Bringing a global perspective to community, work and family

Abstract

To date, much of the research on the interaction between work and family has focused on single countries or comparative studies on OECD countries. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the feasibility of bringing a truly global perspective to comparative research on work, family, and community questions. We conducted an examination of extended‐hour work in four countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. This paper highlights two facts: first, the feasibility of using existing data sources to carry out comparative research on a more diverse range of countries than has generally been conducted to date, and second, the importance of conducting such analyses because of the critical insights that are gained for improving public policies and services.

Hasta este momento, la mayoría del la investigación cumplido sobre la interacción entre el trabajo y la familia se ha enfocado en países individuales o en estudios de comparación entre los países de la OCED. El propósito de este artículo es demostrar la viabilidad de llevar una perspectiva realmente global a las investigaciones comparativas de asuntos del trabajo, la familia y la comunidad. Llevamos a cabo un análisis sobre las horas de trabajo extendidas en cuatro países en Latino América, África y Asia. Este artículo hace hincapié en dos hechos: primero en la posibilidad de usar datos ya existentes para cumplir investigaciones comparativas en un gama más diversa de naciones que se suele hacer, y, segundo, la importancia de llevar a cabo tales análisis por la información crítica que ofrecen sobre la mejoraza de las políticas publicas y los servios públicos.

Keywords:

• working conditions
• extended work hours
• high work hours
• unpaid work hours
• global comparative research
• international labour standards
• parental time availability
• Palabras clave condiciones laborales
• horario laboral extendido
• horario laboral largo
• horas trabajadas sin remuneración
• investigación mundial comparada
• international labor standards
• estándares laborales internacionales
• disponibilidad de tiempo de los padres

Notes

For more information on LIS, see: http://www.lisproject.org (accessed: January 29, 2004). For more information on LES, see: http://www.lisproject.org/lestechdoc.htm (accessed: January 29, 2004).

For more information on the Project on Global Working Families, see: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/globalworkingfamilies (accessed: January 29, 2004).

For more information on the Brazilian Living Standards Measurement Survey 1996/97, see: http://www.worldbank.org/lsms/country/brazil/br97home.html (accessed: January 29, 2004).

For more information on the Mexico National Survey of Household Income and Expenditure 1996, see: www.inegi.gob.mx (Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática, accessed: January 29, 2004).

For more information on the South Africa Integrated Household Survey, see: http://www.worldbank.org/lsms/country/za94/docs/za94ovr.txt (accessed: January 29, 2004).

For more information on the Vietnam Living Standards Survey, 1997/98, see: http://www.worldbank.org/html/prdph/lsms/country/vn98/vn98docs.html (accessed: January 29, 2004).

We defined paid work to include work for which any form of economic remuneration was received.

For those with multiple jobs, hours from all jobs are included. In the Vietnam survey, work hours for those working on farms were collected for the last 12 months (to avoid bias due to seasonality). Therefore, these hours were transformed to weekly rates.

We include own children as well as step/foster/adopted children depending on data availability for each country.

In Brazil and South Africa lower secondary is completed after eight years of schooling and in Mexico and Vietnam after nine years.

For income, at the same hourly wage, those who work longer hours will have higher incomes. However, those who earn less per hour are more likely to need to work long hours to survive. In contrast, for education it is not the case that more work leads directly to more education, although it may or may not be the case that people who have a propensity to work longer hours have a propensity to stay in school for more years of education, many factors other than work effort determine educational opportunity and outcome.

Household income was used in all data‐sets except for Vietnam where household income was not feasible to calculate since wage and salary data were not collected on the 75 per cent of self‐employed workers and employers in the survey. However, we believe expenditures are likely to be a reasonable proxy for income.

The rate of reported attrition includes households that were not surveyed because the spouse or head did not meet the criterion for being a household member, living ‘under this roof for more than 15 days of the last 30 days’.

In addition, in the first stage some geographical regions are either intentionally or unintentionally non‐randomly selected. In the Vietnam survey urban areas were intentionally over‐sampled for more accurate representation, while in South Africa, two of the 360 primary sampling units were not surveyed due to political violence.

This applies also to the chi‐square tests performed to test for uniformity in distribution across categories. We have used the svytab command in Stata Release 8 to perform these tests (StataCorp, 2003).

Jody Heymann, MD, PhD, is founder and director of the Project on Global Working Families. Dr Heymann is an Associate Professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and Harvard Medical School. She is founding chair of the Initiative on Work, Family, and Democracy, and is the Director of Policy at the Harvard Center for Society and Health. For more than a decade, Dr Heymann has been involved in research on working families in the USA and globally. Address: Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Society, Human Development and Health, 677 Huntington Avenue, 7th Floor, Boston, MA 02115, USA.

Alison Earle received her PhD in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Dr Earle's research has focused on how public policies affect the needs of working families in the USA and worldwide. She is currently an instructor at the Harvard School of Public Health, and the project director for the Initiative on Work, Family, and Democracy. Address: Harvard School of Public Health, Department of Society, Human Development and Health, 1637 Tremont Street, Room 202, Boston, MA 02120, USA.

Amresh Hanchate received his PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison specializing in the application of econometric techniques for analysing individual decision‐making models. His research has spanned the fields of health economics and labour economics with particular interest focus on the disparities in health and income. Address: Boston University Medical School, Department of General Internal Medicine, 720 Harrison Dob 1108, 715 Albany Street, Boston, MA 02118, USA.