/REPEATING/LABOUR-LATAM: Maternity Leave – On the Verge of Disappearing?

By Marcela Valente Reprint | | Print |

Marcela Valente

BUENOS AIRES, May 1 2001 (IPS) - Several patients at the Argentine capital’s Durand Hospital, some of them gravely ill, are persistent in their requests for physician Laura Fuxman to come to their bedsides. She tends to them and continues her rounds without a break in her long daily shift.

None of her patients is well enough to notice one detail: the doctor gave birth 15 days ago and her breast milk has left a damp spot on her white coat.

In every part of the world, a mother’s body keeps time like a clock if she is feeding a newborn. But throughout most of Latin America, the right to maternity leave, intended to ensure the well being of the mother and child and allow the newborn to nurse, is in danger of existing on paper only.

But few women complain – for fear of losing what is usually a precarious job.

“In Argentina, the contract for doctors completing their residency covers maternity leave, but so much of the work is left to the few other doctors that if a woman stays at home with her baby she is criticised because the extra work falls on the shoulders of her colleagues,” doctor Juan Rodríguez del Sel told IPS.

Rodríguez del Sel is Fuxman’s husband and on this day is at home taking care of their newborn son, Agustín.

Fuxman’s situation, one that is not recorded in statistics, is repeated throughout many professions, and throughout the countries of the region – and its negative impacts are felt most by low- income workers.

For these women, the options are to either hold onto the job, whatever sacrifice it means for mother and child, or to live in indigence with a newborn.

The problem has reached the point that in Argentina last March 8, International Women’s Day, anthropologist Monique Altschul warned that “if women do not take up an active defence of the rights they have already achieved, they run the risk of losing them.”

“There may be little life remaining for maternity leave,” said the expert, leader of the group Women in Equality.

Altschul pointed out that work conditions in Latin America are increasingly precarious due to high unemployment. Workdays are growing longer, there is less protection of labour rights and unions are weaker.

Given this situation, she said it is no longer a question of obtaining changes to benefit women, but a matter of women defending the rights they won in the past because they are now disintegrating.

Over the last decade, the growing instability of employment conditions has hit women hardest. One indicator of the costs implied by precarious jobs is that women seem to be caving in on their rights, including those intended to protect mothers and their children.

On paper, the Cuban government announced that maternity leave has been extended from six months to a full year, with full payment of wages. Also on paper, maternity leave in Mexico and Peru is set at 84 days, three months in Argentina and Uruguay, four months in Brazil, and four and a half in Chile and Venezuela.

But, with the exception of Cuba, where the law on maternity leave is followed to the letter, these countries’ rhetoric on women’s rights is given the lie by the day-to-day reality.

Rosaura Paulero is an Argentine psychologist and mediation expert for the Buenos Aires schools, employed by the city government. Her contract is renewed on a yearly basis, and, as it is for most women hired under this system, does not include vacation, maternity leave, medical insurance or a retirement plan.

“I also work as a consultant for the Justice Ministry, and there, 75 percent of the workers are employees based on the presentation of our bills for services rendered,” Paulero commented.

“A friend of mine worked there eight years, always under a renewed temporary contract,” she said by way of explaining that it is not a question of job shortages, but veiled precariousness in which employment benefits are sacrificed.

As a result, the provision of maternity leave is often at the mercy of the worker’s immediate superiors. “If you’re pregnant, you have to arrange it with your boss, but forget about the three months stipulated by law. At most we get one month,” Paulero said.

Valeria Mirando, a biologist who works for the government, also mentioned the reliance on the “good will” of employers. She is a scholar at the Council of Scientific and Technical Research and her contract, like all granted by this institution, does not provide vacation, pension payments or maternity leave.

Miranda, who has two children and several years of experience working under a scholarship, is soon to give birth to her third child, but she is not afraid of what lies ahead.

“I have grow accustomed to returning to work right after birth, sometimes with the baby on my back, sometimes with help from family. My scholarship director herself did not take more than 45 days of maternity leave,” she says, with a noticeable tone of resignation in her voice.

“If the government hires people with that level of job precariousness, what is happening in the private sphere?” wonders Paulero. Psychologists who attend clients in privately run offices rarely take more than a month and a half for maternity leave before picking up where they left off with their patients’ treatment, she said.

While the government fails to uphold the law with its own employees, doctors and psychologists suffer the same harm, and they understand all too well the importance of establishing the initial mother-child bond.

And lawyers are also victims in this sense, whether self- employed or members of a firm. Though they know the law and their right to maternity leave better than anyone, they generally reconcile themselves to the fact that their employer will violate it.

“I have the right to three months but I can’t take them,” Ana Rielo, an attorney who works as a judge’s reporter, told IPS. “With my first child, the judge expected me to take work home, and with the second he decided not bother me at home, but so much work accumulated that I had to return before the end of my leave,” she said.

The same situation is found in the schools, where a counselor, who works all year, every day, can only take 45 days for maternity leave. “It is because I am not part of the staff, but am considered a contract employee,” said Yanina Gómez, who works at a private secondary school that she preferred not to name.

Feminist attorney Carmen González explained to IPS that “there is no way to fight for these rights in court because today in Argentina there are more and more women hired for three months, six months, 18, or 24 months, always under renewable terms, but with contracts that do not cover maternity leave.”

González commented that Latin America is getting dangerously close to the maternity leave tradition followed in the United States, where it is not a legal right, but rather is dissimulated as sick leave. The region, she added, is distancing itself from the ideals covered by European laws for women’s rights.

“In France, a woman is obligated to remain in the hospital five days after giving birth and has six months of paid leave if she breastfeeds the baby,” said the attorney. “In European countries, in general, not only is the newborn considered a citizen with rights, but so is the mother.”

González pointed out that the worst is the case of domestic employees, who are nearly all women and represent Argentina’s largest labour force. The law specifically does not provide maternity leave for them.

“My case is illustrative of the situation of many women professionals. I had to return to the firm when my first daughter was just 20 days old because I had to prepare for a court hearing,” said the attorney. She recalled that she wrapped her chest in a thick elastic band to prevent her breast milk from staining her clothing during the court proceedings.

In Latin America, just nine percent of the population is considered high-income, and 14 percent are middle-income, according to the calculations of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

The rest, estimated at 74 percent of the economically active population, receive wages that are not enough to lift them above the poverty line, says this United Nations regional agency.

In the 1990s, the salaried worker tended to be replaced by flexible ways of utilising the workforce in order to improve the company’s competitive edge by reducing costs, says an ECLAC report.

Labour costs drop 30 percent when workers are hired without social security, vacation, maternity leave, or pension payment benefits, according to the study.

This reality favours short-term contracts and promotes the emergence of the category “temporary wage workers,” who are mostly women, young adults or unskilled workers, indicates the Santiago-based ECLAC.

In Ecuador, 45 percent of the workers hold only temporary contracts, but an even worse situation is that of workers who earn wages without any sort of contract. This is the case of the most of the workforce in Paraguay (45 percent of the economically active population), 46 percent in Brazil, 41 percent in Peru, 41 percent in Argentina and 32 percent in Colombia.

Women in these work situations, which do not provide for the leave time required by pregnancies and childbirth, end up forgoing their achieved rights.

Instead of enjoying greater equality with men in the workplace, the lack of maternity leave drags women down because they ultimately suffer from inattention to their own physical and mental health, as do their newborn children.