Working Mothers

When I touch upon the issue of 'working' mothers, I like to remember an event which I witnessed and which left me both mesmerised and amused. It happened quite some years ago, whilst I was interviewing a priest on the topic of poverty in Malta. He was honing in on the issue of families, women, their children and the phenomenon of 'working women'. He had barely finished voicing the start of a sentence -  'Ever since women started working', than a nun who happened to be in the same room filing papers, swirled round to face us, walked abruptly up to his desk and with pointed intensity said, 'Father... Women have ALWAYS worked.' She left him agape and point made, she demurely walked back to her papers and their filing. She might have been a nun with chaste habit and all, but she sure was feminist.

A lot has changed since women walked to their husband's, father's, brother's fields and worked there from dawn till dusk. Those were the times when the suckling babes were carried about in swaddling, the ones old enough to help did, whilst the ones in between stayed back at home helping out grandmothers, spinster aunts and older sisters care for the home, elderly and ill, cook, wash, bathe and feed the chickens. Young children could run about in the fields and play all day long. It was a different lifestyle. The 'working' mother usually had somebody back home to help out, in some way or another and the extended family was not only there to share Sunday dinner but to help in a factual way, every moment of the day.

Today many will wish to remain hooked onto this romanticised version of family, as if wearing blinkers. We are living in a different reality and to keep a family and make ends meet, one only has to do a very simple physical exercise - share life with one medium-sized family of moderate means and  try dealing with shopping, bills, school requirements, doctor's fees, etc, etc, for just one month. One month will be long enough to discover that it is imperative in this day and age for most women to contribute financially to the family.

Fine. But what does one do with children before they are old enough to go to school and in between schooling periods? How can a woman work outside the home with peace of mind? Children need to be cared for by their parents or other persons and carers who are suitably qualified to do so. Given a choice, most mothers will opt to stay at home with their babies for as long as it takes, and if they desire to proceed with a career, they would want to reassure themselves that the care given to their children will not be in any way ransacking their own right of motherhood. But there is no simplistic solution to all of this and since I am writing about mothers and their children, I will only later on be writing about the father's role in all this set-up.

If grandma is still working herself, too old to care for grandchildren or simply disinterested, how is the young mother to regain a place of work? She has to seek child-care, even if she is working on a part-time arrangement or at least on those days when nobody else from within the family can replace her care.

In a bid to address gender sensitive issues, the Employment and Training Corporation (ETC) took specific action in 2005 through an EU-funded project which aims to train and give the necessary qualifications to prospective and existing child-carers  to work in this field and to offer employers the possibility of incorporating child-care facilities on their premises through a number of incentives.

This year Government has specifally allocated LM 130 K to support 45 existing child centres to upgrade their standard in order to comply with the new regulations.

Ms Anna Borg, a senior ETC executive in charge of the Gender Issues Research and Development Division explains, 'We want to tangibly help increase female participation through the provision of child care services at the workplace.'

ETC offered courses to women interested in taking up child care as a career. Training involved 300 hours of intensive tuition, and 500 placement hours in various child care centres catering for children aged up till 5 years.

'With one course ready, and another ten still ongoing, we are planning to have a strong workforce of fully trained child carers to fill the need of manning child care centres according to the standards set up in summer of 2005 by the Department of Social Welfare Standards.'

This is especially important in a country where up until a short time ago, child care centres were not regularised and mothers could not be blamed for being apprehensive about leaving their children behind in the care of others.
The course attracted a healthy number of applicants - 700 women in all, who applied for the child-care training programme, even though ETC could only take around 200. But what about the other side of the coin - the employers?

Initially there was a relatively high response with 60 potential employers enquiring about the system. They were interested in the potential of being offered a scheme of incentives namely providing full-trained child carers and grants to facilitate the initial transitory process. This happened in spring of 2005. Slowly however, interest dwindled due to a series of problems.

'Some employers found they simply did not have the physical space on their workplace to set up a child care centre. Another set of employers found that, following site inspections, their premises, whilst being large enough, did not have the suitable requirements in terms of safety - such as no windows, no space on groundfloor level, or free space only within the basement quarters.'

The end result is that only a few valiant employers have held on to their initial resolve to man a child care centre in-house and these are presently in the process of carrying out the necessary alterations to accommodate the children of their employees. After due clearance from the Department of Social Welfare Standards, permits from MEPA and physical time to carry out works, it is hoped these companies will be able to offer their employees full childcare facilities with the assistance of ETC.

In view of  the  limited  number of employers who will actually open a childcare centre, Ms Borg commented that  'We would have wished for bigger numbers, better results, but at least these  employers have taken on an act of courage and it is a start. Remember that we live in a rather macho society and it is hard to change that too quickly. We shall be applying for the next funding period which stretches from 2007 - 2013 and we are looking forward to wider opportunities and hopefully more openings for in-house child-care centres.'

From their side, ETC employees have been amongst the first to enjoy the serenity of having an in-house child-care centre which is open daily during working hours offering year round care  including  an after school and  holiday care service 'Our employees are now used to dropping off their children in the morning, popping in to nurse or play with them during lunch-break and picking them up after work to head home together. The peace of mind allows these parents to continue with their work reassured. But reassured also because our child carers are top notch and that is what we have attempted to do during this past year. Raise standards, raise awareness, inform parents that child care is not just about minding but also about educating. Hopefully more companies will follow suit in the near future.'

Article prepared by Ms Marika Azzopardi

Marika Azzopardi is a freelance writer and journalist. Although she has been writing 'all her life', publicly she has been writing prolifically for the past 12 years. A frequent contributor to national English language papers published in Malta and varied magazines, she enjoys writing about 'human stories', art and whatever involves feminine issues. Also the author of children's books and short stories, she likes to delve into fiction from time to time.

These features originally appeared in print in 2006 on The Sunday Times - Classifieds Section, as part of a series discussing the issues of women workers in Malta.