| |
 |
Wednesday, June 14, 2006 |
Women and Employment in Central and Eastern Europe - a report from Unifem:
"Since the early 1980s women's lives in the eastern and western part of the European continent have become increasingly similar. Immediately after World War II, a sharp and politically buttressed contrast existed between the worlds of the female Communist factory worker and her Western counterpart, the stereotypically suburban stay-at-home mother. By the 1980s, however, women in most developed Western capitalist countries began to acquire paid jobs and demand equal treatment inside and outside the labour force, while women in state socialist societies were granted long maternity leaves and started to drop out of paid work for lengthy periods in their prime career years.
These trends may have started decades earlier, but their convergence became even more pronounced in the 1990s after the collapse of state socialism and the related escalation in economic globalization. Most strikingly, as this report shows, East European women were forced out of the labour force in unprecedented numbers, exactly at the time when their Western counterparts started to take up paid employment in earnest at the encouragement of national and transnational governments as well as corporate employers. The connection between these two processes - for example, through the supply of cheap careworkers migrating West - should not be ignored.
Did women's labour market position in the region decline after 1990? Did it deteriorate relative to that of men? - an analysis of the UNECE database shows that the answer is yes. Women's employment opportunities and standard of living have deteriorated in all the countries covered by this study. Unemployment rates have increased, large numbers of women are not in the labour force, and job security and social benefits have declined."
12:11:46 PM 
|
|
Another government that seems to base its politics on violence is that of Israel. The country was created with violence and continues its policy of violence against the legitimate inhabitants of Palestine in the most barbaric way.
Independent: "Israel has dismissed continuing calls for an independent international inquiry into the beachfront explosion which killed seven members of a Palestinian family in Gaza last Friday after its own internal military investigation decided it was not responsible for the blast.
But the official interpretation was strongly challenged by a former Pentagon battle damage expert who has surveyed the scene of the beach explosion. He said yesterday that all the evidence points to a 155mm Israeli land-based artillery shell as its cause."
Haaretz: "Former prime minister Menachem Begin played a central role in a failed attempt to assassinate then-West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, with the objective of sabotaging the reparations agreement in the works with Israel, according to the journal of Eliezer Sudit, one of the men who carried out the attempted hit."
Living in perpetual war is a sure way to national destruction. In its present form Israel is not a sustainable nation.
11:34:19 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2006 Hetty Litjens.
|
|
|
|
|
