Globalization is often described as a process in which markets are liberalised and integrated. Both trends sound very positive - who would be in favour of authoritarianism and disintegration? But from the perspective of home-based workers, the process has been very one-sided: that is, market liberalization and integration has privileged powerful economic organizations, like transnational corporations, but not women working in their homes.

What greater contrast could there be than that between the global mobility of capital, especially financial capital, and the immobility of poor women, confined to work in their houses, because of economic, social and cultural pressures? That contrast in mobility illustrates an essential, but often overlooked, dimension of globalization - it is a process in which rights are restructured. The rights of the most powerful are strengthened, while the rights of the least powerful are weakened.

The right of companies to move huge sums of money across national borders everyday has been strengthened. The right of poor people to migrate in search of a better standard of living has been yet further constricted. Labour markets certainly have not been liberalised internationally - such liberalization has been selectively in favour of capital and goods markets. Moreover liberalised markets are insecure markets. The international financial system has no effective mechanism for dealing with the risks it generates. Instead, risks are downloaded to the informal sector, which operates as a kind of safety net of last resort. People who lose jobs in formal employment, as a result of the aftermath of financial crises, crowd into informal employment. As a result, earnings and wages in informal employment are likely to fall - and ultimately, the safety net will break. Earnings will be so low that they do not allow people to survive no matter how long the hours they work, or how many members of the family try to earn something. If countries try to achieve competitiveness on the shortsighted basis of even cheaper labour, then the result will be degradation and depletion of human resources.

Globalization not only puts pressure on the livelihoods of those with the least resources by weakening their rights and subjecting them to more and more competition. It also weakens the ability of governments to partially compensate those who lose from competition using public expenditure targeted to their needs. Globally, mobile capital has a tendency to prefer countries that are reducing their levels of expenditure and taxation. Trade and financial liberalization undermines traditional ways of raising revenue. Professionally qualified well-off people can permanently migrate abroad and often constitute a vocal lobby in support of lower taxes.

The challenge we face is to construct global markets as well as national taxation and expenditure on a different basis. There is a growing movement of women around the world mobilizing on the issue of women's empowerment and government expenditure, including in the Philippines, Brazil, South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, USA and UK. We also see a variety of mobilizations to create different kinds of global markets, based on three principles:

• Supporting international standards, such as the 1996 ILO Convention on Homework
• Building the countervailing power of collective organization of poorer participants - both employees and small-scale own account workers - HomeNet is a good example
• Constructing developmental marketing institutions committed not only to covering their costs, but also to social justice - such as the growing network of Alternative Trading Organizations.

These initiatives hold out the promise of beginning the transformation of both states and markets in ways that will improve the lives of women around the world, based on a globalization from the grassroots.

(From a presentation at the WIEGO first Annual Meeting by Diane Elson, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK.)