For the recognition of care as a necessity, a job and a right, to achieve equal development
A few months ago, a bill was introduced to create a Comprehensive System of Care Policies: "Cuidar en Igualdad" ("Equality in Care Work.") In its body, the bill recognizes care work as a job and expands the terms of family leaves for both gestating and non-gestating people following an equal distribution of work.
What other advances does it promote? It recognizes self-employed people's right to provide care. It establishes the same regime for private house workers, temp farm workers and all national public officials. It grants non-gestating and adopting parents the right to request leave of absence.
Did you know that the International Labour Organization supports this initiative?
Equality in caring, from an intersectional approach
One of the predominant stances within feminisms—specially those of institutional nature and from the global North—regarding care work and women states that the problem of gender-based violence against women could be solved if it were presented as an economic issue. It points out that women who spend their days doing care work are an untapped workforce that the market should employ for its own benefit.
On the other hand, a different perspective considers that the unpaid care work done by women covers up the labor exploitation of men within the workforce. It's important to point out that a perspective that pushes for just "incorporating women as part of the workforce" is not intersectional.
According to bell hooks (2015)—from the global North, too, although critic of this "incorporation" perspective—, Black and poor women (the latter, of all origins) have been part of the workforce for a long time and they have even been doing the care work neglected by women of the upper class. In "Feminist Theory: from Margin to Center," bell hooks states that "Friedan's famous phrase, 'the problem that has no name,' often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women-housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life."
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