Search Results (4)

For more than fifty years, Jamaican farm workers have been seasonally employed in Canada under the Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). In Canada, these workers live and work in conditions that make them vulnerable to various health issues, including poor mental health. This ethnographic study investigated Jamaican SAWP workers’ mental health experiences in Southern Ontario. Several common factors that engender psychological distress among Jamaican workers, ranging from mild to extreme suffering, were uncovered and organised into five themes: (1) family, (2) work environments and SAWP relations, (3) living conditions and isolation, (4) racism and social exclusion, and (5) illness and injury. I found that Jamaican workers predominantly use the term ‘stress’ to articulate distress, and they associate experiences of suffering with historic plantation slavery. Analysis of workers’ stress discourses revealed their experiences of psychological distress are structured by the conditions of the SAWP and their social marginalisation in Ontario. This article presents and discusses these findings in the context of SAWP power dynamics and concludes with policy recommendations aimed at improving the mental health of all SAWP workers. In foregrounding the experiences of Jamaican workers, this study addresses the dearth of research on the health and wellbeing of Caribbean SAWP workers. Full article

Portugal has been described as a singular case in terms of the participation of women in the labour market and work–life balance policies. Unlike the other so-called Southern European countries, where a belated and somewhat slower move away from the male breadwinner model has been found, Portugal stands out from the other EU member states with its relatively high rate of female employment and the prevalence of the dual-earner model based on continuous and fundamentally full-time employment. Moreover, the “early return to full-time work and a gender equality oriented model” calls for a separate analysis of this country’s case. In addition to providing a comprehensive overview of the singularities of Portugal’s employment patterns and work–family articulation policies, this article substantially adds to the existing literature by bringing new analytical angles to the debate. The intention is therefore to shed light on the political discourses that fuelled the policy debate throughout the three decades following Portugal’s transition to democracy, up until the latest and most decisive policy changes. This article also examines the key social actors’ views about the political process sustaining the development of policies in this area and identifies the major players promoting the most progressive legislative advances in the country. Full article

An increasing body of literature has started to look at how disability impacts and shifts poverty in the global South in and through a range of areas, including health, education, and livelihoods. However, much of this research is limited to disabled individuals, while qualitative research focusing on and articulating the circumstances, needs and demands of rural families remains scarce, especially research focusing on Latin America. This paper reports on a qualitative study looking at how disability affects family labouring patterns in rural Guatemala, with a special focus on women carers of people with acquired physical impairments, in the bid to contribute to a more inclusive understanding of the disability and poverty relationship and its gendered dimensions. Findings highlight how in rural communities already living in dire poverty, the fragmentation of labour input of the disabled person, costs (notably health care) and intensified collective poverty, push fragile families with no safety nets into a set of dynamic responses in the bid to ensure survival of the family unit. These include harder and longer work patterns, interruption of paid labour, and/or induction into exploitative and perilous labour, not only for women, but also children. These responses are erosive and have severe personal, social, cultural and economic consequences, strengthening a deep, multidimensional, chronic and intergenerational impoverishment, transforming these families into ‘disabled families’, among the poorest of the poor. This paper concludes that research, policy and services need to move beyond the disabled individual to understand and address the needs and demands of whole families, notably women, and safeguard their livelihoods, because ultimately, these are the units that singlehandedly care for and ensure the well-being and survival of disabled people. It is also within these units that disability is constructed, shaped, and can ultimately be understood. Full article

This study starts from the assumption that the context of opportunities for work-family balance affects individual attitudes toward gender roles, a main indicator of support for gender equality. Compared with extant research, the present study adopts a more articulated definition of “opportunity structure” that includes national income level and social norms on gender attitudes, measures of gender-mainstreaming policies implemented at the company level (flextime), and different work-family balance policies in support of the dual-earner/dual-caregiver family model (e.g., parental-leave schemes and childcare provisions). The effects of these factors are estimated by performing a cross-sectional multilevel analysis for the year 2014. Gender-role attitudes and micro-level controls are taken from the Eurobarometer for all 28 European Union (EU) members, while macro-indicators stem from Eurostat, European Quality of Work Survey, and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Our results show that both institutional and workplace arrangements supporting the dual-earner/dual-caregiver family model are associated with more egalitarian gender-role attitudes This is particularly true concerning availability of formal childcare for 0- to 3-year-olds among institutional factors, as well as work-schedule flexibility among workplace factors, probably as they enable a combination of care and paid work for both men and women. Full article