Domingo-Cabarrubias 91
time that the call center workers have with their families, such as
integrating family days with the regular team-building activities, or
providing for nurseries, child centers, and breastfeeding station for
lactating mothers. RA 10028 or the Expanded Breastfeeding in the
Workplace allows among others, paid breaks for nursing mothers to
express their milk at lactation stations that management is mandated
to provide.
However, it is important to emphasize that measures to ease
the burden of working women should not reinforce the traditional
gender division of labor whereby women are expected to perform
all or the bulk of household and family obligations, in addition to
their stressful call center work. The working women’s burden could
be significantly lightened if they are not compelled to still perform
the domestic work when they arrive home in the morning. Research
conducted by the author revealed that all of the women call center
workers she interviewed no longer perform the bulk of housework
and childcare. Since working in the call center has come to mean that
working wives and mothers are usually out at night and have to sleep
for most of the day, they no longer have any time to do housework
and childcare. From the women’s accounts and also judging from
the male participants’ narration, the male spouses do not have
any problem about sharing housework with their spouses or even
doing most of the work (Domingo-Cabarrubias 2012). To a certain
extent, it was shown that despite the persistence for centuries of the
unequal gender division of labor, gender equality within the home is
achievable. Workers’ groups trying to organize women workers could
incorporate these findings in their trainings and lectures to illustrate
that gender inequality and the gender division of labor at home is
not natural and immutable, and may in fact be transformed. Results
of the study may also provide useful insights on how to identify
more effective strategies of organizing women call center workers
by considering their situations both in the workplace and in their
homes and finding ways to address gendered power relations. For
instance, unions can come up with organizational policies that not
only acknowledge the inequality within the household but actually
make concrete efforts to address this, at least within the households
of their members.
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