The Global Political Economy of the Household in Asia

J. Elias, S. Gunawardana, J. Elias, S. Gunawardana

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137338907
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The household has traditionally been neglected in studies of Asian political economy. While there is an emergent literature that looks at this relationship, to date, it is fragmented. The contributors consider how the household economy has increasingly been incorporated into development planning and policy making within both states and multilateral development agencies. They examine the social consequences of the tendency to view households as marketizable spaces, and explore how the household economy relates to broader structures of industrial production in the region. With case studies on Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, India, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and China, they provide a comprehensive picture of the centrality of the household economy to ongoing processes and struggles associated with the continuous economic transformation of the region.

Part I

The State and the Household Economy: Competitiveness, Development and Security

1

Women Hold Up the Anti-Welfare Regime: How Social Policies Produce Social Differentiation in Singapore

Youyenn Teo

Do we want Singapore to be up among the global cities, or do we want to remain where we are today, while the world moves ahead? I believe that if Singaporeans think of our future from this broader perspective, most will want us to be among the leading global cities. These cities are moving ahead, and so must we. Being near the front means that Singaporeans can enjoy a quality of life comparable to what people in advanced countries will be enjoying in 20 years from now.

– Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, addressing the Economic Society of Singapore (Lee 2012)

Introduction: Singapore – survivalist and exceptional

In the wake of public calls on the state to expand social spending and measures to deal with widening income inequality (Yeoh 2007; Low and Yeoh 2011; Bhaskaran et al. 2012; Association of Women for Action and Research 2012; Tan 2012), as well as to rethink its aggressive growth strategies, Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong responded with the claim that there are no real alternatives to existing policies. This is a claim that the one-party (People’s Action Party, PAP) state has consistently made since national independence in the 1965s. It rests on the assumption that as a small city-state with few natural resources, ‘survival’ is imperative. And ‘survival’ depends upon always being economically competitive (Shanmugaratnam 2010).

Historically, Singaporean governments have used this survivalist credo to justify suppression of unions, and harsh laws for controlling speech and political dissent (Deyo 1989; Rodan 2004; Chua 2004). Most recently, it has been the basis for arguments against increased social spending (Lee 2012). Claims that social spending would lead to Singapore being uncompetitive as a global city are not merely presented in negative, ‘no alternative’ terms. Instead, a positive claim about Singaporean exceptionalism is also articulated: despite rapid development and changes, ‘the family’ has traditionally been strong. This has been a strength of the nation, and state policies have always supported this proposition (Teo 2011). The state claims that its ‘prudence’ in expanding social spending is designed to protect that which makes Singapore – so otherwise oriented to Western global cities – exceptional and good. It is precisely through a limited welfare state that family members’ dependence on each other can be maintained. This is the way forward for a ‘stable and happy nation’ (Lee 2007).

How do these views about Singapore’s survival and exceptionalism, these claims about economic competitiveness and family values, actually play out in social policies? And what consequences do they have in shaping Singaporeans’ lives? In this chapter, I argue that these policy orientations enhance differentiations of citizens along gender lines. I first show that when ‘families’ are called on to be the ‘first line of support’, women bear the main responsibilities as household caregivers and ‘choice’-makers. In essence, the ‘economic growth first’, familialist, anti-welfare state – ostensibly crucial to the nation’s survival and that which makes Singapore exceptional and good – depends heavily on and reproduces gendered differentiations and inequalities among citizens.

Gender in political economy: Not a residual factor

The political economic development of Singapore, together with the East Asian ‘tigers’ of South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, have received much scholarly attention. Prior to the crises of the late 1990s, the discussions were primarily in the form of analyses of their ‘successes’. Scholars pointed to state institutions, global geopolitical conditions and political systems of suppression – particularly of labour – as explanations for the region’s economic success (Deyo 1987; Amsden 1989; Haggard 1990; Wade 1990; Appelbaum and Henderson 1992; Evans 1998). In the aftermath of the crisis, scholars have pointed to a combination of structural factors that have contributed to the unravelling: states’ inability to discipline domestic industrialists and the consequent excessive debt and low productivity; a lack of transparency and information leading to panic amongst international investors; and the failure of transnational governance organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to respond quickly to restore confidence and stem capital flight (Pempel 1999; Robison et al. 2000; Jomo 2003). They have thus highlighted that the crisis – the factors leading to it and the various countries’ responses in the aftermath – is one of political economy (Beeson and Robison 2000). Aside from trying to explain the factors to account for crisis/unravelling, in recent years scholars have also begun to pay greater attention to how the altered economic conditions might shape the lives of people living in these societies. In particular, they have looked at social spending structures and welfare regimes and asked questions about its sustainability given that people no longer have good, stable jobs, with guarantees of security by employers, and given that demographic changes have rendered dependence on children less realistic (Gough 2001; Chan 2003; Croissant 2004).

Strikingly, although ‘the family’ is often mentioned in these accounts of East Asian political economy, it is too often treated as a set of static, factual conditions that states have to take into account, rather than itself an evolving product – in form and content – of state practices (Teo 2010). The complex ways in which gender differentiations and inequalities residing within ‘the family’ shape not ‘merely’ household dynamics but political economic models and strategies have largely been overlooked. Consequently, insofar as family and gender are invoked, they are featured as either static ‘facts’ or residual categories that play minor and secondary roles. The implication, then, is that they have limited explanatory power when it comes to questions of why state policies are structured the way they are, how they work and fail and what consequences they imply for citizens.

Two overlapping bodies of work compel us to think about political economy differently. The literature that traces attention on households has illuminated the importance of women’s unpaid labour in enabling and limiting economic activities (Glazer 1984; Agarwal 1997; Beneria 1999). The vast feminist scholarship on welfare states has further demonstrated the ways in which stereotypes about women’s roles as caregivers enable particular models of governance; and how gendered roles are, in turn, reproduced through public policies (Gordon 1988; Abramovitz 1996; Orloff 1999; O’Connor et al. 1999; Hays 2003; Henrici 2006; Song 2009). This chapter (as well as the rest of this book) places gender firmly in discussions of political economy. I argue that gender differentiation and roles inform, enable and maintain certain definitions of state, society and economy. The anti-welfare regime, which theorists of political economy have referred to and which they now problematize as unsustainable, rests firmly on specific assumptions of gender roles and familial responsibilities. The ‘costs’ of such a regime, then, are not borne equally by all citizens.

The ‘traditional’ family: Communitarian in tone, individualistic in practice, gendered in consequences

State officials in Singapore speak often and regularly of the family. Embedded in major speeches are references to the importance of maintaining families and protecting communities. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, state officials also imply that Singapore is different, and better, than other advanced economies in that it has avoided the pitfalls of dependence. Indeed, in various ways over time the state has made the claim that Singapore is more communitarian than liberal, and that this is an economic asset (Chua 1995, 2004).

For all the talk of family and community ties, however, social policies in Singapore arguably foster practices and sensibilities of individualism. State policies presume and compel individual responsibility and self-reliance in such matters as: securing housing; paying for retirement; protecting oneself against unemployment; educating and caring for one’s old and young dependents; and funding health care.

In each of these realms, Singaporeans are pushed to maintain their own savings in order to meet their and their families’ needs. All employed individuals (and their employers) are required by law to contribute part of their monthly incomes to their Central Provident Fund (CPF) accounts. Although the CPF allows the state access to massive funds for investments, from the individual citizen’s perspective these are individual accounts which are neither pooled resources nor intergenerational transfers. There are strong regulations in place regarding withdrawal – not before age 55 and then not before one’s account meets a minimum sum. The CPF system, through specific mechanisms and rules, ties funding for housing, health care and retirement to an individual’s regular employment.

The CPF is an important site of discipline in a number of ways: first, it allows the state an impressive surveillance tool insofar as it has knowledge of all citizens’ baseline level of savings. This allows it to, second, enforce certain forms of economic self-reliance and mutual dependence between specific family members. One of the few allowed pre-retirement withdrawals of the CPF, for example, is for purchase of public housing in a ‘family nucleus’; these are typically formed by two people married to each other, sometimes by a parent and an adult offspring, and less often by a divorced or widowed single parent with their minor child. The CPF system is set up to regulate people to work, accumulate sufficient amounts for downpayments in their CPF accounts and then continue working so as to accumulate enough for monthly instalments. The CPF system also allows the state to ensure that family members take responsibility for each other: the Medisave portion of CPF, for example, can be used to fund one’s own medical expenses or that of immediate family members. In fact, before an individual can apply for state aid in funding health care via the MediFund, they are expected to first deplete the CPF Medisave funds of both themselves and their immediate family members. A third and final form of discipline that follows from the earlier two is in the production of norms. Ultimately, even if the CPF system has been shown to be inadequate as a form of retirement funds, particularly for low-income households (Mehta 2006; Ishita 2008; Bhaskaran et al. 2012), it shapes Singaporeans’ conception of individual responsibility and ties their self-worth to employment and self-reliance. World Values Surveys (World Values Survey Association 2009) reveal some interesting comparative figures that suggest Singaporeans value work highly and indeed see it as having moral worth.

Sharon Hays, examining welfare cuts in the United States, has argued persuasively that ‘independence’ is a tricky condition for mothers, given that they are always tethered to their children (Hays 2003). She shows that for poor, single mothers, the quest for ‘independence’ is practically impossible given the heavy responsibilities they bear as caregivers. More generally, the conditions that compel, enable and constrain people in their efforts to combine work and family greatly vary along gender, ethnoracial and class lines. Similarly, in the Singapore case, insofar as self-worth and social citizenship are tied to continual employment throughout one’s life course, the emphasis on independence has differential effects across social groups. Here, I focus on the example of caregiving support in order to illuminate the assumptions about normative gender and class behaviours presumed by policies as well as the gendered and classed imbalances in caregiving and ‘choice’-making they in fact reproduce.

Although women have been, since the 1970s, increasingly important actors in the labour force as well as within households, and although children are lauded as being crucial to Singapore’s future, social support for women as mothers is inadequate, uneven and perpetuates important imbalances between men and women as well as families of different socio-economic background. The quest for economic competitiveness is complex: it is not quite right to say that the state is prioritizing the ‘traditional’; instead, it is more accurate to say that its economic development model is premised on certain ideals of the ‘traditional’ family. This family is not just an emotional unit but an economic one where men are idealized as breadwinners and women as (unpaid) caregivers. Moreover, state policies imply differential value for different classes of women – both as workers and as mothers. An unintended consequence of this is that it creates varied difficulties for women, across classes, to have both work and family.

Relying on and reproducing differential roles for men and women

State policies presume that caregiving responsibilities ought to be resolved within the home and be done by women; the commitment to this view is reinforced through workplace policies and policies around support for children. The most straightforward example of this is the paid leave granted to parents of newborn babies. As part of its pronatalist drive, the state has, since the late 1980s, gradually increased paid maternity leave for married, Singaporean women. The most recent adjustment was made in 2008, when paid leave was increased from 12 weeks to 16 weeks; for the first two children, eight weeks are paid for by the state while the other eight weeks by employers; for subsequent children, the state bears all the costs up to a cap of S$10,000 per four weeks (Ministry of Manpower 2011). On the other hand, for years there was no mandated paternity leave at all; when in January 2013 government-paid paternity leave was introduced, it was only one week.

Along with these differentiations, there are no anti-discrimination laws in place to protect women who are or might become mothers from being discriminated against in hiring and promotion decisions. Given strong societal norms that emphasize the importance of work over other commitments, the increase in maternity leave without corresponding significant paternity leave has rendered married women in their twenties and thirties somewhat more rather than less vulnerable as workers insofar as they are seen as potentially less productive employees.

For many women in Singapore – increasingly trained, educated and socialized for employment; more and more aware of the importance of long-term financial independence; and increasingly significant as contributors to the financial security of their families – the ‘choice’ to have a child and leave the workforce is therefore one fraught with tensions. It is clear that they will have to take up a heavy set of responsibilities within the home that cannot be shared with their husbands, on top of having to work harder to prove their worth at the workplace. Maternity leave provisions, in the absence of adequate legislative protections at the workplace and meaningful paternity leave provisions, in fact undermine women’s capacity to attain work–life balance.

The caregiver ‘problem’

A factor that deepens the puzzle of Singapore’s low fertility rate is the relatively cheap labour of foreign domestic workers. In 2012, there were about 206,000 foreign domestic workers working in Singapore, roughly one in five households (The Associated Press 2012). In addition to their salaries, which are about S$400–500 per month, the state institutes a levy of S$265 per month for workers. For households where there are either children below age 12 or adults above age 65, or persons with disabilities, the concessionary levy rate is S$120 (Ministry of Manpower 2013). In addition, married women, or divorced/widowed women with children, can claim relief on their income taxes up to double the amount paid in maid levies.1

In other words, for the middle- to high-income families to which the state promotes pronatalism, childcare is available. Yet this availability has done little to reverse the continuous decline in fertility rates. I argue that we have to understand this by looking more holistically at how the ‘problem’ of care is conceived: the availability of cheap, round-the-clock labour of domestic workers, has maintained caregiving physically within the private confines of households, and psychically as the problems of individuals and their families. It has become a ‘norm’ of sorts – not necessarily in terms of majority households employing them, but in terms of what is ‘normal’ or ‘typical’ to do in Singapore. Significantly, however, this is a highly perplexing norm, fraught with tensions and discomforts on the part of Singaporeans.

Increasingly, Singaporeans work long hours in order to survive in a competitive, global city. If a family can afford to, it ‘makes sense’ to hire someone who can do all the work of maintaining a household: laundry, shopping, cleaning, accompanying children to and from school, cooking, bringing old folks for visits to the doctor or out for strolls, walking the dog, washing the car. It is certainly a lot cheaper to hire domestic workers to do this than it is to contract out different aspects of these tasks to various workers. This is particularly so because domestic workers’ labour is relatively poorly protected by the state and therefore easily exploitable. In Singapore, it is common to see domestic workers washing cars in parking lots late at night, feeding children at restaurants on weekends or cleaning up in kitchens other th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables and Box
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• The Global Political Economy of the Household in Asia: An Introduction
• Part I: The State and the Household Economy: Competitiveness, Development and Security
• Part II: The Household as a Site of Socioeconomic Transformation
• Part III: The Household and the Gendered Workplace
• Conclusion: The Significance of the Household to Asia’s Transformation and to Studies of the Global Political Economy
• Bibliography
• Index