Building a Care System for Chile with the Communities at the Centre Amparo Arias Bravo, Chile

Building a Care System for Chile with the Communities at the Centre

By Amparo Arias Bravo, Chile

Introduction

In the context of the Chilean social outbreak and institutional processes that subsequently emerged, the feminist movement has constantly demanded the necessary redistribution of care work in society. This has paved the way for the care agenda to have relevance in the constituent process and the programmatic proposals of the new government (Convención Constitucional, 2022; Apruebo Dignidad, 2021; Presidencia de la República, 2022). At the same time, there is a proliferation of localities governed by social leaders, with feminist governments that have made care policies a priority at the municipal level. In tune with this enabling context, a National Care System is being developed by the current central government administration and is part of one of the main pillars of what they call their feminist policy. In this process, the main challenges have consisted in building a system that meets the objective of defamiliarising and defeminising care with a community and territorial perspective. The following policy recommendations are intended as guidelines for public policymakers of the central government (specifically the Ministries of Women and Gender Equity and Social Development) and of the local municipalities that recently formed feminist networks of support. As such, this policy brief aims to contribute to the discussion and elaboration of a care policy with a situated perspective, which places the priorities of caregivers and feminist organizations at the centre.

Expressions of the care crisis in Chile

Patriarchal capitalism is increasingly shaping an uncaring world, rewarding those who seek individual interest and maximisation of self-utility and penalising those who care and commit their life to it (Folbre, 2014). The unequal organization of care in which the modern world is structured places the responsibility to care on the shoulders of feminised, racialised, impoverished, and migrant bodies. Faced with the multiple transformations that recent times have brought, such as demographic, climatic, economic, and social changes, the ways in which we perform care are in crisis. Following Fraser (2016), the crisis of care,

“refers to the pressures from several directions that are currently squeezing a key set of social capacities: those available for birthing and raising children, caring for friends and family members, maintaining households and broader communities, and sustaining connections more generally” (p. 1). However, given that care is an essential and earthly condition, extremely necessary for human reproduction, the fact that care is at risk implies a tension on a larger scale; in fact, what is at stake is a crisis of social reproduction. In Chile, this crisis has many expressions, the demographic transition, changes in household composition, and transformations in the labour markets have led to an expansion of the demand for care. Accompanied by income inequality, the privatisation of social rights and the constant pressure to reduce public spending on social provision systems, this increased demand has been absorbed mainly by families and communities. According to ECLAC, female participation in economic activity in Chile reached 47.1 percent by 2020 (CEPALSTAT, 2022), meaning that 52.9 percent of the working-age population was considered "inactive". However, if this category is disaggregated into more specific activity conditions, 15,8% of women of working age are exclusively engaged in domestic and care work, a figure that increases for the lowest income groups (24.4 percent in quintile 1 and 19.6 percent in quintile 2). At the same time, the data show that 69.5 percent of women in Chile do not participate 59

for family reasons (ECLAC, 2019). This distribution of care responsibilities is expressed in the use of time within households, where women spend 42.4 hours per week on unpaid work while men spend only 19.4 hours per week (CEPALSTAT, 2022). These figures express what Beneria (1995) describes when she talks about the biases of traditional economic analysis, where women working for subsistence are considered non-productive or unemployed (Ustek, 2015). Faced with this invisibilisation, understanding care as a distributional struggle (Folbre, 2014) and directing actions in search of a fairer sharing of time is a way of rethinking a socioeconomic model that allows us to value these activities and perform lives outside the current critical conditions described. Therefore, installing a care system can redistribute the time of those who assume the costs of care, opening space for some bodies to assume greater care responsibilities and others to free up time.

Care agenda in Chile: From the social demands to a programmatic institutional response

Just as Gago (2018) mentions, the strike taken by the women's movement overflows and embraces those realities that are outside the borders of unionisation and paid work, these struggles put at the centre the central element of the capitalist system: the sexual and colonial division of labour (Mezzadri, 2020). Along these lines, and in the face of the social reproduction crisis expressed in Chile, feminist and caregivers' organisations have articulated and developed demands to respond to the unjust organisation of work and the precarious conditions in which care takes place. The synthesis of the last three plurinational encounters, one of the main instances of feminist organisations in Chile, has included in its list of demands a Plurinational System of Care with a territorial and community perspective (Coordinadora Feminista 8 de Marzo, 2019, 2020, 2021). The programs highlight the importance of being aware of the diversity of identities and peoples that inhabit the territory and the different worldviews they have about what care is and how they perform it. Also, the summary of the caregivers' encounter program, which brought together 20 caregiving organisations in 2020, incorporates in its demands the creation of a Support and Care System with national coverage and prioritising the optimal development in each region of the country (Mesa de Trabajo para la Promoción y Visibilización de los Cuidados, 2020). Issues such as the coresponsibility of the state, the importance of giving dignity to caregivers, the collection of information for relevant policies, and the particularities of each territory within the country are dimensions included in their list of demands. These demands have had repercussions in two crucial spaces for political transformation today: the draft of the new Constitution and the programmatic proposal of the new government. On the one hand, Article 10 of the newly proposed Constitution guarantees the right to care and the creation of an Integral Care System with parity, solidarity, cultural relevance, gender and intersectional perspective (Convención Constitucional, 2022, p. 94). On the other hand, the administration of the new government has recently announced the architecture of a National Care System (Presidencia de la República, 2022) and has already established in its main axes the elaboration of a registry of caregivers, the strengthening of home care programs, the promotion of training, universality, and care for the elderly in the Day Care Centers for the Elderly (Gobierno de Chile, 2022).

The roadmap for a system of care with a community perspective

In the last decade, Latin America has had different experiences with care systems, generating a roadmap in constructing the fourth pillar of social security in the region. Specifically, Uruguay's National Comprehensive Care System had two distinctive aspects compared to the provision systems developed in the Nordic countries: the central role of caregivers and the importance given to

community care. These policies developed from the South have had a particular focus on studying the interrelationships of the different agents in the care diamond (Razavi, 2007) -the state, the market, families and communities - and have given the latter an important role due to how care is organised in the region. In short, implementing a care system implies integrating a completely new provision system into the social protection structure. In Latin America, these systems have considered three target populations as recipients of care: (1) children from 0 to 3 years of age, (2) populations over 65, and (3) permanently dependent populations. To this is added the preponderance of the caregiver population in the application of the system, promoting the economic autonomy, training and labour dignity of the caregivers. The system coordinates pre-existing care policies such as parental leave and kindergartens and deploys a new offer of community care centres, personal assistants, tele-assistance, among others (see annex 1 for more details). However, in the Uruguayan system, there is significant room for improvement in how care is understood in the communities and how the state thinks of itself as a facilitator of the existing care networks. In the performance evaluation of the first five years, one of the key challenges is advancing in social co-responsibility - that is, in the distribution of care between the state, families, the community and the market (Sistema de Cuidados, 2020). To advance in greater social coresponsibility, the system defines that two processes need to be consolidated: collective bargaining among people working in the care sector and community participation with a solid territorial base. Therefore, the policy recommendations of this policy brief focus on interventions on community care that could strengthen the latter process. • Childcare Cooperatives. One of the populations in which the Uruguayan system had problems in increasing coverage is early childhood (Sistema de Cuidados, 2020). The presence of children in the home increases the workload for women in the home, and, at that age, there is still strong resistance to sending children to care centres. However, many households with children at home rely on the help of family and community networks. Along these lines, promoting cooperatives for childcare can be a way of increasing coverage. In these cooperatives, the principal caregivers play a central role in running the care spaces, and time and money are distributed to organise care provision for a small group of children. People who can offer their time a few days a week receive a more significant subsidy for the payment of the service. The state has different roles in the functioning of the cooperative: (1) building a registry of caregivers who can perform the core work of care in the cooperative, (2) providing the physical place and the resources for its development and (3) supervising the provision. These spaces do not replace the existing and potential public care services but provide an alternative for those who do not send their children to larger care facilities. • Day Care Centres for the Elderly. In Chile, women never stop caring, and even when they are over 70 years old, they spend 35 hours a week on unpaid work (Cooperativa Desbordada, 2020). Therefore, having care centres for the elderly means providing an opportunity to alleviate the working hours of those who have been caregivers all their lives. Incorporating policies that dignify old age, guarantee recreational spaces and promote the autonomy of the elderly population are ways of integrating retribution and reparation mechanisms into the care system. These centres are currently managed by local governments or privately, so there is a debt of the central government in promoting the creation of centres and supporting their implementation at the local level. There is also debt in including measures to prevent abuses and bad practices. A good example is the forms of internal co- governance with the active participation of the elderly population applied in Uruguay's care system (Sistema de Cuidados, 2020). • Territorial Care Mapping. Many community care strategies are often invisible to state institutions. In this regard, it is essential to have better data to implement informed and

situated policies. Developing tools to make visible the time dedicated to care networks and how they support social reproduction is key to building policies with a territorial perspective. Although time-use measurement tools have been vital to measuring time within households, they still do not cover representatively rural areas and are biased concerning the expressions of care in different territories. One strategy that can be highlighted to address this invisibilisation is the exercise that Argentina is doing to integrate into the system's architecture a tool for visualising care at the federal levels (Ministerio de las Mujeres y las Diversidades, 2021). In turn, other more incipient exercises of visualisation of community networks, developed by social organisations in Spain and Chile, can be helpful to shed light on the diversity of care developed in the localities (Ecologistas en Acción, 2021; Cooperativa Desbordada, 2022).

Towards a progressive and decentralised fiscal policy for care

The feasibility of a care policy with a community and situated perspective will depend on a series of structural factors of fiscal policy in Chile, firstly, on how state resources are distributed, more specifically, on the degree of centralisation of decisions on public resources. Currently, more than 90 percent of public spending depends on the central executive power (Dirección de Presupuestos, 2020), an issue that different municipality movements have criticised for restricting the decisionmaking capacity of the territories. In this sense, the ongoing constituent process will be crucial to determining a new way of executing public spending and could provide different sources of resources to develop care policies with a local perspective. In this sense, recent changes in the distribution of power in municipal governments, together with a new way of thinking about public spending, could strengthen programs such as those described above: networks and care centres that function collectively and with municipal support. Secondly, these policy recommendations will depend on the size of the public budget and the possibility of developing a more progressive and fairer taxation system. Chile is the second most unequal country in the OECD and is the one that reduces inequality after taxes (OECD, 2021). The avoidance and evasion practices lose resources estimated at 7.6 percent of the GDP for 2017 (Accorsi and Sturla, 2020), in a country where spending on health and education corresponds to 4.9 percent and 5.2 percent of the GDP respectively (ECLAC, 2019). Therefore, the current administration's tax reform must have progressive redistribution at the centre and raise sufficient resources for an intensive care policy. Finally, the possibility of sustainably financing a care system relies on the disposition of resources in the medium and long term. As mentioned above, the draft of the new constitution establishes an Integral Care System with "progressive, sufficient and permanent financing" (Convención Constitucional, 2022, p. 94), which implies that if the text is approved in September 2022, the financing of the system would be constitutionally guaranteed.

Conclusion

The architecture of the system and its development plan is still unknown as it depends on the proposal that will emanate from the central government and the subsequent legislative work. In this open window of political transformation, an emphatic vision of how the fourth agent of the care diamond is understood can be vital in directing resources towards the community networks in which care is developed today. In order to advance in the defamiliarisation of care, it is not only necessary to expand the provision of public services and increase the supervision and quality of private provision but also to strengthen the community care networks on which social reproduction is currently based, removing them from precariousness and guaranteeing that they are carried out within a framework of rights.

Appendix 1

Table 1. Uruguay: Services and benefits provided by the Comprehensive National Care System. Source: Bravo, Amparo (2022). Mapping exercise Comprehensive National Care System of Uruguay (2015-2020). Assignment for the course: ISS-4154 Critical Social Policy.

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