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REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS
| Jody Heymann, Forgotten Families: Ending the Growing Crisis Confronting Children and Working Parents in the Global Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006)
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| WHEN JODY HEYMANN, a medical doctor who also holds a PhD in Public Policy, was interviewing families in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 2001, she encountered Ramon Canez, a 10-year-old who, rather than attending school, looked after six younger siblings, five under the age of 5, in the family's one room in a metal barracks that housed many families. His parents worked 12 hours a day, 6 days a week, dad as an electrician, mom as a street food vendor, and a 14–year-old brother was also in the labour force. |
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Try as they might, this family could not properly feed itself, provide medicines when the need arose, or attend to all the children's needs. Two-year-old Laurita was immobile thanks to rickets that resulted from malnutrition. Fivemonth- old Beni, for whom Ramon did not know how to prepare a bottle, seemed a likely candidate for rickets as well. Beni had a bad cough and though the parents had spent the money for a prescribed cough medicine, fears that Ramon might overdose the baby prevented him from getting the medicine the prescribed three times a day. |
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Similar stories were common as Heymann and her team of researchers interviewed 55,000 families on 5 continents. Globalization, notes Heymann, has resulted in both a reduction in workers' ability to get decent pay and the provision of social services by the state. She asks what the impact is on working families. "Who will care for infants and toddlers? Who will care for six- and seven-year-olds when school is not in session in different countries? How will adults keep their jobs while caring for children who become sick with fever, diarrhea, or pneumonia? How can parents ensure that their young children receive essential preventive care, such as immunization, or receive breast milk, the best protection against the frequent malnutrition and illnesses accompanying infancy in poor nations around the world? Have the transformations helped to lift parents and children alike out of poverty around the world? If not, why not?" (11) |
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Most of what follows is unsurprisingly depressing. Poor families need to have every able-bodied adult and teenager in the work force. But they cannot afford private daycare and public daycare facilities are few and far between. The result is an international plague of children alone, and the sacrifice of kids' health, development, and education. Fifty-five percent of the families interviewed who had school-age children that they had to leave home alone indicated that an accident or emergency occurred at some point while they were at work. In Brazil and Mexico, 29 percent of single-parent families with preschool children had at least one school-age child who was not attending school, a figure three times that of such households without a pre-schooler, a clear indication of family strategies for minding the youngest children. Some mothers take their youngest children to work, which has some advantages but creates many dangers for the child as well as difficulties for the mother in getting her work done and making a subsistence income. Employers often forbid the mothers from breast-feeding at work, which puts their babies at risk. When children are ill, working mothers often have no choice but to stay home, even though they cannot feed their families if they take any time off work at all. The overall situation of childhood poverty and neglect is especially precarious for children without parents. In Botswana, it is predicted that because of AIDS, 22 percent of all children under 15 will be orphans in 2010. Studies of Ugandan orphans suggest that half are depressed and 34 percent of Tanzanian orphans admitted to having contemplated suicide in the past year. |
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But Heymann points to positive signs amid the gloom in a book that may be the most eloquent book ever produced in making the case for universal, affordable childcare. In Vietnam, though the country has cut social spending since it introduced market-friendly reforms in the later 1980s, there are still vestiges of socialist commitment to working-class households. Figures for children being left home alone in Vietnam are only half of the figures in Mexico, though Vietnam is a poorer country, mainly because of an ambitious public daycare system. In Ho Chi Minh City, 57 percent of lower-income families and 62 percent of higher-income families had sent a child to a formal daycare facility as opposed to making use of older children, relatives, or friends. In Otse, Botswana, a village of 3500 in Botswana, there is an after-school program called Dula Sentle for primary and secondary students with teachers who help with homework, and a playroom. Older children are relieved from having to care for younger siblings. "While developed to serve the stark needs of the increasing number of orphans created by AIDS, Dula Sentle could serve as a model for any after-school program." (66) |
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While Heymann's survey results are an indictment of neo-liberalism and the governments that follow neo-liberal policies, she focuses on a relatively small set of social policy reforms, primarily daycare, as noted, but also paid maternity leave which she notes is enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women, to which 177 countries are signatories. But Heymann is well aware of the larger issues of economic power and the impact of major cuts in social insurance provision that generally now accompany efforts to promote the accumulation of capital. She cites the grim statistics for Russia in its rapid transition from communism to almost unmediated capitalism. Life expectancy for Russian men dropped from 64.9 to 57.7 from 1987 to 1994, and 74.3 to 71.2 for women, which it might be noted, is why some commentators have observed that Boris Yeltsin, the drunken buffoon, may have been responsible for more Russian deaths than Stalin. The government stopped paying social assistance, while subsidies for childcare, education, and health care were drastically cut. In 2002, 26 percent of the Russian people lived below a very modest poverty line of $57 a month. Women's labour force participation had fallen from 74.7 percent in 1980 to 63.9 percent in 1999. |
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Overall, Forgotten Families, while it may stick to a few proposed reforms, suggests the bankruptcy of the entire project of capitalist globalization which focuses purely on benefits for investors with no particular interest in impacts on working people and their families. |
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ALVIN FINKEL
Athabasca University |
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