Anything but a breeze

Women are still working -- harder than ever, it seems. Reem Leila reports
photo: Randa Shaath
Aziza and her family live in a semi-rural squatter area in Imbaba. Aziza, who is 34, has four daughters and two sons, and helps support her children by selling sweets and sandwiches at the bus station for nine hours a day. In the afternoons and evenings, she does domestic work for her neighbours. She has been working at this frenetic rate since her husband disappeared five years ago; but her earnings, when she counts them every evening, rarely add up to more than LE7. The idea of women's right to work is ludicrous to her. Aziza scoffs: "Is there any alternative? If I do not work we will have nothing to eat." She also does all the household chores -- collecting fuel and water as well as cooking and cleaning -- so her working days are usually at least 13 hours long. She is constantly exhausted. The question of how she spends her free time does not arise.
It is with women like Aziza in mind that the National Council for Women launched on Sunday a conference chaired by Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, about "women in the labour market: formal and informal sectors." While the topic is hardly new, the conference was an opportunity to reflect on women's contribution to the work force, and the myriad difficulties they face.
Egyptian women have always worked -- examples ranging from Pharaonic temple inscriptions to the present-day sight of female agricultural labourers put paid to the myth of their seclusion. Nor are women simply men's assistants -- help-meets in some agricultural and pastoral work. Perhaps the myth served a purpose, however; by downplaying women's essential contribution to the economy, especially within the home as unpaid domestic labour, it was possible to employ half the population without retribution. Today, however, ambitions to develop and modernise the country have led to a conscious investment in the labour power represented by this half of the population. Still, several aspects of the relatively new interest in working women remain unresolved. Most importantly, it is difficult to evaluate precisely the number of working women because the concept of productive work is not yet clearly defined, unofficial work is often ignored, and there is little consensus over how women's contribution must be measured statistically.
According to Aliya El-Mahdi, professor of economics at Cairo University, in the absence of a clear definition of what constitutes women's labour, and the variations in work patterns, especially unofficial work, in rural and urban areas, it is very difficult to estimate accurately the number of women or girls in the labour force. "Women's work is usually invisible because it takes place within the domestic sphere and, as a rule, household tasks defy quantification and monetary valuation," says El-Mahdi.
According to the 1998 census, recently released by the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), nearly two million women, aged between 30 and 49, work in the informal sector. According to CAPMAS estimates, women support over 1.75 million families (21.5 per cent of all Egyptian families) socially and financially. Most have been abandoned by their husbands, but many are widowed or divorced. A greater cause for anxiety are the 4.32 million girls under the age of 14 who are involved in full-time "unofficial" economic activity.
"Several studies show that, in part, the exploitation of the female child is a direct result of the exploitation of women. There is a myth that says that domestic chores performed by women have little or no economic value. The fact is, the work performed by women has a high economic value but remains unmeasured and unacknowledged," El-Mahdi notes.
In the rural areas, women's and girls' informal work consists overwhelmingly of domestic tasks: caring for younger siblings, cooking, cleaning, fetching fodder and fuel... In the fields, women are involved in sowing, transplanting, weeding, and harvesting. In the cities, female workers are responsible for their own household tasks, and are also employed as domestic servants, peddlers (selling everything vegetables to balloons, peanuts to bangles and newspapers), rag-pickers or beggars. Many support other sectors of the economy through tedious and poorly paid home-based piece-rate work.
According to Samir Radwan of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), all such work is considered unofficial. Women employed in these activities -- with the exception of unremunerated household tasks, of course -- earn LE5 to LE15 for 8 to 10 hours of work. Yet the value of women's informal work "is neither counted in the Gross National Product (GNP) nor even generally acknowledged as work." Yet their work makes a significant economic and social contribution to their families, communities, and the nation. Many male household heads, Radwan explains, send their wives or daughters to work as domestic servants in large cities in the home country or abroad, often thousands of miles away. "Most do so in the genuine belief that their wives or daughters will be well cared for and at the same time earn a lot of money to help their families," says Radwan. Reality, however, is far harsher: especially when they are cut off from their networks of friends and relatives, and therefore deprived of recourse to any form of protection from abuse, "women and young girls may be the most vulnerable and exploited females of all, and the most difficult to protect," adds Radwan.
Even in relatively favourable conditions, however, women in the informal sector face many obstacles preventing them from using their labour as a means of improving their situation. Marketing, dealing with various governmental bodies, low profit rates, long working hours, difficulties with customers, exploitation by male relatives and police harassment are a few of the hardships with which they must contend. Yet according to CAPMAS, 77 per cent of the women working in the informal sector do not want to quit -- if only because their work is their sole means of survival.
Soad Kamel, assistant professor at Cairo University's faculty of economics, argues that improving the informal sector could augment national revenue considerably. She believes, however, that the government must also increase job opportunities and avoid relying on the informal sector to siphon off surplus labour, so that some informal sector labourers are offered a chance of obtaining formal employment. Kamel also feels it is necessary to change state policies that oppose informal sector employment and small projects.
Where the informal sector was once seen as a nuisance and an embarrassment, indeed, it could prove a boon to a government hard pressed to remedy the high, and growing, unemployment rate. "We must accept the informal sector and admit that it could solve many of Egypt's social and economic problems," remarks Kamel. Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) could play an important role in improving conditions for informal-sector workers. "NGOs should take into consideration the actual needs of those who work in the informal sector, and encourage their initiatives," she adds. The greatest challenge facing NGOs is to "make sure information about specifically tailored programmes reaches target groups in the informal employment sectors. Most of the women working in the informal sector are illiterate and know nothing about NGOs."
While informal employment may act as a valve to release pressure on a government expected to provide opportunities to the country's struggling citizens, then, two questions remain: will efforts to reform the informal sector focus overwhelmingly on controlling the resources that have escaped official control so far? And with so many people employed in this sector, and so many others depending upon their income, how long will we continue to describe it as informal?
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