Impactos de la crisis en las mujeres trabajadoras de las regiones de la Europa meridional. El caso de Andalucía

Resumen:Este artículo analiza cómo la crisis junto con las medidas de austeridad y de ajuste estructural están transformando las condiciones de vida y trabajo de las mujeres, las estrategias familiares y las relaciones de género en las regiones de la Europa meridional, concretamente en Andalucía. A partir del análisis estadístico y la realización de entrevistas a 66 mujeres empleadas en ocupaciones no cualificadas de sectores de bajos salarios se profundiza en los desafíos que enfrentan las mujeres trabajadoras con la crisis y las políticas de austeridad.Abstract: An emerging body of research about the impact of the recession and austerity on women recognized but did not examine the potential different impact of the crisis and austerity reforms on different groups of women, particularly how it affected the labour supply, employment attachment, patterns and experience of low educated women (e.g. Bettio et al., 2013; Karamessini and Rubery, 2014). Yet this is an important question. The policy responses at the European and national level consisted mostly of measures to cut public spending and to increase labour market flexibility, targeting welfare programmes, public sector employment and pay, employment protection legislation and wage setting institutions. Low educated women are more vulnerable to job insecurity and low pay, and on the other hand their employment participation is more likely to be influenced by welfare measures supportive of female employment and so more likely to be affected if these change. This paper focuses on the impact of the crisis and the associated austerity measures on the patterns and quality of employment of women, and how the crisis and changes to employment regulation and welfare provision affected the employment and living conditions of women, the family arrangements and gender relations in Southern European regions, using Andalucia as a case study. To this end, a systematic review of the reforms implemented is discussed, together with their macro-level impact, through an analysis of secondary sources and official statistical data. Statistical data used in the analysis includes data on GDP, employment and working conditions from Spanish Regional Accounts, Spanish Labour Force Survey, Quarterly Labour Cost Survey and statistics on Collective Agreements; data on formal and informal care are from the Statistics on Income and Living Conditions; data on attitudes are taken from the European Social Survey, and the last Eurobarometer special report on gender equality. At the micro level, in order to understand the kind of pressures and challenges created by the crisis and the austerity reforms, interviews were conducted with 66 low educated women employed. The findings reveal great precariousness, insecurity and adverse changes experienced during the crisis, in spite of a strong added worker effect of women increasing their labour market participation in response to male unemployment. Women joined the labour market as men lost jobs but faced increasing barriers to securing employment. The evidence suggests that low educated women met even greater difficulties in accessing, maintaining and re-entering employment. Reforms in employment regulation and collective bargaining seemed to strongly affect the interviewees, who reported poor labour practices and employer unilateralism. Legal changes that increased firms’ discretion to change workers’ tasks, location and schedules led to a growth of precarious work and to employers’ abusing part-time work contracts to reduce costs by replacing full-time workers with part-timers paid at lower rates and by pressuring part-timers to work longer unpaid hours (Rocha, 2014). Legal changes also created opportunities for firms to opt out from collective agreements and unilaterally reduce wages. Temporary contracts and part-time contracts were all typical of women starting working for their present companies during the crisis. Many women reported increases in working time, wage freezing or pay cuts. The women working in social care consistently reported employer strategies to intensify work and reduce labour costs, including the reorganization of work with fewer and longer shifts in order to operate with less staff and the hiring of hourly paid staff to avoid paying premium night shift rates. A significant proportion of women reported that their husbands had been unemployed or had pay cuts, resulting in a significant income loss. These experiences of unemployment and reduced earnings of the women or their husbands were associated with significant financial stress, mainly in the cases of couples with children. When asked how they coped and eventually overcame the financial hardship, they reported to have drastically reduced expenses. Cohabitation is another familialistic trait that continues alive and helped families to cushion the economic impact of the crisis. Under these circumstances, the women interviewed saw their wages as extremely important to the household budget. This study provides also some insights on the strategies used by women to reconcile waged work with family life in the context of the crisis. Women with young children used formal childcare, either school or nursery. However, as schools usually finish before their job ended, there is a need for complementary arrangements. Some women worked part-time hours or on a reduced schedule, whereas others were aided by their own or partners’ mothers. Husbands or partners were also involved but mostly those who were unemployed. Full-time working women appeared to face increasing difficulties in balancing work with family due to longer and less predictable working hours during the crisis, and cuts introduced to public childcare funding. This was particularly problematic for mothers but in general women struggled to combine their full-time schedules with domestic work, which still fell mostly on their shoulders. The gender division of domestic labour remained mostly traditional, though younger women tended to report more egalitarian sharing of domestic labour. There is evidence of a modest move toward a greater contribution of unemployed male couples. The interviewees’ discourse on the importance of employment for women’s economic independence and linking it to notions of fairness and egalitarianism suggests that women’s attachment to employment is increasingly strong. Women’s employment position appears more constrained by unfavourable labour market circumstances than by traditional gender role attitudes. This lack of evidence of a general backlash in gender attitudes, a strong women’s attachment to employment and income contributions to the household becoming even more crucial during the crisis may signal an erosion of the gendered pattern of labour market segmentation. This erosion may not represent a dramatic change. It will depend in the duration of this process, and in the way out of the crisis. As reforms to social welfare and to the regulation of employment have decreased women’s ability to reconcile their family and work responsibilities, and Southern European regions, such as Andalucia, have implemented a strategy of retrenchment through drastic cuts in the welfare state, austerity may create the conditions to the re-emergence of a more conservative gender order.