Working mums yet to benefit from law on day care facilities

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."