Context

  • The International Labour Organization’s 2022 report titled, ‘Care at work: Investing in care leave and services for a more gender-equal world of work’ released to commemorate International Women’s Day.

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Details

  • The report highlights the importance of maternity, paternity, and special care leave, which help balance women’s and men’s work and family responsibilities throughout their lives.
  • The report notes that workplaces that provide time, income security and space for undertaking care services such as breastfeeding, enable positive nutrition and health outcomes.

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Care work

  • Care work is a sub-category of work that includes all tasks that directly involve care processes done in service of others.
  • Care work encompasses direct activities such as feeding a baby or nursing an ill partner, and indirect care activities such as cooking and cleaning.
  • Care work can be paid or unpaid. Unpaid care work mainly takes place in the home and is predominantly done by women. Care work doesn’t necessarily have to be unpaid – in most countries there are market and government run caring economies, with paid workers, private companies and customers

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Significance of care work/economy

The importance of care work/economy is widely acknowledged. Whether paid or unpaid, direct or indirect, care work is vital for human well-being and economies.

Human well-being:

  • Childcare and elderly care services will deliver the benefits of child development, aging in dignity and independent living as the population grows older.
  • This will enable positive nutrition and health outcomes.

Economic aspect:

  • Greater investment in care services can create an additional 300 million jobs globally and this can provide an impetus to the global economic prospects in the long term.

Women emancipation:

  • Most of the jobs created in the care economy will benefit the women job seekers. This will in turn help increase female labour force participation and advance Sustainable Development Goal- 8.
    • Sustainable Development Goal 8 aims to ‘promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all’.

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Concerns with respect to care work/economy

Neglect of care economy:

  • Despite the significance and potential of the care economy, the investment in the care economy has not been proportionate.

Non recognition of unpaid care work:

  • The care work by women is often overlooked, unfairly valued, and hardly rewarded. This is particularly evident in unpaid care work. Unpaid care work is yet to receive adequate attention in policy formulation.

Disproportionate burden of unpaid care work on women:

  • Around the world, women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men, which has a big effect on gender inequality in the economy. In countries where women do more unpaid care work, they are much less likely to be earning money. The higher the unpaid labor that women do, the greater the gender pay gap, which is the difference between how much more men are paid than women on average.

Bad state of paid care workers:

  • Paid care workers, such as domestic workers and anganwadis in India, also struggle to access rights and entitlements as workers.
  • Domestic workers face challenges in accessing decent work and face job insecurity. They lack adequate social or health protection measures. Despite existing laws like the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act and the minimum wage schedule in many States, domestic workers continue to remain exposed to sexual violence and low wages.

Insufficient Maternity/paternity benefits:

  • Maternity leave, though being a universal human and labour right, remains unfulfilled across countries, leaving millions of workers with family responsibilities without adequate protection and support.
  • Though India fares better than its peers in offering 26 weeks of maternity leave, against the ILO’s standard mandate of 14 weeks that exists in 120 countries, notably this coverage extends to only a tiny proportion of women workers in formal employment in India, whereas 89% of employed women are in informal employment.
  • Paternity leave is not provided in many countries, including India. Globally, the average paternity leave is nine days, which further exacerbates inequity.

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Recommendations

  • Government expenditure in the care economy should be increased.
  • The 5R framework proposed by ILO should guide India’s efforts in this domain. This framework urges the Recognition, Reduction, and Redistribution of unpaid care work, promotes Rewarding care workers with more and decent work, and enables their Representation in social dialogue and collective bargaining.
  • The crèche facility in factories and establishments should be extended with emphasis on increased accessibility, affordability and quality.
  • Working conditions of domestic and childcare workers needs to be improved by ensuring decent work for all. This would involve access to fair wages, workplace free from violence and harassment, have good working conditions, and access to social protection, among other benefits.

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