Working mums yet to benefit from law on day care facilities
According to data from the Jakarta branch of the Central Statistics Agency, the number of working women in the capital is 1,041,366, or about 31.5 percent of the 3,379,202 working people. However, many working places do not provide day care centers or special rooms for breast-feeding mothers. The Jakarta Post's Leony Aurora has been looking into this issue. This is the last of four articles.
Support for working mothers may have been laid in Article 83 of Law No. 13/2003 on manpower but the materialization is still far from sight.
The law stipulates that employers allow women employees to breast-feed their babies during working hours. However, there has been no government regulation, presidential decree, ministerial decree or even bylaw to specify the implementation and sanctions for violation.
Rini Said, head of the discrimination analysis of work requirements division at the Ministry of Manpower and Transportation, said on Wednesday that women should be allowed to go home or bring their babies to the office.
"But we leave it to the companies' policies and financial capacities," she said.
Woman activist Nursyahbani Katjasungkana said that due to lack of facility, female employees often come late to work because they had to take care of their babies first.
"This declines their productivity and produces the image that women are indiscipline," she told The Jakarta Post.
Nursyahbani urged concerned parties not to let women face the dilemma of choosing between jobs or children. As the government encouraged women to work, it should provide supporting facilities like day care and nursery.
"At the very least, it should make the policies," she added.
The government could include a day care as part of the requirements for office buildings, she said. Other alternatives were the implementation of flexible working hours or part-time jobs.
The State Minister of Women's Empowerment Office is currently working on a draft law on women's reproduction right, which would regulate nurseries in offices and extend maternity leave for working mothers, said Wahyu Widayat, an official with the office.
"We have appealed for companies since 2001 to provide a nursery for mothers," he said, adding that the minister office could not do more as it did not have the authority to impose sanctions.
Three years after the appeal, only a small number of office buildings have set up the facility, which simply requires a room, a couch and a refrigerator. The women empowerment office and City Hall themselves do not have such facility.
City Manpower Agency has promised that an amended bylaw on manpower would include the provision of a nursery, but failed to mention a time frame.
Nursyahbani proposed a community-based support facility, especially for working mothers of the low-class economy, who could not afford private day care centers.
These women usually entrusted their children to the grandparents or neighbors. "But time is changing from extended family to a nuclear one," she said.
Housewives in a housing complex could built a modest child care facility to accommodate this need. "They will get additional income while helping fellow mothers."