Gloria Steinem, the feminist writer and activist who died Wednesday at 92, was also a critic of the free-trade order taking shape in the 1990s, joining conservative Pat Buchanan and consumer advocate Ralph Nader in opposition to the trade agreement that created the World Trade Organization.
In August 1994, Steinem was among more than 130 prominent Americans who signed a letter urging President Bill Clinton to postpone congressional consideration of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT. The agreement, negotiated among more than 100 countries, would lower trade barriers and establish the WTO with new powers to enforce international trade rules.
The unusual coalition included Nader, Steinem, Noam Chomsky and former California Gov. Jerry Brown on the left, alongside Buchanan, Phyllis Schlafly, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie on the right. Other conservative stalwarts signing the letter included Reagan adviser Lyn Nofziger, Ross Perot running mate Pat Choate, and American Spectator editor R. Emmet Tyrrell Jr.
The group warned Clinton against a “rush to judgment” on the sweeping agreement and its implementing legislation. Contemporary reports described opposition to the accord as including concerns that WTO rules could allow foreign governments to challenge U.S. health, environmental and food-safety regulations as barriers to trade.
Steinem’s participation was consistent with an economic critique she had developed over decades and connected explicitly to feminism: Companies benefited when they could draw on pools of workers whose wages were held down by weak bargaining power.
“The capitalistic system is dependent on a supply of cheap labour which is provided by women of every race,” Steinem said in a 1976 interview with India Today.
Steinem later made the connection between feminism and resistance to the global trade regime explicit. Canadian feminist Judy Rebick recalled interviewing Steinem around the time of the 1999 Seattle WTO protests and asking about the state of the women’s movement. Steinem replied, “Seattle is the women’s movement,” identifying the uprising against the WTO with the broader struggle over labor, corporate power, and economic inequality.
Donald Trump was voicing a strikingly similar opposition at the same moment. In a December 1999 ABC interview after the Seattle protests, Trump said the WTO was “not necessarily fair to America,” argued that workers often understood trade better than U.S. negotiators, and declared, “I’m not a World Trade Organization fan.”
In “Revaluing Economics,” an essay published in her 1994 book Moving Beyond Words, Steinem argued that wages often reflected the social and political power of workers rather than the economic value of their work.
“A cheap labor force cheapens whatever it does,” Steinem wrote. She pointed to differences in the pay and status of similar work performed by different groups and countries and argued that “the free market has little to do with it.”
Steinem applied the argument directly to competition from foreign labor.
She disputed claims that the United States suffered from a shortage of nurses, arguing there was “only a shortage of wages and respect” that was pushing trained nurses into other occupations. Rather than raising wages, she said, employers sought to change training requirements and bring nurses into the United States from lower-wage countries.
Steinem defended nurses’ unions that resisted the practice and asked readers to imagine the reaction if automobile companies similarly cut the wages of predominantly male assembly-line workers and then imported workers from abroad.
The argument closely linked Steinem’s feminism to trade and labor policy. She viewed cheap labor as a source of economic power for employers and believed competition among different pools of lower-paid workers could hold down compensation more broadly.
She also argued that eliminating cheap labor could encourage investment and productivity. In a 1970 Time essay imagining the economic consequences of women’s liberation, Steinem predicted that “higher wages would encourage further mechanization” of repetitive jobs that remained economical because labor was inexpensive.
That high-wage argument became increasingly relevant as American politics turned toward globalization in the 1990s. The Clinton administration strongly backed the Uruguay Round, arguing that lower barriers to international commerce would expand American exports, economic growth and employment. Major business groups mounted an aggressive campaign for congressional approval.
Steinem ended up on the other side.
For one of the most recognizable leaders of American feminism, opposition to the emerging global trade system followed directly from her view of women’s economic position: Workers with less bargaining power became sources of cheap labor, and businesses could profit by using that labor to hold down wages.
In the 1990s, that conviction put Gloria Steinem on the same side as Donald Trump, Pat Buchanan, and Phyllis Schlafly on one of the defining economic battles of the decade.
Read the full article here
