December 8, 2014 - 09:38
One aspect of this film that shocked me was the fact that women’s work in the home, the work that sustains life for an entire nation and raises the workers of the future, is not counted in the UNSNA. However, the income created by child sex slavery IS counted, because it brings outside money into the national economy. This statistic to me is exemplary of the blatant disregard and invisibility of women’s domestic work and one of the many severe costs this invisibility has. I wonder where else in the world this pattern exists (sex slavery valued over work in/near the home), because I’m almost certain it is not exclusive to the Philippines.
I thought a different example of illogical economics in action was the idea that sustaining one’s family is not economically effective (or just unvalued). For example, when the two Maori women from New Zealand described their local practice of gathering shellfish for their families to feed them, Waring comments that their work is not seen as productive to the economy. Only if they were to go to the market and purchase the same shellfish from the market would their consumption be valued. This makes no sense to me — why wouldn’t these women’s work be constructive? It’s sustainable (they only take what they need and preserve the animals that take a long time to reproduce, like oysters), it feeds their families which in turn places more working hands in the economy, it is more cost effective than the entire process of someone else collecting, transporting and selling the goods, the list goes on.
Waring does an excellent job at her crash course in the nonsensical, detached nature of economics and the great negative impact it can have on global and local health. I never knew and never tried to know how the economy functioned, but when Waring said that the rules were in a bunch of books in a library in Washington I almost laughed. Then I realized it wasn’t a joke… Why have people accepted our damaging system of economics for so long? Aren’t the growing levels of global poverty indicative enough that the system isn’t working? Or is it just seen as an inevitable side effect of the way things “just are”? Are the people running the global economy even seeing the effects of the relentless consumerism we’ve grown to embody? Are WE running the economy? What is anybody even gaining from this whole system?? It doesn’t seem worth it, yet we justify it on a daily basis with our consumption, complacency, and life practices in general.
It seems to me that women and children are getting the brunt of this mangled, confounding economic framework. Is that why I feel like nothing will change? Because women and children have been overlooked for so long in the history of the world?