Abstract. This article defines paid care work and explains why it has become an important arena for research and policy. Drawing on cross‐national and country‐level analyses of selected occupations, it highlights three findings: first, the employment situation of care workers often mirrors broader, country‐specific labour market conditions and problems; second, the State's role as an employer of care workers is changing as governments increasingly outsource such work; and third, social policy regimes also shape opportunities for and conditions of care employment. It concludes that both care workers and care recipients are likely to benefit from improved employment conditions of care work.

No abstract

This article examines the functions of the “dual discourse” about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle‐class employers of Peruvian workers simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle‐class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed how globalized, market-based economies critically depend on a foundation of nonmarket goods, services, and productive activities that interact with capitalist institutions and impact market economies. These findings, long argued by feminist economists, have profound implications for how we think about our economic futures. This paper shows how lessons from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic can inform how people think about the future of our economies and, specifically, how to address a trio of interlocking crises: care work, environmental degradation, and macroeconomic consequences. Drawing on these lessons, this paper argues for a necessary paradigm shift and discusses the implications of such a shift for social and economic policies.

Social investment ideas are increasingly permeating social and care policy-making in Latin America. In this article, I analyse a variety of instruments which have been used to 'invest in children' across a range of Latin American countries to then zoom in on Chile, where early childhood education and care have attained a prominent place on the welfare agenda in recent years. This policy interest materialised in 'Chile Grows With You', an integrated child development strategy whose title resonates strongly with the global narrative on social investment. Engaging with the programme's aim of creating 'equal opportunities from the cradle', I discuss the transformative potential and the limitations of childcare service expansion in a highly unequal context.

This article explores the influence of religious actors on the elaboration of two public policies that are key to the advancement of women's rights and have long formed part of the women's movement's agenda in Chile: the introduction of sexual education in secondary schools in the 1990s and the distribution of emergency contraception in the 2000s. Our analysis of how different actors-from a variety of ideological and power positions-have influenced the two policy debates suggests that their discourses and strategies are highly contingent on the political environment. While conservative religious forces retain an enormous capacity to hinder policy making and implementation in the arena of family and sexuality, the government's determination to confront such interference seems to have grown in a context of fewer authoritarian enclaves, a more pluralist society and a strong sexual and reproductive rights movement. The diversification of religious positions on issues of family and sexuality has also affected the room for manoeuvre in the policy arena.

Resumen. Las autoras definen el trabajo de cuidado remunerado y explican por qué ha pasado a ser un campo importante para la investigación y la política. Basándose en análisis internacionales y nacionales de varias ocupaciones, ponen de relieve tres conclusiones. Primera, la situación laboral de estos trabajadores es, a menudo, un reflejo de las circunstancias y los problemas propios del mercado de trabajo del país. Segunda, la función del Estado en tanto que empleador del sector está cambiando porque cada vez se subcontratan más labores. Tercera, los regímenes de política social también conforman las oportunidades y las condiciones laborales del sector. Es de prever que los trabajadores y las personas que reciben la atención salgan beneficiados de una mejora de las mismas.

In recent years, several middle-income countries, including Chile, Mexico and Uruguay, have increased the availability of early childhood education and care (ECEC) services. These developments have received little scholarly attention so far, resulting in the (surely unintended) impression that Latin American social policy is tied to a familialist track, when in reality national and regional trends are more varied and complex. This article looks at recent efforts to expand ECEC services in Chile and Mexico. In spite of similar concerns over low female labour force participation and child welfare, the approaches of the two countries to service expansion have differed significantly. While the Mexican programme aims to kick-start and subsidize home- and community-based care provision, with a training component for childminders, the Chilean programme emphasizes the expansion of professional ECEC services provided in public institutions. By comparing the two programmes, this article shows that differences in policy design have important implications in terms of the opportunities the programmes are able to create for women and children from low-income families, and in terms of the programmes’ impacts on gender and class inequalities. It also ventures some hypotheses about why the two countries may have chosen such different routes.