Contrary to popular belief, companies in Latin America face the same need to help their employees reconcile work and family life as their European and U.S. counterparts. This is the conclusion of the IFREI (IESE Family-Responsible Employer Index) study, prepared by Professor Nuria Chinchilla and researchers Consuelo León and Anaïs Maya Hendriks.
The studied is based on companies in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, and was produced in collaboration with the following business schools: Instituto Superior da Empresa (Brazil), Instituto de Alta Dirección Empresarial (Colombia), Instituto de Desarrollo Empresarial (Ecuador), Escuela de Negocios Universidad del Istmo (Guatemala), Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa (Mexico), Escuela de Dirección de la Universidad de Piura (Peru), and Instituto de Estudios Empresariales de Montevideo (Uruguay)
The responses given by the companies surveyed suggest that the cliché of South American dolce far niente is entirely misleading. In fact, workaholism is widespread. More than half the companies expect employees to take work home with them.
A Heterogeneous World
The countries of Latin America are too heterogeneous to allow sweeping generalizations. The vast territory stretching from Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego encompasses a wide diversity of habitats, education systems, natural resources and production systems. The proportion of mixed race, indigenous or African-American people in the overall population also varies dramatically from one country to another. It would be a mistake, therefore, to lump them all together.
Brazil is a particularly atypical case. It has 42 percent of the landmass and 33 percent of the population, and boasts a different language from almost all the other nations. Also, though an emerging world power, it carries only a very limited weight in the concert of Latin American nations, many of which languish near the bottom of the world's human development league tables.
Despite their great diversity, the countries of Latin America have two things in common which, beyond geographical proximity, give them a degree of human and cultural cohesion: Roman Catholicism and language. Another affinity is respect for the family, which obviously exerts a significant influence on any effort to balance work and family life. Of the Brazilian companies included in the study, for example, 88 percent cite respect for the family as part of their corporate culture.
The family plays a fundamental role in every society, but in societies with only a rudimentary social safety net, such as many Latin American countries, it is the only institution that can afford protection against unemployment, illness and migration. As an economist might put it, in these countries, the family represents a vital stock of social capital.
Diverse Legislation
And yet, the Latin American family is not immune to the pressures besetting the family in other parts of the world. While the nuclear family still predominates, the number of female single parent households continues to rise. The result is widespread exhaustion among the female population and poverty in society at large.
In Latin America, as elsewhere, women have started to join the paid workforce on a massive scale. Between 1990 and 2002 the female employment rate in urban areas (in the countries studied) rose from 37.9 al 49.7 percent. As almost everywhere, though perhaps more markedly than in Europe, the increase in the number of women taking paid employment outside the home has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in male participation in domestic chores. As a result, the full burden has fallen on women.
At the same time, work-family reconciliation measures are not yet widely accepted by Latin American companies. There is no comparison to Europe, except on the most basic level, such as statutory maternity leave (which varies from 12 to 16 weeks, with some countries requiring that at least half be taken after the birth). Time off for breast-feeding is guaranteed in all countries, and in Peru the law stipulates that for six months the daily breast-feeding break "may not be replaced with extra pay or compensated in any other way."
Another feature found in the legislation of all the countries is an emphasis on the provision of kindergartens in the workplace. This no doubt has a lot to do with the high birth rate (averaging three times higher than in Spain). Brazil, for instance, requires all companies with more than 29 employees over the age of 16 to have kindergartens; in Guatemala the threshold is 30 employees; and in Ecuador, 50 employees, male or female.
Nevertheless, a great deal remains to be done before work-family measures become universal in Latin American companies. In Brazil and Mexico only 20 percent of companies have work-family policies in place, 15 percent in Uruguay and 13 percent in Colombia. In Ecuador such policies are found in 12 percent of companies, in Guatemala in 9 percent, and in Peru in just 6 percent of companies.
More than half the companies that responded to the surveys say that they have no work-family reconciliation policies, and between 20 and 35 percent say they have such policies, but have not implemented them. What's more, a far from negligible proportion of the companies that have actually implemented work-family measures say that employees do not take advantage of them.
By contrast, the main demands of employees with respect to flexibility policies focus on days off and short vacations or leave for emergencies, time off for training, and flexible working hours.
According to the authors of the IFREI report, Latin America is one of the regions of our planet most likely to see major social changes in the coming decades. Many Latin American countries still need to develop a middle class, which today simply does not exist. Also, career and development opportunities in this continent of almost 600 million inhabitants need to be expanded. Against this background, measures to reconcile work and family life are urgently needed. It would be best to start right now.