Intervention by the International Women Count Network to the Maternity Protection Convention Committee,
88th International Labor Conference, Geneva, Switzerland, 31 May 2000
Our members are here to speak on behalf of the International Women Count Network which is based in many countries in all parts of the world. We thank the Committee for this opportunity to present the views of women who are otherwise rarely heard.
1) When entering the waged workplace women bring with them an important unwaged job, including the skills learnt in this job. Employers worldwide have made much of women's biological work as an excuse to underpay women and deny women our rights. Universal maternity protection including paid breastfeeding breaks begins to reverse an injustice, right a wrong, an important step towards ending the disadvantages women suffer because we are mothers of the human race.
The ILO Report 4(2a) for this conference shows that our contribution has been acknowledged: the government of Italy said: "It is outdated to consider maternity anywhere in the world as a burden on society or as a production cost for companies . . . inalienable rights are involved . . . safeguarding women's and children's health. . . an economic bias in the current view of society is running counter to its renewal through human reproduction." The Moroccan labour union stated that "working women are the foundation of [the] economy and wealth."
2) On this basis we reject the "gender equity" argument which claims that it is unfair to men if women expect treatment which takes our biology and our caring work into account, and that doing so will provoke further discrimination against women. Equality cannot be based on women carrying an invisible, unwaged workload on top of the waged workload we do alongside men. This is an attempt to hide the sexism which downgrades the unwaged work women do and invites women to carry a double load, and an attempt to make two jobs by women equal one job by a man. And in return for doing this extra unwaged work, women are punished by receiving extra low wages.
3) Women are entitled to maternity protection, including paid nursing breaks and other benefits, on the basis of the vital work we do, a partial compensation for our enormous unremunerated economic and social contribution. The alternative is to deny us this entitlement, penalizing women for doing the double day. Women's work of bearing children and breastfeeding is our unique, massive and fundamental contribution. Ignoring this contribution is the basis for *all discrimination against women.
4) Caregivers have the responsibility for the health and well-being of the global community, beginning with infants. They are entitled to social consideration which must begin with having the time to do their work. The powerful Global Market is defining priorities, and telling us that what we don't have to buy (and what the market does not profit from) is not worthwhile. Because so much of caregivers' work is outside the Market, neither infants nor mothers have been economic priorities. This is entirely unacceptable. Since last year's ILO Conference, the world has changed and taken a big step forwards - the events in Seattle, Washington, India and elsewhere demonstrate that. There is a new defining of priorities. What we fought for last year is entirely acceptable to many more people and in this new millenium expectations are much higher.
So it is unacceptable that breastfeeding is rarely acknowledged as a contribution to the economy, part of this unwaged caring work that mothers do. And that breastmilk is not treated as the basic world food that it is. Breastfeeding is the foundation for the highest standard of nutrition and
health that can be offered to infants, saving lives and avoiding the misery of ill-health as well as saving millions in health care costs. Equally important, breastfeeding is an opportunity for women to be uniquely productive while safeguarding our own health.
But despite these irreplaceable benefits breastfeeding has been undermined over the last century, with catastrophic results: "By 1996 only 1/3 of babies in the world were exclusively breastfed. This decline is responsible for the deaths of at least 1.5 million infants each year, and uncounted illnesses and allergies in the population generally . . . "* With the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action, we have prepared a publication to be launched at this 88th ILO conference. The Milk of Human Kindness is a global factsheet on the economic value of breastfeeding. In this book we show how much breastmilk and the work of breastfeeding are worth, economically and socially. We make a comparison using an economic balance sheet of how much is spent supporting breastfeeding and how much is spent undermining it. It is a reckoning not only of the value of breastfeeding but of the social value of women and children, in fact of all our lives.
This Maternity Protection Committee and the Convention you are now drafting must not contribute to any further decline of breastfeeding globally.
Instead the new Convention must help reverse that decline and provide fundamental support for all women making this social and economic contribution.
5) We therefore want to see the following provisions in the new Maternity
Protection Convention:
i. Scope: "all women who work" must be covered, that is, women working in the informal sector, for example, as domestic workers, agricultural workers, migrant and contract workers. Who can think that their health and lives, and those of their children have less value than women working in the formal sector? The value of every life is equal.
The Convention must also cover married and unmarried women, a principle established in 1919. Punishing mothers also punishes children. Must babies suffer because of different sexual mores and what some people think of them?
In some countries such a move would mean that the majority of mothers and their children are excluded. Mothers of adopted children must also be covered.
ii. There needs to be "A minimum of two daily nursing breaks of at least one half hour each for a period of at least one year." They must count as working time and be paid - as the a spokeswoman for Kenya said last year: "the breaks are really working periods for a nursing mother." Nursing breaks cannot be a luxury only better off mothers can afford to take. A clean, comfortable space separate from the worksite with access to safe water is also necessary. No medical certificate is necessary for breastfeeding and should not be required - it is another obstacle in the way of mothers taking the breaks.
iii. The non-negotiable compulsory six weeks of paid maternity leave after birth must be put back into the Convention. And paid maternity leave must be extended to six months, in line with international guidelines which recommend
six months exclusive breastfeeding.
iv. Entitlement to cash maternity benefits should be universal, regardless of the number of children a woman already has. Women should not have to work a certain length of time to qualify for benefits.
v. Protection from dismissal or other discrimination against women who are breastfeeding after their return to work must be strengthened. Current language allowing dismissal on grounds "unrelated to pregnancy or childbirth and its consequences or nursing" gives too much leeway for such discrimination.
vi. The health and safety of pregnant women, nursing mothers and their children cannot be up for negotiation. The new Convention needs to ensure that pregnant women and nursing mothers are not required to do any job that could put their health or that of their children at risk.
Our proposals are in line with decisions to defend and promote breastfeeding from the Beijing Platform for Action already agreed by governments at the UN
Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. These UN decisions include ction
to " . . . enable mothers to breastfeed their infants by providing legal, economic, practical and emotional support", " . . .to alleviate and eliminate
environmental and occupational health hazards associated with work in the home, in the workplace and elsewhere with attention to pregnant and lactating
women" ; to ". . . eliminate discriminatory practices by employers . . . such
as the denial of employment and dismissal due to pregnancy or breastfeeding.
. ." and to " . . . promote the facilitation of breastfeeding for working mothers." Further governments agreed to measure and value unwaged work through time-use surveys and in satellite accounts.
'Women worldwide demand recognition that what they do outside the Market, the production of life and the caring for it, has social value. What, we keep
asking, is more important than this?** Millions more people are joining in
and asking the same question: what is more important? Life or the Market?
What is decided here is a test case for what kind of society we want.
International Women Count Network
Box 287 London NW6 5QU England
Tel:: (020) 7482-2496 fax (020) 7209-4761
Email: crossroadswomenscentre@compuserve.com
Box 11795 Philadelphia PA 19101 USA
Tel: (215) 848-1120 fax (215) 848-1130
Email: 72144.1055@compuserve.com
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