At the heart of unpaid care work in Mexico lies a paradox: The labor sustains the economy, even as it creates barriers to women joining the workforce.
All told, the value of uncompensated domestic labor in Mexico amounts to more than 26 percent of GDP, outpacing both the manufacturing sector and trade, according to the country’s statistics agency. Yet roughly 20 million Mexican women are not employed because they are busy providing unpaid labor.
Now, a push to build a national care system seeks to recognize and rebalance that work by creating a network of services covering care for children, people with disabilities, the elderly—and the caretakers themselves. President Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first woman head of state, created a Women’s Secretariat that, among other tasks, is charged with building the system. Earlier this month, one of the country’s main opposition parties said it would introduce an initiative enshrining the right to care in the Constitution.
But the devil is in the details, and building a national care system will take time and resources. Can Mexico get there?
The effort to recognize “the right to care, to be cared for, and care for oneself” is not new in Latin America. From the 2007 Quito Consensus on multiple regional women’s summits since then, it has been a focus of attention, and several Latin American countries have taken steps to develop care systems. In 2015, Uruguay became the first country in the region to make such a system law, while others—from Costa Rica to Colombia to Chile—are developing national systems with services ranging from early education programs and job training for people with disabilities to day centers where the aging can get the care and socialize.
Beyond care delivery, another goal is to close gender gaps: Across the region, women spend almost triple the amount of time that men do on unpaid domestic and care work.
Nowhere in Latin America is that gap between men and women bigger than in Mexico, where women devote, on average, 43 hours a week to unpaid labor—the highest in the region.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE by Carin Zissis ON WORLD POLITICS REVIEW
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