Istanbul Technical University Women’s Studies Center (ITU-WSC) Working Paper Series on Work-Family Balance and Gender Equality: A North-South Policy Perspective TAKING ADVANTAGE OF AUSTERITY: THE ECONOMIC CRISIS AND CARE IN SPAIN Lourdes Benería and María Martínez-Iglesias February 2014 Abstract The paper focuses on the effects of the 2008 economic crisis on care work in Spain. It analyzes the extent to which the crisis has affected earlier trends and brought about new developments in care giving. It shows that, even before the crisis, reconciliation policies were focusing on the distribution of care work within the family or they were leaning on the family to "professionalize" care work. The paper's main argument is that the crisis has been used as a way to justify the low implementation path that was being followed even before the crisis and to water down many of the policies that had been adopted since 1999. Using primary statistical sources and complementary information from interviews, we show that the implementation of these laws and the processes initiated in 1999 have been seriously weakened and, in some cases, even reversed by the crisis, with negative consequences for gender equality. 1. Introduction The main argument in this paper is that the economic crisis that has hit Spain since 2008 has become an obstacle and a turning point in the implementation of the policies that had been adopted during the previous decade on the issue of balancing family and labor
Since the crisis began, the implementation of the Law of Dependency has been facing new and substantial difficulties. There has been delays in the acceptance of new beneficiaries or in the transfer of funds even when approved; the amount received for caring for a family member has been lowered; budget cuts have reduced considerably the scope of the Law; non-professional family care givers have seen their access to social security cancelled. All these effects have a clear gender dimension given that the great majority of care givers are "non-professional" women. Thus, the crisis has been particularly harsh on women in this respect and gender equality has not been enhanced by the Law as expected. During the decade previous to the crisis, other funds and services related to care were also approved but they have also been eliminated as a result of the crisis or for ideological pressures. For example, the “baby check, a 2,500€ subsidy for working mothers, was cut out in 2010. In addition, some of the most notorious negative impacts of the crisis have been the indirect effects generated by budget cuts in key sectors such as health and education. Given the high proportion of female employment in the two sectors, these cuts have contributed to the increase in women's unemployment, thus expanding their time available for care work and reproductive activities at home. The cuts have also eliminated or reduced public services such as free meals at school and free ambulance services, both increasing reproductive work and family responsibilities, again affecting women in particular. Additionally, the election of the conservative party in 2011 added an ideological twist to some of the austerity policies affecting care. For example, public discourse referring to the Law of Dependency has moved away from the initial position of the Socialist government that showed a minimum recognition of women's work in providing care; the new conservative government has put pressure on families to pay for private care or to be responsible for their own care responsibilities. Since the arrival of the conservative government to power, the political discourse has focused mainly on the financial viability of care services without taking into account the gender consequences of the budget cuts. As Mariano Rajoy, the current President, has put it, "the Dependency Law is not viable" (Público, 3/30/2012). Thus, the political will to implement the adopted laws has practically disappeared. 4. Changes in the organization of care work