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Land Reform, Female Migration and the Market for Domestic Service in Chile*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

David E. Hojman
David E. Hojman
Affiliation:
David Hojman is Lecturer in the Department of Economics and the Institute of Latin American Studies, University of Liverpool.
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Extract

In recent years there has been significant improvement in terms of the quantity and quality of empirical studies on Latin American urban labour markets.1 The relative degree of ignorance concerning the market for domestic service is therefore particularly notorious. Some important gaps in the current state of our knowledge are the determinants of long-term trends and of short and medium-term fluctuations in this market, the relationship between domestic service and female rural–urban migration, and that between domestic service and the aggregate labour market.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 21 , Issue 1-2 , June 1989 , pp. 105 - 132
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

1 A review of the literature is presented in Hojman, David E., ‘Urban Labour Markets in Latin America: A Survey of Empirical Research’, University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies, Occasional Papers Series no. 8 (1986).Google Scholar

2 According to these estimates, there are between 150,000 and 200,000 domestic servants in Chile, half of them in Santiago; Mamalakis, Markos J., Historical Statistics of Chile. vol. 2. Demography and Labour Force (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Todaro, Rosalba and Gálvez, Telma, Trabajo Doméstico Remunerado: Conceptos, Hechos, Datos (Santiago: Centro de Estudios de la Mujer, 1987).Google Scholar The domestic service wages quoted by the Social Security Service are biased in a twofold sense: first, they include only those wages on which national insurance contributions are paid (no information is available about the rest, which are illegal, part of the underground economy); and second, if contributions are paid at all the wage declared is often the legal minimum, even when the actual earnings are higher. If the wage actually paid is lower than the minimum, obviously no national insurance contributions will be paid.

3 Elizaga, J. C., ‘A Study of Migration to Greater Santiago (Chile)’, Demography, 3, 2 (1966)Google Scholar; ‘Encuesta sobre Inmigratión al Gran Santiago’, in CELADE, Chile (Santiago, 1969)Google Scholar; and Migraciones a la Areas Metropolitanas de América Latino (Santiago, 1970).Google Scholar

4 Bell, William S. and Hojman, David E., Issues in Latin American Agrarian Reform: Promised Land, Wonderland or Never-Never Land?, University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies Working Paper 1 (1983).Google Scholar

5 Kay, Cristobal, ‘Agrarian Change after Allende's Chile’, in Hojman, David E. (ed.), Chile after 1973: Elements for the Analysis of Military Rule, University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies Monograph Series no. 12 (1985).Google Scholar

6 For a fuller discussion see Hojman, David E., ‘Minimum Wages, Union Membership and Differentials: The Phillips Curve and the Chilean Labour Market Revisited’, Journal of Economic Studies, vol. 11, no. 4 (1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Table 3.

7 The index of real wages in domestic service in Santiago rose from 100 in 1960 to 206 in 1970, to 247 in 1972, fell to 134 in 1975, and increased again to 273 in 1978 (Todaro, and Gálvez, , Trabajo…, p. 100).Google Scholar These authors use the official consumer price index as deflator, so their values should be compared with Table I in Hojman, ‘Minimum…’. The long-term improvement is better for domestic servants than for any other category of workers, but the fall in relative terms in 1975 is worse than anybody else's.

8 Hojman, David E., ‘Free-Market Economic Policies and Infant and Child Mortality in Chile: Multiple Regression, Principal Components, and Simultaneous Equation Models Results’, University of Liverpool, Institute of Latin American Studies, Occasional Papers Series no. 6 (1985)Google Scholar; David E. Hojman, ‘Neo-Liberal Economic Policies and Infant and Child Mortality: Simulation Analysis of a Chilean Paradox’, forthcoming in World Development; Boyle, Catherine M. and Hojman, David E., ‘Economic Policies and Political Strategies: Middle Sectors in Contemporary Chile’, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 38 (06 1985).Google Scholar

9 Boyle and Hojman, ‘Economic Policies…’; Edwards, Sebastian and Edwards, Alejandra Cox, Monetarism and Liberalisation: The Chilean Experiment (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).Google Scholar Demand for daytime domestic service, in which sleeping in the employer's household is not required (puertas afuera), is not so concentrated in the highest income families, but even so three-quarters of the demand for it is exerted by the top quintile, Todaro and Gálvez, Trabajo…

10 Smith, Margo L., ‘Institutionalized Servitude: The Female Domestic Servant in Lima, Peru’, Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University (1971)Google Scholar; Rutte-García, A., Simplemente Explotadas. El Mundo de las Empleadas Domésticas de Lima (Lima, 1973)Google Scholar; Gutiérrez, A., Se Necesita Mucbacba (Mexico, 1983)Google Scholar; Bunster, X. and Chaney, E. M., Sellers and Servants: Working Women in Lima, Peru (New York, 1985).Google Scholar For Buenos Aires see Forni, F. H., ‘Review of M. L. Gogna, El Servicio Doméstico en Buenos Aires: Características de Empleo y Relación Laboral’, Desarrollo Económico, 21, 83 (10–11 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Garrett, Patricia, ‘Women and Agrarian reform: Chile, 1964–73’, Sociologia Ruralis, 22 (1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Elizaga, Migrations…

12 Guichaoua, A. and Majeres, J., ‘Agrarian Structure, Technology and Employment: Agricultural Development in Chile, 1955–65’, International Labour Review, 120, 5 (09–10 1981).Google Scholar

13 Deere, Carmen Diana, ‘Rural Women and State Policy: The Latin American Agrarian Reform Experience’, World Development, 13, 9 (09 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Jarvis, Lovell S., Chilean Agriculture under Military Rule: From Reform to Reaction, 1973–1980, Berkeley, University of California, Institute of International Studies, Research Series No. 59 (1985), Tables 2.1 and 2.4Google Scholar; for alternative estimates see Kay, ‘Agrarian…’.

15 Rivera, Rigoberto and Cruz, María Elena, Pobladores Rurales (Santiago, 1984).Google Scholar

16 Gómez, S. and Echenique, J., ‘Trabajadores Temporeros de la Agricultura Moderna del Chile Central’, Documento de Trabajo no. 324, FLACSO, Santiago (1986).Google Scholar

17 Carreno, D. and G, G. Fu, ‘1985. Coyuntura Agraria: Más Dólares que Alimentos’, Documcnto de Trabajo No. 25, GIA, Santiago (1986).Google Scholar

18 This technique was successfully used by Balan, J. et al. , Men in a Developing Society: Geographical and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico (Austin, 1973).Google Scholar

19 For a Chilean example of unstructured interviews of domestic servants, see Gálvez, Telma and Todaro, Rosalba, Yo Trabajo así…en Casa Particular (Santiago, 1985).Google Scholar

20 Migration between regions is substantial, but this table does not show the possibly large intra-regional rural–urban migratory flows. For a more detailed discussion of the contents of Table 4 and related questions, see David E. Hojman, ‘Female Migration and the Market for Domestic Service in Chile’, typescript, University of Liverpool.

21 The accuracy of these official unemployment figures has been challenged by independent observers. However, alternative estimates exist only at the national level, not disaggregated by region. We would expect that if there are any biases in the official rates, these biases should apply evenly across regions. So comparison between regions should still be possible. Analyses of the multiple interactions between trade and financial liberalisation, exchange rates, non-traditional exports and labour markets, leading to the 1982 crisis, are presented in Edwards and Edwards, Monetarism…; and Hojman, David E., ‘The Dutch Disease as a Challenge to the Conventional Structuralist-Dependency Paradigm: Oil, Minerals and Foreign Loans in Latin America’, Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 42 (06 1987).Google Scholar

22 There is no way of knowing how many migrant women took up jobs in domestic service, held these jobs for some years, and then returned to their regions of origin to stay there. However, correlation in the sample between length of stay in Santiago and willingness to return to the countryside is minimal. There is no evidence to support the view that the longer a migrant stays in Santiago, the more likely she is to be willing to return to her region of origin. On the contrary, for the 18 migrants in the sample who would be very happy to return, the average year of arrival to Santiago was 1979–80; but for the 40 women who were not prepared to return, the average arrival year was 1971. In the ten cases of reverse migration followed by re-migration to Santiago in the sample, most are explained either by abrupt changes in family conditions, or by the migrant being employed in both the Santiago house and the country house of a rural landowner's family. The motives behind migration and reverse migration seem to be qualitatively different. Usually once migration is undertaken, it is for good: there is no return.

23 Over the long term, the proportion of domestic servants who are 19 years old or younger has been steadily declining, from 28% in 1960 to 26% in 1970 to 19% in 1980, Todaro, and Gálvez, , Trabajo…, p. 86.Google Scholar In our sample, taken in 1986, this proportion is only 8%. At least partly this is explained by the long-term expansion of opportunities for education.

24 This is confirmed by Rivera, and Cruz, , Pobladores…, p. 82.Google Scholar In our sample, the relationship between ownership of agricultural land and well-being of the family of origin is not unequivocal. In this sense replies can be classified into one of three types: (a) the family is better off now because they always have had land; (b) the family is better off now, and as a result they have acquired land recently; or (c) the family is worse off now despite land ownership: in this case insufficient credit facilities or other related problems are usually blamed. For credit and other forms of government support to parceleros see Jarvis, Chilean….

25 The wage standard deviation was 3,000, which means that under normal conditions 50% of all wages paid should be expected to be between 7,400 and 11,400 pesos (or 80% of all wages paid should be between 5,600 and 13,200 pesos). Todaro and Gálvez, Trabajo…, maintain that employment agencies in the wealthiest districts offer wages one-quarter to one-third higher than agencies in downtown Santiago, but no systematic evidence of better wages being paid in higher income neighbourhoods is shown by our sample.

26 The years of schooling in the sample fluctuated between o and 14, with an average of 6.6. Age fluctuated between 17 and 78, with an average of 34.7. The length of service at the current job fluctuated between one and 480 months, with an average of 45.3. Among women aged 21 or younger (20 of them), average schooling was 8.4 years. Only 5 women in the whole sample had no schooling at all. Their average age was 54.8 years.

27 According to Todaro, and Gálvez, , Trabajo…, in 1980–1982Google Scholar most women working puertas adentro were in their early twenties, whereas most women employed puertas afuera were in their thirties. In our 1986 sample this distinction is still there, but now it is less marked: average ages were 32.3 and 38.4 for live-in and daytime servants respectively.

28 The fact that the wage does not fall with the workload as the employee approaches old age could be interpreted as an informal ‘semi-retirement pension’.

29 This type of arrangement has been observed in other contexts and described as longterm ‘implicit contracts’, or associated with informal mutual insurance practices or with high costs of searching or changing jobs, Carline, Derek et al. , Labour Economics (London: Longman, 1985).Google Scholar

30 The standard deviation was 1,750.

31 National insurance contributions are not always paid. Employees are keen on them because they entitle the insured person to the state-system sickness benefit and old age pension. Some employers do not like them on the grounds that the system is bureaucratic, inefficient and expensive. They also tend to identify an employee's pressure for contributions as a sign of political militancy. A compromise is usually reached by which contributions are paid but only on the declared legal minimum wage, which is often lower than the wage actually paid. When we describe a wage offer as ‘net of all national insurance contributions’ it always means that the prospective employer is prepared to pay them.

32 The standard deviations were 3,740 and 1,680, for all wage offers and for wage offers for which it was made explicit that the offer was net of all national insurance contributions, respectively. The fact that the average wage offer net of all national insurance contributions in El Mercurio in 1986 was considerably higher than the average wage in our sample (even for women with less than a month in the current job) seems to confirm that only the best paid positions are advertised in newspapers.

33 However, the real wage in domestic service is likely to increase over the long term as the reserve of female labour in rural Central Chile and progressively further south becomes exhausted. As mentioned before this is, nevertheless, a very gradual process. For some evidence confirming this decline in domestic service supply over the very long term see footnotes 7 and 23 (the fact that on average domestic servants are older in 1986, footnote 27, might be a short-term phenomenon). Footnote 7 also confirms the presence of wild short-term market wage fluctuations between 1960 and 1978. In terms of income distribution, 86% of female domestic servants in Santiago were in the bottom quintile in 1960, but only 57% in 1970 and 42% in 1978, Todaro, and Gálvez, , Trabajo…, p. 101.Google Scholar

34 Just as a change of job may be required in order to get a better wage, also wage cuts may often be accompanied by changing jobs. In several cases in our sample either the employer or the employee preferred to terminate a job contract rather than imposing or taking a wage cut, in 1985 and 1986.

35 It must be emphasised that this not a policy recommendation, but merely a description of how the market functions and how individuals tend to protect themselves against extreme short-term changes in it. Clearly no informal system of ‘implicit contracts’ is meant to solve, or will ever be able to tackle, any of the most unfair and economically inefficient manifestations of discrimination against women in Latin American urban labour markets, which are all-pervasive and have deep social and cultural roots.