Women in Latin America and the Caribbean - Cepal

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employee for family reasons. The duration of this leave is decided on in consultation with the employer,
however, so that it may not always satisfactorily meet the worker’s needs.
State provision of early childcare is inadequate in most of the region’s countries, the exceptions
being Uruguay and Cuba. Private provision caters only to an extremely small number of people. In these
circumstances, the women in families with newborn children provide a de facto social safety net. The
recipients of care, in this case children, pay the price for family adjustment and the lack of State
provision. Differences in the care children receive exacerbate social inequalities, and the opportunity for
and quality of care will determine their future. Despite this, most countries only recognize care needs
from the age of six, when children begin school.
The existence of day-care centres or crèches is related to the third key component: childcare
services for the children of working people. The regulations on childcare facilities attached to the
workplace vary enormously from one country to another, but the great majority oblige employers to
provide such facilities based on the number of female workers they employ. The law therefore not only
assumes that it will be the working mother who brings her child to work, but also allows them to restrict
the number of women they employ to avoid the extra burden of providing a new childcare facility.
In Argentina, article 179 of Law No. 20744 on employment contracts obliges employers to
provide mother and baby rooms and day-care centres based on the number of female workers employed.
No implementing regulations were ever issued for this article. Law No. 11317 established that this
obligation applied to companies employing more than 50 female workers aged over 18; subsequently,
Law No. 20582 provided for the creation of district nurseries for the children of mothers aged under 18.
However, no implementing regulations were issued for either of these provisions and they are not applied
in a coordinated way; nor is there any system for ensuring that a woman’s children are cared for while she
is at work. Some collective labour agreements recognize the right to use of a day-care centre or to
financial compensation in the absence of such a facility.
In Costa Rica, employment legislation does not provide for day-care facilities in the workplace. It
does, however, guarantee that “all breastfeeding mothers shall be entitled in the workplace to a break of
15 minutes every three hours or, if they prefer, half an hour twice a day during working hours so that they
may feed their infants, unless a medical certificate can be produced to show that they only require a
shorter break” (article 97 of the Labour Code). In Puerto Rico, Public Law 155 obliges government
agencies in their capacity as employers to provide an appropriate place (not the ladies’ room) for the
extraction of breast milk. 52
Varied as they are, all these laws apply discriminatory criteria that differentiate the ability of men
and women to look after small children, the sick and older adults. This is particularly striking in the case
of older adults, since labour regulations make no provision for their care other than to provide for a
pension if they have contributed to the pension system as wage-earning employees. However, there is no
provision for male and female workers to care for their parents, although this is becoming increasingly
necessary as the lifespan of older adults in the region increases. Other than in the Bolivarian Republic of
Venezuela, whose Constitution establishes that “the father and mother have a duty to raise, bring up (…)
their children, and those children have a duty to assist them when they can no longer care for themselves”
52
Report of the Women’s Procurator of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico presented at the subregional
preparatory meeting for Central America and Mexico for the tenth session of the Regional Conference on
Women in Latin America and the Caribbean, Guatemala City, 17 and 18 May 2007.