economy

Women, Work, and the Downturn For an excellent column on why and how the downturn is likely to affect women, read UNC-Chapel Hill sociologist Philip Cohen’s recent post at HuffPo. He argues, as has Randi Albelda and Linda Hirshman, that Obama’s jobs/stimulus plans thus far are good for men, but not as likely to address the jobs concerns for women. As Cohen asks, will Obama listen?

The Black Middle Class As happened during the Great Depression, so in the (current) Great Recession, African Americans are going to be harder hit by job loss. Zenitha Prince does outstanding reporting on the issues in AFRO News. She reports that the manufacturing sector—read auto industry, where in particular African Americans had found a path to the middle class in the past few decades—is getting hammered. What’s the size of the problem? While the unemployment rate overall is currently at 6.7 percent, for African Americans it is at 11.2 percent. It will get worse.

Not only is unemployment generally twice as high for African Americans than for the population in general, but wealth inequality also makes the black middle class a vulnerable group. While the racial gap in incomes—what we earn at our jobs—has declined over the past thirty years, the gap in wealth—what we own in terms of savings, retirement funds, housing, stocks, and other assets—remains quite large. A 2005 report from the National Urban League reports that African American households have about one-tenth the net worth of white households. This makes family crises like unemployment much harsher.

–Virginia Rutter

Later: Read more about the recession’s impact on minority autoworkers in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Sad times over here in the publishing world. The news reports come one after another: layoffs at Simon & Schuster, jobs cut at Random House, a freeze on acquisitions at Houghton Mifflin and layoffs as well, and plenty more to come, I’m sure, as the fiscal year comes to an end.

With the economy flailing, it’s no surprise that readers aren’t buying as many books. But is that really what’s causing all this distress?

Depression or no, it seems to me that publishing has been going in this direction for a long time. With the money that the big publishers have been spending on books in the post-Internet Age, in which content is otherwise cheap and plentiful, it seemed that it was just a matter of time before the old budgets couldn’t sustain themselves.

To make my point, here’s a generic case study from pre-economy-crash days: Let’s say Big House Publisher A offers a book deal to Author B for six-some-odd-figures. And then, to show its support for the book, Publisher A spends another 20,000 on publicity, marketing, and the like, making the overall expense on Author B’s book somewhere in the range of, let’s just say, $150,000. Throw in plant costs and overhead and manufacturing and shipping and that number gets even higher.

Now, Author B’s book is pretty commercial—not celebrity commercial, but an interesting topic that’s relevant to a good-size audience—and it gets some terrific reviews, and winds up selling, let’s say, 25,000 copies. Terrific! Well, come to think of it, the book is actually a little more nuanced and sophisticated and attracts a slightly more targeted niche audience and sells more like, say, 15,000 copies, but that’s 15,000 people who just read this book, and that’s fantastic too. An accomplishment any author can be proud of, no question.

Except. If you’re like me, this is where you stop and check your mental back-of-the-envelope P&L. Where, exactly, is the sustainable profit after spending six figures on a book that, like many wonderful books in your local bookstore, sells 15,000 copies? Or less? A scenario like the one above, for a book that costs $20, would mean losses for the publisher that would easily exceed $100,000.

The publishing industry, and the big houses in particular, have been headed for a housing-bubble-like crash for some time now, and we’re only starting to think about what a new mortgage might look like. A peek at a new writer-publisher model could be found, I’m betting, by looking at the independent presses, which tend toward savvier spending and more realistic expectations of what a book can do in the marketplace. The economy isn’t doing these indies any favors these days, either, but I’m betting these tight-and-lean operations are taking the hits with a little more stability.

If you’re a writer with publishing aspirations, I hope you don’t think I’m being a Cassandra. In fact, I’d say this isn’t necessarily bad news. I have to confess that I’m a little bit excited to see what’s next for literary America. If the rubric of yesterday was Big House = Big Advance = At the Mercy of the Big Three (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders) Only to Almost Earn Out Your Advance but Not Quite, then maybe the new rubric will allow for More Houses offering More Realistic Advances which could lead to More Generous Profits which will create a More Open Marketplace that advances A Wider Range of Authors and Ideas.

A girl can hope.

It’s a long way from here to there. But sometimes we need to take something apart in order to put it back together again in a better and smarter way, and if you’re an aspiring author, I’m rooting you on to take advantage of the time we’re living in by pitching your book to editors and publishers who understand the new economy and the value of your intellectual offering: indie houses, small and medium publishers, and boutique agents who are committed to your message and mission, not (only) to your bottom line.

More on the bottom line — and what this means for YOUR bottom line — next month.

Meanwhile, a few nights ago I got a chance to hear literary great Gary Snyder read letters Allen Ginsberg wrote to him about getting high and getting naked and sitting zazen and circumambulating mountains, and it reminded me why I’m in this book publishing business: I’m in it to be in it, to be a part of the public exchange of ideas and the intellectual development of our era.

What about you?

—Laura Mazer

Big news. Feminist media are covering unions. Thanks to a report from GWP friend John Schmitt over at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the feminist blogosphere is on the case–at Ms, at Feministing, at Feminist Majority. There’s also an excellent editorial in the San Diego Union Tribune.

The CEPR report, “Unions and Upward Mobility for Women Workers,” identifies what’s in the union movement for women. Schmitt reports that women in unions make 11.2 percent more than their non union peers. What’s the value of that? “All else equal, joining a union raises a woman’s wage as much as a full-year of college, and a union raises the chances a woman has health insurance by more than earning a four-year college degree,” reports Schmitt in a press release.

GWP talked with Schmitt about the report, to explore whether it is relevant to think of unions as a feminist institution, and here are a few thoughts he had for GWP:

GWP: What has changed for women in unions?
Schmitt: Women are now 45 percent of all unionized workers, up from 35 percent in 1983. If the trend holds,  women will be the majority of unionized workers by 2020.

GWP: What’s the significance–besides the increased wages you report?
Schmitt: There is a perception that unions are about white guys in their fifties who work in manufacturing and live in Michigan and Ohio. But, our study, which is one in a series focusing on different kinds of workers, shows that increasingly unions are about men and women. Union men and women are Latino, African American, white, Asian, and from other racial and ethnic groups, and more than ever union workers are in the service sector. I think the facts help to counteract some of our old-fashioned preconceptions of unions as not being representative of the workforce as a whole. For women today, unions have the potential to be a freestanding institution of the larger feminist agenda.

GWP: How are unions doing on health insurance?
Schmitt: Health insurance and pensions were two of the areas we examined. Part of the current health insurance “system” in the United States has been that marriage and jobs are gateways to health insurance, and this so-called system has the disadvantages of often making women dependent on their partner status for health insurance. In our study, we found that while 51 percent of non union women had health insurance, 75 percent of union women did. For low wage workers, the benefits were even more striking–union membership doubled a woman’s odds of having health insurance. Without a union, 26 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. With a union, 59 percent of low-wage working women have health insurance. These large union advantages remained large even after we controlled for a host of demographic factors such as age and education levels.

GWP: What about women’s pensions?
Schmitt: Our retirement system has historically counted on women’s relying on their husband’s pensions–another case of dependence. Unions change that, nearly tripling the likelihood that low-wage women in unions have some kind of pension. While 21 percent of non union, low-wage women workers have a pension, 58 percent of these women do if they are in a union. For women workers overall, the pattern is similar: 43% of women workers without a union have a pension, while 76 percent of women workers with a union do. Again, the union effect holds even after we control for demographic differences between the union and non union groups.

GWP: What’s up ahead?
Schmitt: One of the key drivers of second-wave feminism was the incorporation of women into the workforce. But getting to work is a necessary but not sufficient condition for advancing the cause of women–and everybody, for that matter. What is happening today is that unions are increasingly acting to defend the interests of working women of all social classes and backgrounds, over issues such as flexible work schedules, extending the Family Medical Leave Act, and improving access to paid sick days and paid vacation.

–Virginia Rutter

We’re back to regale with tales of research from the international hinterland. The global economic crisis has been making front-page news for weeks now. And while we’ve heard lots about the bankers and the automakers, the gendered impacts of these shifts, especially internationally, are little reported. This week, we take a look at these impacts in the context of the phenomena of remittances.

Remittance is a big word that describes a simple concept critical to the economic viability of many countries. The term ‘remittance’ refers to the transfer of money from one country to the other by immigrant (or migrant) workers who leave their home country (usually in the Global South) to work in a higher-paid arena (usually in the Global North). Although difficult to exactly measure, remittances now account for the second largest source of external funding for developing countries. The Migration and Remittances Team at the World Bank estimates that flows to developing countries will reach $238 billion in 2008. Interestingly, with the rapid economic development of some developing countries, especially the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China), the flow of remittances is increasingly between developing countries. Information from the US Census Bureau shows that remittances between developing countries was 17% in 2008.

Why is this important to women? Remittances are a direct product of migration, one of the most highly gendered social processes. According to UNFPA, in 2006 95 million migrants were women, approximately half of all international migrants worldwide. Whether women are being left behind with the children, making decisions on how to spend the money that men (or children or other family members) send from abroad, or whether they leave behind children with extended family members in the hopes that they can create better lives for themselves and their families from a distance, women are at the maelstrom of movement.

UN-INSTRAW has been working on a fantastic project on Gender and Remittances since 2003. So far, they have looked at the patterns of migration and remittances by women between the Dominican Republic and Spain and the US, the Philippines and Italy, Guatemala and the US, Columbia and Morocco and Spain, SADC and Lesotho and South Africa, Albania and Greece, and Senegal and France. Key concerns of these projects are not only the recognition of the shear number of women migrants and the amount of money being sent back, but these monetary flows are then gendered both at the household and community level. In many countries, community development projects have been started with remittance money. INSTRAW, and others using a gender perspective, seeks to ensure that such money benefits both men and women, as well as is inclusive of issues specific to age, sexuality, race, ethnicity and religion.

Why does the gendered nature of remittance patterns matter in the context of the current global economic crisis? Well, according to The Economist, “plunging commodity prices and reduced foreign demand will hurt quite a few African economies; foreign investment, remittances and foreign aid will all shrink.” However, in spite of much doom and gloom in the current financial forecast, there is hope.

Remittances are one of the least volatile sources of foreign exchange in developing countries. They may slow but they never stop. They will continue as long as migration continues. Not only are they sometimes the sole source of income for many families – they are often seed funds for entrepreneurs. Two amazing young women from Mexico recognize the importance and the effect of remittances in their communities and have mobilized women in the community and the diaspora to exploit the full potential of these funds, as well as to ensure that the funds are used in a way that benefits both men and women.

Image Credit.