Women’s Unwaged Caring Work

A delegation of 70 women from the Global Women’s Strike, an organization formed to win economic and social recognition for unwaged caring work, stood together in the community of La Padera, Venezuela, awaiting news. Global Women’s Strike member Juanita Romero explained that President Hugo Chávez had just announced what we had all been waiting for: implementation of Article 88 of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Constitution. 

Article 88 in the Bolivarian Constitution declares: “The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work. The State recognizes work in the home as an economic activity that creates added values and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to Social Security.”  

Coinciding with the Global Women’s Strike’s delegation on February 2, in a speech delivered in the Teresa Careño theater in Caracas, Hugo Chávez proclaimed that on the first of May, International Worker’s Day, 100,000 Venezuelan female heads of households would receive 380,000 Venezuelan Bolivares per month ($185). This is about 80 percent of the Venezuelan minimum wage. In the following six months, another 100,000 women will begin to receive payments in recognition of their work. 

“Caring for others is accomplished by a dazzling array of skills in an endless variety of circumstances. As well as cooking, shopping, cleaning, laundering, planting, tending, harvesting for others, women comfort and guide, nurse and teach, arrange and advise, discipline and encourage, fight for and pacify. Taxing and exhausting under any circumstances, this service work, this emotional housework, is done both outside and inside the home,” said Selma James, international coordinator of the Global Women’s Strike. 

Besides the work in the home, the caring work of women in the community serves as a base of the Bolivarian Revolution. In the community of Los Teques, like so many others, this vital work is overwhelmingly led by women. While President Hugo Chavez has claimed that he will “eliminate poverty by giving power to the poor,”  in Los Teques, a city that is both rich and poor, urban and rural, the poor are not waiting to be given the power—they are taking it. 

In a poor barrio where many of the community members have squatted their land, the nurses and doctors of the San Juan Evangelista Health Clinic offer free preventative, curative, and rehabilitative health care to the community. The clinic is part of the Barrio Adentro Healthcare Mission where Venezuelan and Cuban doctors live in the communities in which they serve, and provide free healthcare to some of the poorest in Venezuela. 

San Juan Evangelista Health Clinic serves 400 families and works in close collaboration with the health committee, one of the many committees that have formed to assure that government programs and Missions reach the grassroots and that community members play a role in shaping them. 

Sharon Lungo, an activist from Los Angeles who participated in the Global Women’s Strike delegation, noted how in Venezuela the focus is on “addressing the injustices by building the alternatives.” 

A t the bottom of a steep hill, Sylvia Gonzales Rodriguez met the 70 women from the Strike with a big smile. She is in charge of the “food house,” which feeds 150 people in the community, mostly people who are unemployed, have drug addictions, are pregnant or nursing women. She works with four other women preparing hot food from scratch with the staples she receives from the state subsidized food program called MERCAL. “There are other food programs that are not involved in the revolutionary project, which give food to children. We ensure that the whole family eats, not just the children,” Sylvia said. 

This food kitchen is an integral part of all of the other Missions. If there are children or parents that receive food who have never learned how to read and write, they are integrated into the Educational Missions. If there are unemployed people who lack certain skills, they are integrated into Vuelvan Caras, the Mission that provides job training to establish cooperatives.