Tape #303 - Women's Farm Work Counts

My name is Phoebe Jones Shellenberg and co-coordinator of the international Women Count Network in the United States. The Women Count Network now in 22 countries was formed in 1985 after final conference for the UN Decade for Women in Nairobi, Kenya in order to build the movement to get women's unwaged work in the home, on the land, and in the community counted in official statistics. That is, we want unwaged work, housework, child care, caring work of all kinds, volunteer work, as well as food production and work in family measured through time use surveys and other methods to see how much work women are actually doing. And we want unwaged work valued by having an economic value placed on that work. We want the value officially recognized in satellite accounts of the countries gross domestic product. Now some figures already exist, the international labor office produced a statistic that women do two-thirds of the worlds work for five percent of the income and own less than one percent of the land. The Human Development Report said that women's unwaged work is worth four trillion dollars to the world economy. The US Department of Commerce 1985 figures said that housework is worth 1.5 trillion dollars at that time that was one-third of the gross domestic product. The summit on economic advancement of rural women reported that rural women formed the backbone of the agricultural labor force across much of the non-industrialized world and produce an estimated 35-45 percent of GDP and well over half of its food. While women in Africa grow 80 percent of the food consumed on that continent. Yet more than a half a billion rural women are poor and lack access to resources and markets. Nowhere is the work officially recognized and nowhere is this work even officially happening. Even where farm work is supposed to included in the statistics, according to the revised system of national accounts they're supposed to be counting food that produced on the farm both for personal consumption and for sale, but the enterprises are so small they don't bother to count them. Even though the aggregate is 80 percent of the food in some continents.

So coming into the 4th World Conference on Women in China, we had gathered over 700 non-governmental organizations endorsements. In the first two weeks, Beijing conference we doubled that. So we had 1,400 non-governmental organizations representing millions of women and men from around the world supporting this issue. It was one of the largest demonstrations of support on any issue in Beijing. And really cut across a devise from which ever country we're in. One of those groups was Associated Country Women of the World with its 7 million members and had made this issue one of it's platforms. So, with such support, and by consorted pressure we were able to get from governments a firm commitment in the platform for action, which was the document that came out of Beijing, to measure and value unwaged work in official statistics including measuring those tasks that are done simultaneously and to provide resources to non-industrialized countries to do this. Since Beijing, two countries have passed legislation to implement this decision, Spain and Trinidad and Tobago, Trinidad and Tobago was first in fact. And the US is undertaking consultations through the Departments of Labor and Commerce. The European Union has begun a time use survey. And Canada has been pressing ahead with its methodologies. Now the issue of counting simultaneous activities is very important now, because as their starting to count women's work, how they do it becomes critical. And what we've been finding is that, when they measure unwaged work, and they usually do this by handing out diaries or the format to a sample population and women mark down what they do at each given time. However, they only allow you to put down one thing at a time. And any women is doing three, four, five, your on the phone with your mother who is in the nursing home, your watching the food, the kid is running around, and they put down one thing. And there's a researcher who just published it, I'm from Philadelphia, and it was in the Philadelphia Inquirer front page news, "Women have more leisure time than we think", and you go what? And you look at this thing and he reports, I actually got the book to find out how could somebody be saying this, and I looked at the research, and his data shows that women are doing one-hour of child care a day, one-hour a day, are you crazy, how can any self-respecting anybody report such things. But that's because if your watching TV and your watching the child, the TV is counting but not the child.

What impact will the decision the measure and value unwaged work have on women generally and on rural women or women doing farm work in particular. First it shows how people are actually spending our time which happens to be our life. For the first time we get an accurate picture of everyone's reality. The human development report produced by the United Nations Development Program, reports that estimates of the world-wide economic output are off by 70 percent because their not including unwaged work. And I must say we've been absolutely swamped at our table, we've almost run out of Every Mother is a Working Mother t-shirt, we have run out of Every Mother is a Working Mother buttons, we have ordered some more, hopefully they will be coming today. And I think it just really shows how desperate we are to have our work recognized and to have this brought out. Second, counting the work exposes the impact on women's work load of cut-backs and other policies. Structural adjustment programs in non-industrialized countries. Structural adjustment programs are programs imposed on countries by the World Bank and The International Monetary Fund that make as a condition of loan force countries to cut-back essential social services in order to pay back the debt. So health care is being cut, education is being cut, you know, any of the social services are cutting. And whose picking up the slack, it's women. If the hospitals close down, it's women who are taking care of the sick people. And that's not just happening in non-industrialized countries, that's happening here too in the United States, and in other countries. With the health care crisis and closing down of hospitals. There was an article in the New York Times just a couple of weeks ago that women are doing all of these complicated medical procedures at home. You know with the Intravenous feedings and the lung machines and all these things are were formerly done in the hospital or with a paid nurse coming in, that women are now picking up for free. And I think the health care work particularly among rural women where there aren't immediate health services is a huge part of our work load. And its compounded by pesticides and poisonings, its compounded by depression and suicide. A study in the United Kingdom said that one farmer a day commit suicide. In the United States there's been a lot of studies showing on the closing of the family farms, the depression that results, women not only trying to save the farms but also dealing with the crisis in their families lives. A women yesterday from Strevlanka was reporting on how the men who get in debt, by the borrowing in order to pay for the pesticides and other loans, have actually been themselves drinking the pesticides to end their lives, because they in such a bag. Caring for older people, caring for people with disabilities, caring for people who get injured in the work, with the big equipment and so forth, is a big concern of women. Of course, women are also the ones to deal with safety concerns in trying to make the farm safe in the first place, and have the kids not get under foot. My cousin has a small farm in Vermont, and his dog lost a leg, you know getting to close to the machine. Yes, it's dangerous work. And women are the ones who are dealing with the safety and the health. And dealing also with rape and domestic violence, for ourselves, our friends, neighbors, there's been an increase in the volunteer work as more and more hospitals, schools, churches are relying on volunteer work in order for those institutions to survive. Trade agreements, such as NAFTA closing down businesses in the rural areas in the US. Free trade in the European Union has meant that Britain which formerly was buying bananas from the West Indies and there were protections in place. Now with the European Union free trade agreement, they are forbidden from buying from the West Indian banana growers and are forced to buy the cheapest banana available, which happens to be in countries where there are military dictatorships, where guns, and violence, and repression are what's keeping the prices down.

The development of Agri-business, 15 million acres, a women was up at the United Nations giving a report on conditions in the south of the United States. Fifteen million acres of family farms are now down to 2.5 million acres and their losing a thousand acres a day. Black farmers own less one percent when they used to own 14 percent of the farms. The independence of the farmer from working for employers is ending, it's going quickly in this country. Anybody here from West Virginia can help me out here. Every single farm had a big Wampler sign. Every single one. The whole movement of farmers to work for themselves is over. These farmers were all working for another company. Which was dictating what they produce, how they produce it, which pesticides, which chemicals etc. And I think mechanization of the farms has really resulted in a torture of animals that did not exist when their was a relationship with the animals when the independent farmer was running the show. And it really makes you question, on whose behalf is this economy? We're all much more aware of our connections, with the land, with each other, with the animals, and those relationships are really being broken down by this globalization of the economy. In many parts of the United States, residential developments, urban sprawl are taking the family farms. The majority of people in this country on welfare are in rural areas. And welfare reform has been replaced with welfare-to-work schemes which frankly, in rural areas especially with NAFTA closing down the businesses that were in rural areas, welfare-to-work is a bit of an unfunny joke. Welfare-to-what-work? There is no waged work in many rural areas in the United States. There was another article in the Wall Street Journal, black farmers have instituted a law suit against the USDA, which a women here was just telling me, the Department of Justice said, the statute of limitations had run out. But they were issued a law suit because they weren't getting the same credit as other farmers were getting for crop disaster and loan. And also the refusal to in investment in piped water and available sustainable fuels, which mean in many parts of the country and the world, women are spending four hours a day fetching fuel and water. And on US reservations women are having to drive fifteen miles in order to get fresh water. Now the results of these developments have meant that women, and men, and children are working even harder. Yet it's hidden, because women's work is not counted. We're the hidden adjusters.

Third, by highlighting our contribution, we make a case for the resources which are denied us, particularly in the rural area, resources such as piped water, clean water, sustainable fuels and development, land rights, inheritance rights, social security, better treatment in the courts, pay equity, no poison foods, no pesticides, paid maternity leave, health insurance, sick leave, compensation for rape or violence, solar cookers, pensions, welfare or family allowance, or even wages for housework, there is a number of us that international women counting network is coordinated by the wages for housework campaign, women counting network is just for measuring and valuing, but many of us in it also want to see things back for that work.

And want to make a case for the kind of relationships that we want to have with each another. Fourth, we highlight what we have in common with other women from very different circumstances, and to cross the divisions among us, by race, nationality, age, religion, disability, whether we're from a rural or urban area, marital status, sexual preference, by whether we're a producer of food or consumer of food. And this conflict came up yesterday at our workshop on organic farming, one of the farmers was saying we have a right to demand high prices for the organic food, we're worth it, we deserve it. Which is true. But it also means that most of us are not in a position to be able to afford that food. And so there's almost a two tier level of food production. One, as one women put it, for the yuppies who can afford it. So, that her produce from Vermont was being shipped down to New York. And whereas, the people in the local area couldn't afford the food. So we can't be pitted against each other. We want to be able to make a case for the resources that we've all entitled for the work that we have all been doing. And open the way for more resources for everyone, so that we're not at each others throat and where society is investing in the care and feeding of people and not just the production of things for profit. I think that that's what this movement about counting women's work is about. It's a movement about life and valuing of people. It's making a claim on the resources that in most countries are going toward military budget. And death. This is a movement about life.

Now while I painted a bleak picture, but unfortunately a true one, the movement to count the work is really the positive side, because by valuing our work, we value ourselves, our communities, our families, and our lives, and we want to determine ourselves how our time is spent. Whether that means spending more time with our families, or less time with our families, we're the ones who want to determine how to spend our time. And that's something that the independent farmer has always aimed at. But I think each of us, the farmer in particular, is ghetto-ized and segregated from other people and we're all in our own ghettos. There's divisions among us, and there's divisions among farmers, between farm workers, migrant workers, women and men who own the farm. Which is not always easy to deal with, but I think that the way that we can deal with them, is first of all, see how what we have in common, which counting unwage work does, cause we see how much we share, and the rest we can figure out and be negotiated. Counting unwage work breaks us out of the ghettos, and not to leave the power of our communities but to leave the weakness of the isolation of our communities. And that's what this world-wide movement is all about. And I think it's really a movement for the new millennium, which is not just a change in calendar or a change in the clocks, or the computers, but actually a change in the way that we think, and a change in our expectations in what kind of life we want to have. And I think people are expecting more. And I don't mean just things, but I mean a fuller life. And I think that begins with a critique of the life as we're living it now, counting unwaged work would be essential to that.

I wanted to stop there. Say a couple more things. We can go into methodology. How their counting it, how their valuing it, how their measuring it. We can go into other things too in the discussion. I did want to say, I think we passed around an endorsement form. It's very critical now that group, especially rural women groups be in on this count, the counts going ahead, rural women's work is one of the most undercounted part of that, and I think that we all need to be pulling together, at the 1999 Commission on the Status of Women in New York which is the body that is geared towards implementing the platform for action their going to be discussing this issue. We really welcome people's input into that, and we'll be going up. Talk with us, if your interested in going up there and making governments be aware of this. We have an excellent publication called the "Global Kitchen" which hopefully has arrived by express mail now, since we sold out of it yesterday. But it makes the international case all over the world for why women want the work counted. I think I'll stop there. Should we hear from Barbara first and than open it up for discussion.

Women do two-thirds of the world's work, for five percent of the world's income and own less than one percent of the land.

Rural women? No all women.

Women do two-thirds of the world's work, for five percent of the world's income and own less than one percent of the land.

I'm doing a Ph.D. on women in the sugar industry. And what I was interested in as I thought about this conference, I was reflecting on what changes have happened in Women in Agriculture in Australia since 1994, and I thought there had been significant advances, and I started thinking about why, and what had happened in Australia, and there are three basic groups that I could identify, and I've left industry out. But I looked at how in Australia academic women, and bureaucrats, and grass-roots women have worked together. And than I started thinking about some of the difficulties that we had talking to each other some of the times. The Bureaucrats talking to grass-roots women or academics, if you just look at the bureaucrats to start with, Australia has had a very strong tradition of having the state involved in women's movements. I think Australia coined the term "femocrats." You know feminists and the bureaucracy. But these women were urban based. And they use the language and have a way of talking, as you know people in the public sector, I'm sure all over the world about performance indicators and efficiencies and things like that. So, I spent time at looking at the sort of documents about rural women and women in agriculture and than I had a look about how the rural women are talking about themselves. One that a lot of them don't have a lot of patience with prices, they want to be tops, they want to get things done. I suppose families are very important to them, they want an agenda for women, but they don't identify with feminism, as a whole, more broadly. And than I had a look at what the academics had been saying and doing in terms of women in agriculture in Australia, and basically academics were very solid until the early 1990's. I went back and had a look through women's studies, journals, and different journals, there had been very, very little in women in agriculture. But the ones who had been starting to write, the one thing that I could identify about them were that they identified themselves as feminists. Which you can start to see some of the conflicts that things start to emerge if there rural women have stood back from feminism, a lot of them are urban based, and they have problems with that too as well. So, all of those three groups. And than I suppose that for me, when I went through these prices, as someone starting as working in a university as an academic I think that what women like myself have to do, if we're going to work better with rural women and women in bureaucracy I think we need to take an interest, and the fact that no academics writing as interested in feminism, writing about everything, but agricultural women have not been a big topic interest, until very recently.

The other thing is that I think that academic women as myself, I am a feminist, I think we need to be very inclusive of women who don't identify with that. And I think that academic women have sometimes not recognized, feminist have been accused and very rightly accused of talking as if there's this universal sort of woman and actually we're being criticized in Australia by indigenous women by speaking on their behalf and excluding them. And I think that feminist have probably excluded rural women and not recognized the importance of the family to them and how that works with the family farm. So, I think that that's the other thing that feminists need to do. The other thing I think academics need to do is look at how they write and the writing they do. The other thing that I started looking intensively the academic writing is being done on rural women. Especially in these times where there’s all these interesting theoretical and post-monodies and post-structuralism. It's not a language that's accessible to people. And, for me, if not's excessible to people, it's not useful. I think that's what the message is to me. I think that we spend a lot of time thinking about our differences, and I think that we could spend more time thinking about our similarities. Because every time a rural women has experienced her work not being valued, you could have an experience of a women in academia who has had an experience of her work not being valued because she's writing about women, or she's doing something in sociology, or something soft. And you could have an experience with someone in the beaurocracy whose had her work not valued because she's just doing that women's stuff or something. So I think that we have got some commonalities there and I think that the other commonalities of course, the commitment of getting a profile for women in agriculture.

Open up the floor for discussion

Question: I'm very interested in finding out your strategy and perhaps a formula that I can actually take back to my community so families can sit down and find out the value of the farm women’ role. And I think here in the United States we maybe have some help from extension, perhaps maybe you know do they have any literature that might contribute to this.

Answer: The question was what tools can people take back with them, and also what work has been done on it. I can give you some materials you can use. There's been a number of evaluations that have been done, there was one listed in Mothering Magazine, this was the work of mothers, not of rural women, per se, and we're coming up with that the work is worth $50,000 to $60,000 a year. And all the figures that have happened have been really quite high, and that's also with also an underestimation of the work. There are lists like that that we could get available to you. I spoke a year or two ago at the convention of the Family and Community Education (FCE) which is a rural women's association in the United States and they had done in their work an extensive listing of the volunteer work, they had it all over their publication, so they always listed what volunteer work had gone into their organization. And I learned from that for our organization because we really tend to undervalue ourselves in all the volunteer work that we're doing for our communities. And they had some formulas on that, that I can get you. But I think as I said the methologies now, and I'll just say one word on the valuations. First just to make sure that everything is clear, first the measurement is the time you survey, than they do the valuations, they assign a value to it. One of the most common ways of doing that, is that they break down the task that the women are doing, say your cooking, your chauffeuring, your doing the laundry, than they look at how much that is worth in the market place and apply it to the job there. So, your spending an hour a day driving, they take a chauffeur's wages... they have you doing the cooking, the nursing. The problem with that method is that their using women's low wages in order to value unwaged work. The connection between the unwage and the low wage is very close, first of all because much of the work we do for wages is very similar to the housework kind of things, the nursing, teaching, the caring kind of work. So, if it's not valued in the home is low waged outside of the home. We have used this counting unwage work to actually win one of the largest pay equity settlements in the United States, because what we did, it was a situation in Southern California, where the utility workers were evaluating the clerical work and what we did was, we got the company to agree to do use a method where they broke down into tasks, everything that the women were doing. Not just broad classifications, but looked at everything. And when they looked at it very closely, they realized that women were doing management work, because they were managing tensions in the office, they were managing irate callers, you know, my gosh its been turned off, often translation, and when they added up all the points it equaled the same as the men that went out and turned on the gas, but the pay differential was 13 to 28 percent and they had agreed that they would match it so the increase was 13 to 28 percent. That's a major increase, cause most pay equity settlements you measure at around one percent. But it was actually by breaking down the task. This sort of point system, where you look at how many skills are involved, how many things are you doing at the same time, what's the stress level and if you put points on that kind of thing, you get a much more accurate picture. And that's the method that we've been trying to put forward. The cost of a meal. You know how much would a meal cost... The product and the time are very important things to measure, because it brings out how much harder a women say, in a non-industrialized country has to work in order to produce the same thing as somebody in this country for example. If you have to go fetch water before you cook the rice, that is very important for that that time and the product both be measured. And as for the extension of services, what their doing, I don't know, but I'm hoping that the Department of Agriculture will get in with the Department of Labor and Commerce in order to fund these timing surveys that their starting to do in this country. I know that they've done something in the past on it but I think they need to get involved into this new wave of it.

Statement: I would want to get on the Network in St. Lucia on that. This particular work is critical in terms of international stress that we all face. And if we can get handle in terms of recognizing and bring forward the unpaid work of women, particularly in agricultural and rural development, I think it's going to be fundamental in terms of reshaping the thinking as far as how we move forward, not only in agriculture, but in other industries generally, because when in our country for instance, we turn and see, well tourism is now the leading sector, I crunch, because my concern is that we measure it in chid-a-pee, and chid-a-pee is skewed in terms of not recognizing the work, the true work, the real work done in agriculture because of the formulas that we use and the instruments that we use. And I am dedicated to trying to see if we could really focus that in terms of getting instructions to really measure the real work that people do. Might not be able to pay everybody, the pay is a questionable thing. But the recognition of the work is what we need to bring forward and solicit. While we have tourism for a billion more dollars, the real contribution of agriculture is X, Y, & Z and without it we can't really move forward in anything that we do. So we need get the statistics right as far as what exactly is happening. So I am committed and I would like to get onto the Network to get some of the solutions on that.

Question: My name is Sue Brumby, I am beef and farm wool-producer from West Victoria in Australia. My question was about your census I understand that in America that both people can't put down together that they work on the farm together, and I wondered if you could only have one sole worker on your property for your census and I wondered what you were doing about that.

Answer: I know that their re-looking at the census questions, partly because Canada, our neighbor to the north, has for the first time put in, ask questions about the work you do at home and also from the rural land. And some women from Canada were telling me that in this census they were still underestimating farm work, because they connected it to whether you owned your farm. So the same inequalities were still coming out. But they felt that a start had been made. But to keep working on it and improve it in the next census. I don't know much about the census here. I'm interesting in knowing more and what can be done about it. The US census does not ask questions about work at home or any of the work, and there's a real confusion, I think, between what's housework and what's rural work, the growing and the harvesting and the processing of the food is rural work but the cooking of it is housework, the divisions are very almost artificial in many ways and I think the connection between housework counting and rural counting is very important.

Question: Jennifer McKinnon and I'm with the Farm Women's Bureau at Agriculture and Agrifood Canada. And just to provide a little bit of clarification from the little I know about our Canadian census system, there has been some move in the latest general census to count some of the unpaid work that women do. And I'm not sure if that's just the last one or the last two surveys but the agricultural census....[skips some of tape]. Part of the reason that the question isn't whether you owned is but, people were allowed to identify more than one operator for a farm for the first time in 1991 which helped identify when there were women as the second operator of farm as well as the primary operator, so that's one of big differences that let us break out the gender based analysis a little bit, but there is also a labor analysis involved that is in another part of the agricultural census where it does break down by gender the laborers on the farm, not just the owners, but you have to dig a little bit further to find that.

Question: My name is Shirley Danskin White and I'm from Iowa. And I just wanted to share a couple things about work and the worth of work. It was about twelve years ago, in Iowa in state government where we have a couple of very forward looking women legislators who put through a bill that put into place comp-worth for state government workers and we had to go through this exercise because I worked for state government at that time, which we all groaned about, but we found out later, that it was very important and they had measurements and so forth that academics helped us with as well as Department of Personnel and found out that there were women who were working as secretaries and clerical positions, and so forth, that were underpaid, and there were people who were working in cleaning and so forth who were overpaid, and they had to adjust their pay. And some peoples pay went up and some peoples pay went down and so forth. But it did have a big impact. And something like that has continued to follow through when people wanted their pay adjusted or they wanted a new title so they'd earn some more money. Another thing that was passed in the legislature about 20 years ago, was divorce law, this so happened a lot with farm women, say there was a wife and several children, well if say there was no will made out, the wife would only receive 1/3 of the inheritance, whereas the other children or even one child would receive two-thirds. That was automatically the way it was. And that was changed. Also in our divorce laws if you were a stay at home wife and mother and you went through a divorce, the work that you did at home in raising the family, all the things that were involved in that, you received half of the assets. Another thing that they've done in Iowa, in participating in going into leadership roles, is that they for a long time, almost thirty years, they've had in place where you have to have a political balance of state appointed committees and commissions and so forth, and than about ten years ago they passed a law where you have to have a gender balance as well. As so that has brought in to state government on some commissions, women have had an opportunity to serve who would have never had that opportunity to serve before and than have gone on to other leadership positions.