For a national system of support and care. By Dr. Marco Ceballos Schulson, Academic at the Faculty of Education and Social Sciences of Andrés Bello University, Viña del Mar Campus – G5noticias

Over the past two decades, throughout the governments of Lagos, Bachelet, and Piñera, Chile has made progress in developing and improving public institutions that aim to respond to poverty and social and economic vulnerability. The current Ministry of Social Development and the Family (formerly Ministry of Social Development, former Ministry of Social Development, former Ministry of Social Development), whose mission is to eradicate poverty and provide social protection to people, is the result of a process of learning, organization, and administrative innovations in social policy matters. Likewise, there is the “Intersectoral System of Social Protection” (2009) that now includes specific subsystems such as “Chile Solidario” (2004, focused on extreme poverty), “Chile Cris Contigo” (2009, focused on early childhood), and “Securities.” “Opportunities – Moral Family Income” (2012, focusing on the employability of particularly vulnerable women). Chile has, in two decades, moved from a socially irresponsible state model, inherited from the Pinochet dictatorship, with an overly focused and discretionary social program, towards a broadly focused institutional framework that integrates social benefits and advantages for the benefit of socially and economically vulnerable groups, defined as priority beneficiaries.

However, not all social problems are due to conditions of socio-economic vulnerability, although these conditions affect the poorest groups more strongly – like everything else. There are urgent and massive problems that we cannot address through an institutional framework of poverty and social vulnerability. This is the case of the “crisis of care”, as demographic and social factors such as advanced ageing, low birth rates, family disintegration, and female domestic dependency are called, which affect the well-being of a very large segment of the population. Today, in Chile, an inverted or regressive population pyramid is already evident, typical of post-industrial societies, but with a pre-modern social structure based on the definition and de-institutionalization of care.

Updated official figures indicate that between 1.5 and 2 million people in Chile (about 10% of the population) have some degree of dependency. More than 70% of them receive unpaid care from female relatives, regardless of their socio-economic status. Women spend almost five times more time than men on unpaid care and other domestic work, and in contrast, they spend about half the time of men on paid work, which affects their integration and career paths, as well as their economic independence and well-being. The care crisis is exacerbating gender inequality.

In Chile there are no institutions, no programs, no allocation of resources to address this problem structurally. There is a limited, scattered and fragmented programmatic offer with welfare characteristics, allocated according to social and economic targeting criteria, which is incapable of meeting these needs, let alone planning and projecting public policies with social and demographic impact over time.

It is not enough to create a new “subsystem” of care under socio-economic targeting criteria that clarify and improve the current offer, not only because the care crisis does not affect a homogeneous segment of the population (the legal requirement for the formation of “subsystems” of “social protection”), but also because the social and economic situation of self-reliant people and caregivers does not constitute the core of this complex social problem. It requires a more ambitious institutional framework, designed with global standards, with administrative powers, effective decision-making capacity and intersectoral integration, and planning policies with social and demographic impacts for the next half century. The sub-institutional character of Chilean social policy does not allow it to take responsibility for this structural, heterogeneous and aggravating problem.

In this sense, the bill recently presented by the government, which creates a national system of support and care, is not only correct in taking into account these structural and institutional dimensions and seeking a social and institutional reorganization of care around shared responsibility between the sexes and the reconciliation of workers, among other prominent aspects, but it is also part of the path of progressive and politically inclusive reforms that Chile has been advancing in the last two decades and that have allowed it to go beyond the mere political management of poverty to provide ourselves with effective tools and institutions on a global basis, that guarantee and draw up solid and lasting policies for the coming decades and for current and future generations of Chileans.

It is hoped, at least academically, that this political and parliamentary debate will be based on real and reliable data and surveys, will be consistent with the nature of the social and demographic problem behind it, and will not be contaminated by harmful factors, ideological conflicts between political references or personal agendas of charismatic leaders, allowing Chile to continue to advance in the field of social and administrative innovation to provide effective responses to its pressing problems.