Work-life balance is a global dream: just listen to workers themselves
By Deirdre McCann* and Kelly Pike**
In the global North, there are signs that the daily struggle to balance employment and family life could become less fraught. In the US, proposals from across the political spectrum are raising expectations that paid family leave might soon be a reality. In the EU, the recent Work-Life Balance Directive has introduced a set of new rights for European workers.
Workers in lower-income countries also dream of working lives that allow them to care for their families.
This has been a key insight of our project on Decent Work Regulation in Africa (DWR-Africa). The project investigates effective labour standards in the garment sector in southern Africa, bringing together researchers and stakeholders from across the world, including the ILO.
Garment factories across sub-Saharan Africa supply clothes to many of the world’s largest brands and retailers. One of these countries is Lesotho, whose garment factories provide vital jobs in a country in which 25 per cent of the population is unemployed.
The conditions in many of these factories can be poor. Concerns are frequently raised about low wages, poor health and safety, long hours, discrimination, harsh management cultures, and even sexual exploitation.
Yet we have found that the problem that causes most anxiety for many Lesotho garment workers — 80% of them women — is how to combine their jobs with their family responsibilities.
The workers’ experiences are shared in a new short film, Rethabile’s Story, by Manchester, UK based film-maker Darren Hutchinson in collaboration with our project. The film offers a rare glimpse into life in the garment sectors of Lesotho and South Africa through the eyes of workers themselves. It tells the stories of Rethabile, an ex-garment sector worker, and her friends who still work in the factories.
It was striking how often these workers talked to us about work-life balance. Some worry about when they will see children they have left in distant villages with their parents. Others, how they will feed, clothe, and educate children closer-by, raised in modest homes and educated in heartbreakingly dilapidated schools.
Some of the garment workers’ problems seem easily resolvable. Mothers who fear being unable to respond to family emergencies, for instance, because mobile phones are banned in their factory. Others are more complicated. How to fit childcare with a full-time working day and long commute (some of the garment workers walk 12 miles each way to work). Without prompting, many of the workers volunteered their most cherished hope: to keep their children in school so that they will grow up to find good jobs.
Securing decent work in the garment sector is a complex endeavour. Governments, unions, employers, buyers, international agencies, and NGOs are all making laudable efforts. These include work/family initiatives. The ILO/World Bank Better Work programme, for example, recently showcased a factory in Indonesia that supports new mothers by providing paid breaks, a breastfeeding room and access to a medical clinic.
Yet legal rights are too often ‘paper tigers,’ with resources for enforcement inevitably scarce in poorer countries, and workplace innovations may be adopted by only the most exemplary factories. How to make improvements sustainable, and transfer lessons and strategies across borders, are enduring challenges.
Our report on Developmental Enforcement makes some suggestions by drawing on the recent experience of Lesotho. Centrally, it suggests a focus on better integrating international initiatives so that local actors can sustain decent labour standards in the longer-term.
Work/life balance should be at the heart of this endeavour. To appreciate its significance, we need only listen to the voices of workers themselves.
*Deirdre McCann is a Professor of Law at Durham University, UK.
**Kelly Pike is a Professor of Industrial Relations at York University, Canada.
Decent Work Regulation in Africa is an international collaboration between Durham University, UK, the University of Cape Town, South Africa, York University, Canada and local and international stakeholders. It is part of a broader investigation into globally-shared challenges to effective labour regulation funded by the UK Global Challenges Research Fund and Economic and Social Research Council. The Developmental Enforcement report explores the effective enforcement of labour standards in South Africa and Lesotho. The project can be followed on Twitter at @UnacceptableFoW.
