The Problem of Unpaid Labor in Latin America - Essay Example

The problem of unpaid labor in Latin America Thesis ment Women and children form a significant part of the workforce in Latin America but they suffer from maltreatment at their places of work due to poor or no pay for their services. It is therefore the intention of this paper to analyze such problems and find ways if any of how such situations can be rectified. Introduction In Latin America, women and children make up the larger portion of the unpaid workforce. The children are denied the most important activities of their childhood such as sports in order to provide for their families. According to a survey conducted by International Labor Organization (ILO) in 2006, about 6 million children in Latin America are engaged in the workforce as laborers (Antonopoulos, and Hirway, 2009). On the same score women have been found to be heavily involved in unpaid labor all across Latin American economies. Research conducted by the United Nations on this subject has found that the gap between women and men in paid labor is quite huge. Many women and children still suffer from certain forms of discrimination or slavery at their places of work. Research has also shown that efforts are being made to ameliorate such discrepancies in the workforce and bring some ethics into organizations. Such efforts like bridging the gap in health, education, markets and access to credits as well as protection of labor rights have been devoted to address these alarming disparities. Such initiatives have been important yet not sufficient to bridge the huge gap that already exists and women still feel underrepresented in paid labor (Magaña, 2013). It must be recognized that by bridging the gap between paid and unpaid work is a positive goal that influences positively pro-poor growth, social cohesion and general human developments and must be encouraged. As such policy makers must focus their attention to address the gaps that exist in health, education, labor rights and access to credits as these have been found to influence greatly the productiveness of women in the workforce. The ILO defines child labor as any work that interferers with the child’s development. In Latin America many children are engaged in the regional workforce either formal or informal. It is a difficult problem to combat as it as a result of the high poverty levels and entrenched societal customs. It is therefore the aim of this paper to look at such problems of unpaid labor in Latin America and find out possible solutions. The succeeding discussion elucidates the problem in more detail. Discussion The number of people engaged in unpaid or poorly paid labor in Latin America has grown so much that agencies such as the UN have tried to focus their attention on how such a problem could be addressed. The numerous classifications regarding unpaid labor have made it extremely difficult to combat. Most often, people engage in unsecured labor where they are not sure if they would be paid due to poverty. Many children in Latin America are participating in any of these sectors; agriculture, industry and the informal economy. Employment of child laborers is mostly common in the agricultural sector whereby children and at times women hold unpaid positions in family farms or businesses (Antonopoulos, and Hirway, 2009). In the industrial sector, the work performed ranges from factory work, manufacturing, mining or any such activities. The informal sector is so wide that keeping track of statistics of unpaid labor is often difficult. The International Labor Organization defines the informal sector as any good or service that is untaxed or unregistered by the government and involves unregistered workers. Works such as prostitution, domestic slavery, drug trafficking or any unregistered work falls within this category. Child labor negatively affects their education and development. In Mexico, children aged fifteen and under form about 30% of the workforce in the agricultural sector. In more remote communities such as the Mayan communities the situation is much worse. Children there are forced to endure hard labor from dawn to dusk and rarely attend school. In industries, the conditions for child laborers are even worse than in family businesses. In Honduras, children form about 50% of the total labor intensive workforce. Children are forced to work in the factories for over 12 hours till they reach their allocated quota. Young girls are usually sexually harassed in these factories by their bosses. The conditions are so pitiful and few if anyone often care about these children’s physical safety. The informal sector is often difficult to monitor as the number of children walking the streets looking for work or begging for money is very high. In Ecuador, children make about 25% of the workforce. According to research conducted by ILO, women form about 58% of informal jobs against 48% for men. Globalization has also pushed women further into informal work as they are relegated to be just home-based workers. The women do such jobs as laundry and dressmaking, clerical jobs, and other types of professional work. Women often face sex segregation at places of work and are usually given low paying jobs than their male counterparts in most Latin American economies (Commission on the Status of Women, 1989). The rapid globalization and neo-liberalization of most Latin Economies have resulted into greater market in-formalization. This growth of the informal sector has resulted in the weakening of the links between the informal sector and the formal institutions as majority of the workforce are now in the informal sector. This shift has come about due to governmental policies and privatization programs aimed at reducing the level of state influence in the markets and to open such markets to the global competition and attract foreign investments. These moves however have resulted in lower bargaining power for unskilled laborers. There has been a prevalent shift in investments towards the more dangerous, exploitative and often unprotected forms of employments. The magnitude of the population affected is so great that governments have almost been rendered unable to control the sector as proper statistics is usually lacking. In Latin America, about half of the working population is engaged in informal activities. For instance, in Bolivia the proportion of people working in the informal sector is about 65% of the total working population (Magaña, 2013). Research has shown that the problems of unemployment, underemployment and cases of unpaid labor have created more poverty. There is therefore lack of proper education available to such populations and the vicious cycle just repeats itself while the gap grows wider. A lot of literature on this subject has shown that the informal sector is characterized by dangerous and unstable working conditions, lack of government regulation and unprotected labor. Why Care? Unpaid work includes all the work that lack remuneration and mostly social recognition. Works such as child care by mothers often deny them opportunities to engage in paid labor. Paid work on the other hand refers to such work that are remunerated and thus recognized. Most organizations and trade unions have devoted much time in addressing problems in paid labor. Very little attention is often given to unpaid work. Many children and women in Latin American economies often spend a lot of time on unpaid jobs than men. This is mainly because in these economies basic social amenities like proper healthcare, proper schools, availability of water closer to people’s homes etcetera are often poorly developed (Bose, 2010). Unpaid work is often used interchangeably with unpaid care work, household production, and household reproduction. It is therefore critical to bring the subject of unpaid work into perspective. According to the United Nations System of National Accounts of 1993 some unpaid labor are considered to be economic work while others are classified as non-economic work. The economic unpaid work can be measured and included in calculating the GDPs of the various countries. The SNA convention of 1993 classified such economic unpaid work to include but not limited to work like; constructing a house for the family, agricultural work like animal husbandry and crop cultivation, collecting raw material for crafts and manufacturing, and collecting water or wood for family use (Romero, Sotelo, P., & Ortiz, V. (1997). However collecting data on these activities are often difficult and as such correct statistics is hard to obtain. Non-economic work falls outside the SNA production boundary and include work such as cleaning, cooking, shopping etc. unpaid care work include jobs like childcare, caring for elders or the sick etc. At the macro-economic level, feminist economists have stated that unpaid work contributes to the economy as their production of goods and services influence the lager economy of a country. In developing economies like in Latin America, excluding unpaid labor in calculating the GDP often presents a problem as larger portions of these economies engage in unpaid labor. Monetized activities form only a small fraction of the economy and thus omitting unpaid labor in GDP calculations would obviously lead to inaccuracies. It is therefore important in such economies to: Expand their GDP measurements and include the economic unpaid work and the non-economic unpaid work as per the SNA guidelines. Since these activities have been shown to have ripple effects on the larger economy, not considering them so would result in inaccuracies in the GDP estimation. Consider unpaid labor as subsidies to the monetized part of the economy. From the classical economics point of view, at the macroeconomic level, unpaid labor lowers the cost of labor resulting in increased profits and facilitate financial accumulation. Unpaid time spent on any type of work lowers the cost of production since in its absence the managers would be forced to pay for those services. It is thus safe to consider it as a subsidy to the market economy. Studies have indicated that most women in Latin America are forced to stay home and take care of their kids and cannot seek paid jobs although they have the required levels of education. Consider unpaid work as subsidies to state provisioning. Governments are often required by their citizens to; care for the sick in hospitals, the elderly, provide proper sanitation, and provide other social amenities. Most of these jobs are done by unpaid laborers and this affects public sector goods provisioning and can be considered as subsidies to the governments. Activities such as delivery of foodstuffs, cooking and serving for school children, child and elder care are some of the clear examples. Work hard to end all forms of child labor and forced labor in factories and instead invest more in educating its people since knowledgeable minds are more innovative and can better find ways of addressing these problems. For these Governments to successfully monitor the unpaid labor market, proper national accounting must be conducted and the statistics so developed be used in developing the best national strategies of regulating the sector. Emerging issues The rapid rise of unpaid labor in most economies has given rise to the search for new approaches to try and account for the unpaid labor market. According to Benería, (2003) there is concern about how the unpaid labor workforce is distributed across different age groups, sex or educational levels. The first issue is how the women are distributed across the labor market and within the family. Secondly, globally there is an increasing trend whereby even the paid workers resort to some forms of unpaid work as a means to survive; there is an upsurge of unpaid labor within Families and in the Community at large. These are usually not included in the national statistics. On the same score, the high rate of underemployment in most Latin American economies give way to a mixture of paid and unpaid work which affect the populations in various ways such as influencing the living standards of the people. Women still bear the brunt of combining their usual jobs with household chores like childcare. As a consequence, families have to redistribute how work is shared within households in order to achieve equality of gender. Lastly, given that unpaid labor forms roughly more than have of the labor force in Latin American economies, it is quite unwise to exclude it from national accounts calculations. Research on this subject has indicated that domestic work is increasing much faster than market production (Benería, 2003).This is mainly due to the fact that there are younger families where mothers have to devote most of their time caring for their babies. The growing number of elders and other sick members of the society who require constant attention is another reason. The foregoing reasons help understand why it sis so necessary to regulate the sector and ensure gender equality as well as good working conditions for all. The effort to reclassify work and measure the contribution of unpaid labor to the economies has taken a front row in most policies being developed across the world, mostly in Europe and America. Some critics have however expressed pessimism due to the complexity of the issues involved as discussed hereunder. The Criticism According to (Benería, 2003), some critics have raised their objections against responsible accounting for unpaid labor in Latin America and in the rest of the developing economies. Both feminist and orthodox economists have expressed their criticism towards this. First, it has been argued that it is a useless effort since the amount of resources and time needed to collect data and come up with proper statistics may end up not helping the unpaid class of workers. For instance, within the family, the women will still be expected to carry out their traditional duties like taking care of the house chores due to rigidity in cultural practices. There is a feeling that these efforts may not end up helping the women increase their bargaining power within the labor market. The second objection put forward is that too much energy is required to carry out these efforts. It must be remembered however that no task is usually easy at inception and some considerable amount of effort must be put forth at inception of such ideas. Policy makers at the national level of governments also do require enough statistical data to plan the economy and as such, seen in this light the effort does not therefore sound a lot like useless work (Benería, 2003). For instance, by the government knowing the time taken by women in carrying out household duties like fetching water and firewood may help the government to come up with efficient policies on how to reduce their workload. Again, the slowdown in economies worldwide has pushed more people into unpaid labor and it is only through keeping up with these figures can the governments then best design their policies towards sustainably development ( Benería, 2003).There is fear in many countries too that politicians may take up such efforts and dilute it to suite their own needs. This should not be a point for discouragement since by proper regulation; the governments in Latin America can improve the welfare of their citizen’s. The second objection to this effort is that most of the domestic work done mainly by women and children as unpaid labor as indicate above are considered personal and very different from market work. There argument put forward is that certain domestic activities such as childcare are self fulfilling and can hardly bee considered in the same light with other conventional forms of work. This however is not true as increased awareness and documentation of such activities help raise their recognition and better understand their significance to human welfare (Benería, 2003). On top of the foregoing reason; many unpaid jobs are not self fulfilling while some paid work is. Personal relationships also exist in paid labor and some are even more fulfilling. Another reason is that the process for measuring unpaid work relies heavily on theoretical and methodological questions originating from conventional economics. This however has been overtaken by continuous studies and refinement of the methods by different scholars worldwide. Conclusion Unpaid labor is quite prevalent in most Latin American economies and women and children are the most affected. There is a great challenge of measuring unpaid work and how it contributes to the overall economy of nations. Governments must therefore try and come up with legislative policies aimed at regulating work in the informal sector. Certain protective laws should be put in place to shield the populations in these countries from mistreatment at their places of work. Some factories that engage children and women in unprotected labor must be censured (Magaña, 2013). It is rather sad to realize that women and kids less than twelve years are being forced to work long hours in the factories without any extra pay. This is unacceptable behavior and must be stopped at all costs. The efforts by the United Nations, UNICEF, The World Bank, international Labor Organization ILO, and other related agencies have done little to improve that situation. Governments must therefore take it upon themselves to protect their citizens from such exploitative forms of service (Commission on the Status of Women, 1989). This paper though not exhaustive of the problems at hand somehow sheds light on the extent of the problem. It is important that any government that cares for its people must work to protect them. Child slavery and maltreatment of women at the workplace are bad for the development of any serious economy (Benería, 2003). It is therefore felt that the governments in Latin America have done very little to protect their people. The media should also be encouraged to shed light on any forms of unethical behavior in factories or other sectors of the economy. To this end, human rights groups should also make it their responsibility to fight for the rights of the unpaid works; mostly in the industries where there have been numerous reports of human rights violations. The national accounting for unpaid work suggested above is felt to be a proper way of monitoring the labor markets and regulating it to the overall benefit of the population. The problems mentioned herein, though not specific to Latin America, must be addressed through a coordinated approach between the governments, both local and national, and other international agencies like the UN, UNICEF, and the ILO. Reference 1. Antonopoulos, R., & Hirway, I. (2009). Unpaid work and the economy gender, time-use and poverty. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2. Bose, C. (2010). Women in 1900 Gateway to the Political Economy of the 20th Century. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. 3. Commission on the Status of Women: report on the 33rd session, 29 March-7 April 1989. (1989). New York: UN. 4. Magaña, C. (2013). Redistributing care: the policy challenge. Santiago, Chile: United Nations, ECLAC. 5. Romero, M., Sotelo, P., & Ortiz, V. (1997). Challenging fronteras: structuring Latina and Latino lives in the U.S.: an anthology of readings. New York: Routledge. 6. Benería, L. (2003). Gender, development, and globalization: economics as if all people mattered. New York: Routledge. Read More