By the beginning of the 1970s, particularly after the oil-shock (1972), it became clear that the independent development of "underdeveloped" countries had not happened. At the same time the leading economies of the World, and the Transnational Corporations (TNCs) were confronted with high wage demands from workers and a flood of petrodollars which they could not profitably invest in their countries. The solution was a restructuring of the international division of labour. in the old IDL the colonies had been used as sources of raw material which then was manufactured into commodities in the metropolis. Now the TNCs of the USA, of Europe and Japan relocated whole factories to so-called cheap labour countries, particularly to South-East-Asia, to Mexico, later also to Tunisia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and other poor countries. The relocated firms were all firms with a very high percentage of female workers. The industries which were first relocated were: electronics, textiles and garments, toys and plastics. This transfer was made possible by special concessions which the host countries gave to these companies. These included relaxation of labour laws, exemption from import-export tariffs, tax holiday, lax environmental laws, prohibition of strikes etc. The relocated production units were established in special areas, called Free Productions Zones (FPZs), World Market Factories (WMFs) or Export Production Zones (EPZs) because the production was not for a home market but for the consumers in the North. The TNCs chose these countries as sites for their relocated global factories because of the great differences of labour costs. In 1994 a production worker in Germany earned $ 25 per hour, a worker in the USA $ 16, in Poland $1.40, in Mexico $2.40, in India, China and Indonesia $ 0,50 (Wood all: 1994).

The reason for these low labour costs in the Third World is not only the fact that these countries are generally poor and have a large pool of unemployed, but also that by far the majority of workers in the Global Factories are young, unmarried women. One of the main reasons for hiring young women is the housewife-ideology and the skills they have already acquired for housework: they know sewing and knitting. They are supposed to have "nimble fingers" and to be "docile". Moreover, when they get married and have children many either leave the job or they are fired. It is the housewife-ideology due to which women's wage is seen only as a supplement to the man's wage. As most of these women come from impoverished rural or urban households, they accept appalling working conditions with working time up to 12 hours, an inhuman work speed, sexual harassment, practically coerced labour discipline, safety and health risks which would not be permitted in Northern countries (Mies: 1991).

The last stage of global restructuring began with the recession around 1990. It is characterized by an unprecedented penetration of all regions of the globe and all areas of life by the logic and practice of capital accumulation, epitomized as global Free Trade.

In this stage, most changes brought about earlier in the restructuring of the world economy are continued, but there are quantitative and qualitative differences. Thus, the system of relocating manufacturing industries into low-wage-countries is vastly expanded and includes today not only practically all poor countries of the world, but also the whole of the economically bankrupt Eastern-European countries and also China. The closing down of labour intensive, environmentally polluting plants and their relocation to cheap labour countries has now also affected other industrial branches in the rich countries like the steel industry, coal mining, ship and car production, etc. It has led to massive layoffs of skilled workers, mainly male, in Europe and the USA. Moreover, when due to workers' protests wages rise in one of the cheap labour countries, the companies move to other countries which are even cheaper, for example from South Korea to Bangladesh (Elision: 1994).

The process of restructuring the global economy into the direction of ever more export-led industrialization, also in the South and East, is driven by the big TNCs. In their hands more and more capital and power are concentrated.

This neo-colonial structure of the global economy is politically and ideologically upheld by a few global institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (lMF) and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), today the World Trade Organization (WTO).

GATT is an agreement by which trade barriers, which countries have set up to protect certain areas of their economy and society, must be removed, and they have to open their markets to goods from all over the world. This new free trade policy assumes that all trading partners are equal, and that by using the principle of "comparative advantages", all trading partners would benefit. But in practice the weaker partners, above all Third World countries, will be forced to accept regulations which threaten their national sovereignty. They have to make their agricultural sector dependent on the TNCs and have to abandon their policy of food self-sufficiency. They have to allow Northern firms to set up their "dirty" industries in their territory. They have to open themselves up to Northern banks and insurance companies and above all, through the GATT clause on Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRlPs), allow foreign companies and scientists as patent-holders to privatize, monopolize and commercialize their biological and cultural heritage and common property.

But also in the North biotechnology, the genetic manipulation of plants, animals and eventually also of human beings will have detrimental consequences. As most consumers in the North depend already now on the TNCs for their food, they will lose the freedom to choose food which is not manipulated. As biotechnology is seen as the growth industry, ethical considerations are more and more pushed aside. In these processes women and their capacity to generate new human life are of strategic importance. Reproductive technology is being expanded all over the globe. It opens the way for eugenic, racist and sexist manipulations, and treats women's bodies increasingly as reservoirs of biological raw-material for scientific experiments and bio-industry.

Another consequence of globalization is an increasing polarization of the rich and the poor in the South. One reason for this are the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) which are imposed on indebted Third World countries in order to bring their economies under the discipline of the "free marker". These SAPs have had disastrous consequences, particularly for poor women. Whereas in the second phase of globalization the poor could still hope that the state would eventually take care of them, this illusion is now no longer possible. The poor and particularly poor women are virtually left to fend for themselves to survive or to die They are practically expendable, both as producers and consumers. That is the reason why poor women are the main target of population control.

On the other hand the new global restructuring has improved the situation of the elites in the Third World, so much so that their life-style is more or less similar to that of the middle classes in the North (Mies/Shiva: 1993, Sklair: l994). In fact the fastest growing economies are today some of the Newly Industrializing Countries in Asia (NlCs) like Thailand, Indonesia and also China and India. Their middle classes are keen to buy western produced consumer goods and, according to an analysis by Pam Woodall, they are helping "to pull the rich world out of the recession of the early 1990s". According to an estimate of the OECD the consumers in India, China and Indonesia would make up 700 Million people by 2010 (Woodall: 1993, 13). But the author argues that the gap between these elite consumers and the poor in their countries will further widen.

A similar situation can also be observed in the North. Not only has the relocation of industries to the Third World led to increased unemployment, wage loss and poverty in the USA and Europe, but also the strategies to "solve" this crisis are similar the those applied so far only in the Third World. This means deregulation and flexibilization of labour: "housewifization" and informalization of hitherto formal labour relations, an increase of home working, are the main methods. The creation of a cheap labour sector within a country, particularly for women, the gradual dismantling of the welfare state, the elimination of subsidies, particularly for peasants, follow the same pattern as SAPs in the Third World. Due to all these measures poverty has returned to the rich countries of the North, and, it is mainly female poverty. Also in the North the polarization between the poor and the rich is increasing. The global restructuring has not brought, as its spokespeople maintain, more wealth and happiness and development to all; on the contrary, the global capitalist economy can only grow as long as it maintains and recreates inequality between and within the respective countries. This was clearly spelt out by Pam Woodall:

The benefits of international trade come from allowing countries to exploit their comparative advantage, not from requiring them to be identical. And much of the Third World’s comparative advantage lies, in one way or another, in the fact of its poverty, in particular, cheap labour and a greater tolerance of pollution." (Woodall 1994:42)

The polarization and contradictions inherent in the economic model of capital accumulation are not only found between economy and ecology, capital and labour, men and women but affect all spheres of life, particularly the work-sphere as such in the introductory paper sent to the participants of this meeting I read:

The contradiction in the assumption that GNP growth as measured conventionally is required to overcome unemployment and poverty even though it is not environmentally or socially sustainable in itself, forces a rethinking of the values which underpin production, consumption, and the tone of work."

Before we come to the issue of new values it is useful to reconsider the contradiction which exists today between work and employment. Generally it is assumed that work under capitalist conditions is identical to employment, i. e. gainful employment or work for a salary or a wage. It is further assumed that without such employment people cannot survive, as employment gives them the money to buy their necessary livelihood. As was said before, only the labour spent in such gainful employment is counted as contributing to the GNP. And, according to Adam Smith and Karl Marx, only such labour is considered "productive".

Since the late seventies, however, feminists have shown that such "productive" labour would not even exist, were it not for the so-called "non-productive" unpaid work of women in the household.

All this work was/is not only exploited freely, without any labour laws, it is excluded from the GNP, but it is also not considered when people talk of a labour market. Because only employment, work for a wage, has entered the labour market, which as Polanyi has shown, had to be created by state intervention in the 19th century.

A second feature of the relationship between work and employment is that due to the specific functioning of the capitalist production system, costly employment will increasingly be replaced by machinery, hence ending in unemployment. At the same time, unpaid work will not diminish, it will rather increase. What was said before about capital going to cheap labour areas is very relevant here. The cheapness of such labour is due to the fact that a lot of work done in those areas is still - or again - some sort of subsistence work.

We can thus conclude, that looked at from a global and feminist perspective the dynamics between work and employment is such, that while employment shrinks, work (as unpaid work) increases. Here we can again observe a structural polarization. But at the same time employment is seen as the only source of people's livelihood. To create new employment is considered as the main goal. And, although it has become crystal clear by now, that full-employment for all is not even possible any longer in the affluent countries, let alone in the poor countries, policy makers still continue to talk of employment generation as the only solution to the social crisis.

We can often hear these days that an ecological re-structuring of industrial society would solve both the environmental and the social crisis, because it would create more employment This argument ignores, in my view, the dynamics of the capitalist industrialist system which necessarily has to produce commodities for an anonymous market. If we insist on true social and ecological sustainability and on non-exploitative and non-oppressive gender-relations, then not all work necessary for the production of life and for the healing of the environment can become wage labour or employment A large part of that work will have to be done by men and women as free work.

A third point: This unpaid or low paid work (mainly that of women) continues to be the base upon which employment can be organized. Particularly in times of ecological and economic crisis this work becomes more and more important. This is the reason why women in the context of the UNCED have often been referred to as the saviours of the environment.

The contradiction mentioned above between ecological and social sustainability and unemployment and poverty cannot be resolved, in my view, unless the contradiction between work and employment is being resolved. Because if one would try to resolve the first contradiction without the second, this would mean that more (female) unpaid work would have to be mobilized than ever before, both in the South and the North to uphold gainful employment for a labour aristocracy and wages like those of German skilled male workers. But such wages would never be generalizable globally and across the sexes.