REPRESENTATIONS OF MINORITY WOMEN IN CONTEXTS OF AUSTERITY

At the time of writing, the UK is undergoing the most extensive reduction and restructuring of its welfare state since its enactment after the Second World War (Taylor-Gooby and Stoeker Reference Taylor-Gooby and Stoeker2010; Yeates et al. Reference Yeates, Haux, Jawad and Kilkey2011). The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition government is presiding over a 27% cut to local government—the key mechanism for delivery of public services—and a 68% cut to the social housing budget (Taylor-Gooby Reference Taylor-Gooby2011, 4).

While France is not implementing as stringent measures, a key policy aim is deficit reduction and cuts to public spending (Clift Reference Clift2013). The headline of President François Hollande's 2013 budget, which he described as “the biggest budget shock of the past 30 years,”Footnote ³ is a commitment to cutting the deficit to 3% of GDP in 2013 (L'Express 2012).Footnote ⁴ However, the beleaguered Socialist government has announced that it will miss this budget target this year.Footnote ⁵ The government has opted to side-step sweeping cuts and instead to freeze all government spending (which amounts to real cuts, due to inflation). The precise areas where these cuts will come into force have not yet been specified.

Despite initial reports of a “he-cession,” women appear to be disproportionately impacted by the crisis (Women's Budget Group 2010). They are more likely to be employed by the local state (as teachers, nurses, social workers, etc.) and the public sector more generally (APPG 2012, 10) and more likely to be subcontracted to the state via private-sector organizations (as care workers, cleaners, caterers, etc.) (Seguino Reference Seguino2010; Taylor-Gooby and Stoeker Reference Taylor-Gooby and Stoeker2010; Women's Budget Group 2010; Theodoropoulou and Watt Reference Theodoropoulou and Watt2011). Women are also more likely to be connected to the local state (through accessing and relying on social welfare and public services) because of gendered caring responsibilities.Footnote ⁶ Therefore, austerity measures are likely to increase female unemployment while reducing social protection measures that might cushion against mass job losses.Footnote ⁷

But which women are affected?Footnote ⁸ And to what extent?Footnote ⁹ A further “intersectional” move is needed to challenge state representations of the crisis and the silencing of alternative analyses. We propose simultaneous consideration of processes of racialization and hierarchies of legal status, ability, and other processes of stratification that exist alongside and are inflected by gender inequalities (Bassel and Emejulu Reference Bassel and Emejulu2010), which are exacerbated by austerity measures.

MAPPING MINORITY WOMEN'S POLITICAL ACTIVISM

Our second concern is with the effect of austerity measures on minority women's activism and intersectional mobilization within third-sector spaces, an important site where the paradoxes of austerity are brought into focus. The impacts of budget cuts on the not-for-profit sector are increasingly well documented (Independence Panel Reference Panel2013), but few studies consider the intersectional effects of austerity on organizations' programs and advocacy, and of activists working within them to make multiple axis claims.

In France and the United Kingdom, the rise of “enterprise” as a dominant ideological frame for action has continued apace during the crisis, generating strategic dilemmas for NGOs working in the antipoverty, housing, and migration sectors (Emejulu and Bassel Reference Emejulu and Bassel2013).Footnote ^10, Footnote ¹¹ Principles of competition, the accumulation of assets, and the commodification of services and products offered by NGOs have been imposed onto individual organizations by the local or national states. In some cases, organizations have actively adopted these ideas for survival, while in some (much rarer) cases, they have resisted or subverted these processes and used them as a springboard for new coalitions.

The ethos of enterprise has fundamentally shifted relationships between state, market, and civil society. These shifts generate a difficult context for NGOs, as—with the rise of privatization of social welfare in the wake of austerity—they must either become “any willing provider” or, often, face extinction. We suggest that the ability of actors seeking to represent “intersectional interests” within the sector is under threat because these claims may be silenced and/or misrecognized due to the prevailing marketized logic of the sector.

The fate of solidarity within these increasingly privatized NGO spaces is important because solidarity both animates oppositional voluntary action and is the hoped-for outcome of this form of action.Footnote ¹² If solidarity is weakened within the NGO sector, the ability to mobilize at the intersections of different social justice agendas is undermined.

Solidarity is threatened by the rise of enterprise culture within NGOs and increased fierce competition between organizations for government contracts for service provision. Because the Scottish, English, and French states are moving from core funding to contracting out parts of the state for NGOs and the private sector to deliver on a short-term project basis, trust and mutuality within the sector are being eroded. Several of our informants perceived these factors as limiting the spaces for different forms of action, especially oppositional work against various policy regimes.

What, then, does this uncertain context mean for minority women who are positioned at the intersection of these various issue areas by virtue of their legal status, housing, class position, race and ethnicity, and, of course, gender? Because NGOs are facing an erosion of solidarity within and across sectors, attempts to combine claims and issues across these organizations—to reflect multiple and simultaneous social justice issues—is extremely challenging and becoming ever more unlikely. Some of our participants observed that when NGOs are confronted with acute resource scarcity, they prioritize strategies that are often short-term and oriented to service provision rather than to advocacy and more militant confrontation.Footnote ¹³ Diminishing state and charitable foundation support has, in many cases, meant that the broader intersectional agendas of NGOs are restricted in their struggle for survival. As a consequence, these organizations are presented with strategic dilemmas about the best ways of advancing their social justice agendas in contexts where single-axis claims are the frame of reference most often recognized by state actors who impose stringent funding criteria and encourage competition within a narrowly defined sphere of action.

In the current crisis, resource scarcity shrinks the available range of frames of contestation. It is difficult for these organizations to inflect agendas with multiple-axis (race, class, legal status, and gender) concerns because these may well delegitimize their efforts and weaken their competitive advantage vis-à-vis other organizations vying for the same funding. In a context where organizational survival often asserts itself as the dominant concern, the “simple and straightforward” single-axis claim may win out, as it does not attempt to straddle issues and in so doing contest government funding criteria. In this deeply troubling context, who will lobby with and for minority women in the diminishing political field? The dynamics we have identified, both within organizations—where workers are disciplined to avoid questioning of work conditions—and in organizations' relationships with each other, may preclude the bridging and expansion of social justice agendas that are essential to addressing the challenges of austerity.