or who have surrounded police jeeps and snatched back those arrested, even forcing the police to apologise in some instances.

In a context where larger landowners belonging to upper castes long considered sexual harassment and even rape of dalit women to be their birthright, the movement began in many areas with campaigns to bring local rapists to justice.
For many dalit women, the fact that they are now able to challenge these practices which symbolised and reinforced gender, caste and class power is the most important aspect of the movement. On numerous occasions women told me that the men from the higher caste landowning families who employ them to work in their fields used to sexually harass and abuse them, physically assault them if they missed a day’s work, or refuse to allow them to take breaks to drink water, telling them to drink the muddy water in the drainage canals, but now they no longer ‘dare’ to do these things.

The complex interaction between changes in ‘ways of thinking’ and perceived changes in the balance of social, economic and political power brought about through collective struggle was often expressed by dalit labourer women in terms of ‘fear’ and the way it had shifted: on the one hand, the landowners, though still powerful, now ‘feared’ to assault them, on the other, they described themselves as ‘no longer afraid’ – ‘we are even prepared to face bullets’.

But the decline in ‘everyday’ violence in the fields has been accompanied by the rise of organised terror. In the late 1990s, Landowner’s armies with links with the state and dominant political parties carried out a series of massacres of agricultural labourers in which women have been targeted for the most brutal violence (prefiguring the patterns of genocide in Gujarat in 2002 and the current corporate- and state-sponsored terror against people resisting displacement). Women leaders have been assassinated. The movement has struck at the roots of feudal and patriarchal power in the region, but clearly the battle is far from over.

These struggles also led women to openly challenge oppressive gender relations within the household. In many cases this has begun with conflict within the home over a woman’s participation in the movement, with her husband or in-laws attempting to prevent her from being involved. Women have organised collectively against domestic violence, men abandoning their wives, and the increasing incidence of dowry among poor dalit families. I discuss this further below.

Gender and Rural Labour in Neoliberal Discourses of Development

Since the 1990s there has been a significant shift in neoliberal development discourses. Faced with incontrovertible evidence of the destructive impact of neoliberal policies throughout the 1980s, institutions like the World Bank now focused attention on addressing ‘poverty’ in a way which not only did not question the neoliberal model, but which could further extend the gains of global capital. This has been variously known as the Post-Washington Consensus, the new poverty agenda, or the New Social Policy.

The key concepts within this agenda are ‘empowerment’ and ‘participation’ - in practice this is linked to preparing the poor for engagement with globalised markets; ‘targeting’ as an instrument in reducing extreme poverty - this represented a clear move away from any idea that poverty in general was to be tackled by meeting social needs; and ‘social risk management’ which entails developing the capacity of the poor capacity to ‘cope, mitigate or reduce’ their risks. Related to this is the principle of beneficiary responsibility variously articulated in ideas of ‘co-management/responsibility’, self-help or self-sufficiency. The growth of cost recovery, co-financing and co-management schemes along with community participation and voluntary work shifted the burden of responsibility onto poor households, and specifically poor women, and at the same time they were directly subordinated to the disciplines of the market in new ways (Molyneux, 2008).

In this context gender has become increasingly central to dominant discourses around development. Ideas of women’s empowerment and agency are increasingly being incorporated into discourses promoting neoliberal models of development in which a further intensification of poor women’s labour is expected to provide a buffer for their households against the ravages of neoliberal economic restructuring.

The construction of the poor woman as a ‘rational economic agent’ exercising choice is elaborated within the moral framework of neoliberalism which ascribes ‘responsibilities’ to the poor as a condition for the enjoyment of ‘rights’. It is emphasised that women work harder, and expend less resources on themselves (in terms of leisure time as well as consumption) than their male counterparts, and women’s access to the market and earnings will therefore have a far greater impact on children’s well-being. The fact that these differences in behaviour result from patriarchal relations of power, both material and ideological, is rarely acknowledged. Yet, as we will see, when women have engaged in collective struggles with a transformative agenda, it is often precisely those gendered inequalities which make women more ‘efficient’ neoliberal subjects, (such as women’s primary responsibility for children, the acute scarcity of time not spent working, and the ubiquitous threat of violence) which are challenged.

But in the absence of an analysis of patriarchy, the moralistic overtones of the development literature’s oft-cited contrasts between women’s ‘good’ spending (on food, children’s clothes etc) and men’s ‘bad’ spending (on alcohol, cigarettes, entertainment etc.) are distinct echoes of the Victorian discourse of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor (Wilson, 2008).
The instrumentalisation of poor women is perhaps epitomised by the World Bank’s current Gender Action Plan (2007-10) and its slogan ‘Gender Equality as Smart Economics’. But this represents a much wider consensus across development institutions, including the vast majority of non-governmental organisations. Central to this consensus has been the remarkable rise of microfinance models, with their emphasis on women as better borrowers as well as better providers, and a claim to be able to simultaneously resolve problems of poverty as well as gender inequality, even as they integrate women more deeply into global circuits of capital.

Thus, much of the responsibility for providing a ‘safety net’ against the ravages of the market and for ensuring household survival is placed on women in low income households. This implies further intensifying women’s labour.

The question of the lack of time and leisure is a particularly important one for women agricultural labourers, who work extremely long hours both in the fields and in the household. The right to leisure time has been central to struggles of labour everywhere, but like economic rights in general, it is ignored in neoliberal ‘rights based’ development discourse. The implications of the current neoliberal strategy of intensifying women’s economic contribution through micro-enterprise in particular, and increasing women’s labour force participation more generally, can be seen in terms of intensified violation of Article 24 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay’.

This assumption that the time of women in poor households is infinitely elastic, and can always incorporate more income generating activity has come to be taken for granted in development discourse and policy, even when the notion of a double or triple burden (of productive, reproductive and community labour) is acknowledged. For example a recent study of the conditions of women agricultural labourers in Orissa published by the state government, while noting that the women in the study worked for an average of 14-16 hours in the lean season, and more in the peak season, still insists that ‘leisure time’ income generating activities should be promoted among them, because currently leisure time is ‘sometimes non-productive’ involving ‘gossiping, sleeping, playing cards and watching TV’! (Mishra, 2009:8)

Gender, neoliberalism and micro-enterprise

The notion of micro-enterprise fits in very neatly with the ideology of neoliberalism – it is based on the idea of the individual entrepreneur who with the help of micro credit, becomes an owner of petty capital. The responsibility for the survival of the household then rests with the individual poor woman, not with the state. Further, relations of class solidarity are undermined: the goal of the micro-entrepreneur must be to move up hierarchies of wealth and resources, not to demolish them. Yet there is also a contradiction at the heart of the notion of the gendered entrepreneurial subject – who is also expected to be infinitely self-sacrificing and altruistic in relation to her family. The failure of micro-enterprise programmes to challenge unequal power relations has been highlighted in many conversations with women who have previously been involved in SHGs and micro-credit NGOs, before getting involved with revolutionary left-led movements.

A number of studies have looked critically at the functioning of these programmes and their impact on unequal gender relations, raising questions such as : Who controls the household expenditure of loans? How does micro-enterprise affect women’s work burdens? What is the impact of ‘feminisation of debt’? Are the poorest women excluded?

More recently, studies have highlighted that not only are existing gender relations often taken as given, but the strategies employed in microcredit programmes are actually based on the perpetuation of these unequal relations. For example, Lamia Karim explains how notions ‘shame and honour’ are treated as ‘collateral’ in ensuring loan repayments in Grameen Bank schemes in Bangladesh (Karim, 2008).

Similarly, in the Indian context of state-sponsored Self Help Groups (SHGs), a recent comprehensive study found this ‘underlying gender ideology’ to be embedded in the programmes, which ensure repayment by targeting women because: ‘women can be located easily…they cannot run away, leaving their homes; they can be persuaded to repay more easily as they feel shame more quickly and consider non-repayment a matter of family honour,’ (ADM, Sabarkantha, Gujarat, cited in Nirantar, 2007:95)

Most recently, the shocking spate of microfinance driven suicides of women in Andhra Pradesh has exposed these processes further, revealing the extent of coercion, as well as usury, which is facilitated by the microfinance model.

What these examples also highlight is that the intensification of rural poor women’s labour (and specifically this idea of women as ‘better’ borrowers) draws upon their lack of spatial mobility. Neoliberalism is based on the unfettered mobility of capital and the relative immobility of labour (this is expressed through tight controls on the movement of people such as immigration laws, but also through the discrimination and constraints which make it possible to exploit migrant workers more intensively). But mobility is also extremely gendered.

More broadly, micro-enterprise and SHGs are involved in the construction of the notion of a ‘new good woman’ who not only conforms fully to existing gender norms but also submits to the discipline and regulation of the market. Not surprisingly then , we can observe the growing phenomenon of corporates using SHGs to access raw materials and markets via the labour of the women in them – from Pepsi and Cadbury’s acquiring agricultural inputs in Kerala to healthcare corporate Apollo Hospitals in collaboration with ICICI bank and UK insurance giant Aviva promoting ‘telemedicine’ in Tamil Nadu and Bihar.

By contrast, in the context of rural labour movements, the struggles in which women have engaged have frequently been accompanied by a questioning of the precise complex of oppressive gender relations which supposedly make women more ‘efficient’ producers/workers and borrowers. The questions of both time and of spatial mobility were raised by women labourers in the context of these movements.

This has been the case for the struggles of landless dalit women agricultural labourers in Bihar. The oppressive domestic relations they began to challenge included the ever-present threat of violence, but also women’s primary responsibility for children’s welfare, and the absence of the time which men can devote to political activity. Savitri Devi, a woman labourer attending the Jehanabad District Kisan Sabha (Peasant Association) conference explained how all of these are linked while introducing a song entitled ‘give women respect in society’: “a woman gets up in the morning, she has to wash the utensils, wake the children, take them to the fields to relieve themselves, prepare the meal…the man just gets up, goes to relieve himself, comes back, and if the food isn’t ready, he’ll start hitting her…”.

Similarly, the experience of agricultural labourer women in Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu in India in a movement demanding that they be paid wages equal to those received by men (see Women’s Voice, January-February 2001) also illustrates the link between involvement in collective struggles and questioning of the notion of the endlessly self-sacrificing ‘efficient’ woman. In this context, a number of women whose family members opposed their participation in the movement actually left their homes and spent the nights in their union’s one-room office at the height of the struggle. While the women labourers were challenging patriarchal relations within the family, their landowner employers were attempting to utilise these relationships to break the strike, urging husbands and parents of the women labourers to put pressure on them to withdraw from the struggle, as otherwise they would be labelled as ‘bad’ women who moved around, neglected their domestic duties and were ‘out of control’.

In conclusion then, neoliberal discourses of development have appropriated and transformed notions of women’s ‘empowerment’ in order to legitimize the intensification of the exploitation of rural women labourers, in ways which actually reinforce, rather than transform existing unequal gender relations. But women involved in rural labour movements are continuing to resist this appropriation, challenging patriarchal relationships in the context of an agenda of revolutionary social transformation.

References

Karim, L., 2008, ‘Demystifying Micro-Credit: The Grameen Bank, NGOs and Neoliberalism in Bangladesh’, Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 20, No.1

Mishra, S., 2009, ‘Life of Women Agricultural Labourers in Orissa’, Orissa Review, December

Molyneux, M., 2008, ‘The “Neoliberal Turn” and the New Social Policy in Latin America: How Neoliberal, How New?’ Development and Change, Vol. 39, No.5

NCEUS, 2007, Conditions of Work and Promotion of Livelihoods in the Unorganised Sector’,National Commission for Enterprises in the Unorganised Sector, New Delhi

Nirantar, 2007, Examining Self Help Groups: Empowerment, Poverty Alleviation, Education – A Quantitative Study, Nirantar, A Centre for Gender and Education, New Delhi

Srivastava, N. and Srivastava R., 2010, ‘Women, Work and Employment Outcomes in Rural India, Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. XLV, No. 28, July 10

Wilson, K, 2008, ‘Reclaiming Agency, Reasserting Resistance’, IDS Bulletin, Vol. 39, No.6