For a new Care Law in Spain, the country with the longest lifespans in Europe

"The unpaid time women spend caring for others, at the extremes of life, is equivalent to money saved by their family, their husbands, the state, and the market," insists Spanish professor Ángeles Durán Heras. And it's no wonder the lesson has sunk in. Just over a month ago, the extension of the pension moratorium in Argentina ended. The result is that now only 1 in 10 women, many of them employed in domestic work, will be able to retire .

With a PhD in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid and an economist, Ángeles Durán Heras was the first female professor of sociology in her country and currently works as an honorary researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

She is a leading expert on the topic of unpaid work, from a gender perspective; she has developed this topic in a dozen books. Among them are The Invisible Costs of Illness, The Value of Time: How Many Hours a Day Are You Missing?, Lifetime and Worktime, and Unpaid Work in the Global Economy. The full texts can be accessed in the CSIC Digital Library. In 2022, the honorary degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) crowned previous distinctions at the universities of Salamanca, Córdoba, Valencia, and Granada.

These days, at her prodigious 80s, she is a volunteer contributor to a project to reform the System of National Accounts , without which it will be impossible to make progress in reforming the current Comprehensive Law on Care for People. We heard her talk during the tenth edition of the Ibero-American Women Leaders Program, organized by the Carolina Foundation of the Spanish Foreign Ministry. The meeting took place in Madrid between March 2 and 7 and was attended by prominent feminists from the region, gathered this time to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the United Nations Women's Summit in Beijing. So we resumed our conversation.

–In addition to the savings in profitable time that husbands achieve, we must consider that women's care work, the least monetized, is saved by the market. Let's say in general, it's a saving in formal employment; I'm referring to the costs of labor reproduction . It's the time dedicated to caring for children and the elderly in the family. But while childcare has been creating institutions, spaces, and ad hoc legislation for about 100 years, today the trend that puts the most pressure on the entire system is the aging of the population. It has altered the entire landscape.

–Has childcare taken a backseat?

–Today, far fewer children are being born, so fewer institutions can care for everyone, while the number of older children has grown enormously. This is also a firm trend in Cuba, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina. The demographic dividend is also coming to an end in Latin America.

–How does that advantage work in relation to care?

–The demographic dividend is a very advantageous time for economies: by controlling the birth rate, the state saves a lot of money. This means that children are being born as intended, children whose families have chosen when to have them, so they arrive with fewer disadvantages from their origins. This is not a uniform or national phenomenon, of course. For example, in Argentina and Brazil, the difference in the demographic dividend between cities and even between neighborhoods is striking. Now we are seeing the opposite trend: an aging population. In Spain, we have areas, in Castile and Teruel, where three elderly people remain living next to a wonderful church that they cannot care for.

–Doesn’t immigration compensate for this aging?

–No, because migrants settle mainly in large cities and on the coasts, in growing economies. They certainly fill the demand for home care workers, although not in the best way.

–You said in your lecture that life expectancy increases by three months every year.

–Of course, every four years, the population lives another year longer in Spain. It's a sustained trend that only stopped during the pandemic, when there was a high mortality rate among the elderly. That's why childcare is no match for the enormous pressure that aging puts on healthcare services and the pension system.

–What is the current state of legislation in this country with the longest-lived population in Europe?

We're currently working on a reform of our original autonomy law, Organic Law 3/2007, regarding obligations arising from motherhood and family obligations. Although it's less than 20 years old, it's outdated. This is a proposal that the government will advance. In our Civil Code, Article 68 establishes that the family has the obligation to share domestic tasks , which at the time improved the "natural" role of providing care for women. But what's happening? Today, young people mostly don't marry. So one sees that legislating through the family is of little or no use . Among the changes resulting from the pandemic, we see that the entire nursing home system needs to be revamped. There's a very serious problem with nursing homes, as we need to increase the quality of service, but this means doubling the price. First, the number of staff matters, for a better ratio between residents and employees. Another objective is for workers to work fewer hours and be better qualified. The ideal in these areas would be to reproduce the family environment as much as possible.

–The press has reflected in recent months the unique problem of immigrant minors without families.

–Yes, they are the so-called “menas” (unaccompanied migrant minors), meaning they are not cared for by an adult. It's a political problem of the highest magnitude. We have to decide how many will be allowed to enter and what rights they will have. At first, they were young Moroccans, admitted through the cities of Ceuta and Melilla, but more and more are arriving from all over Africa, where there is an explosion of births. We have the Canary Islands in a state of collapse, with days when up to a thousand immigrants arrive, many of them with a unique pattern. The young people often burn their documentation in order to pass themselves off as minors, given that the law grants them benefits. In March, news broke about a young man suspected of killing his caregiver because he wanted to escape from home. These cases are often very dramatic, it's true. But the most serious problem is the aforementioned pressure to care for the elderly.

–In Spanish cities, it's common to see elderly people strolling accompanied by immigrant caregivers. The vast majority of these caregivers are Latin American.

–Yes, it's the majority. They're chosen for their language skills and tend to be precarious domestic jobs, which they keep while they sort out their paperwork. In domestic services, they reach 40%. There are no official figures, but in nursing homes, menial care tasks are performed by Latin Americans—cooking, cleaning, and basic care—while complex doctors and nurses are nationals. Nursing homes don't risk hiring them illegally. At the same time, Spain is rapidly becoming more racially mixed. It's a sustained process, through mixed marriages or marriages with fellow nationals. We see it both in recent and second-generation immigrants, who seek partners of their parents' original nationality.

–Would you agree that the time spent on care is at the heart of women's inequality?

–Between men and women, yes, not so much between social classes or population groups. Women are born with a burden on their time, the obligation to provide care. And here immigration makes things even more complex. How will Spain resolve this? Will it become "Trumpified"? We don't know; the Vox party is moving in that direction. But there's no doubt that Spain's historical policy, with poorly regulated immigration—what Vox calls "the kick in the door," the forced immigrant—has been the norm. Today, due to its volume, it brings new problems.

–Is immigration still divided by gender? Do men come from Africa, and women from Latin America?

–It used to be like that, but today there are many African women who come alone to work in seasonal agriculture, in the strawberry harvest, for example. In theory, they should return, but it's not something that's pursued in Spain. Furthermore, single women generally arrive escaping from problematic families and environments. Most men come alone. And all of them seek to stay and then bring their families. But once again, when you look at it from a gender perspective, it's worth asking: should we allocate resources to care for this latter sector? Very often, fathers of families arrive with several wives and numerous children.

–In your lecture at the Carolina Foundation, you drew a parallel between the number of workers required by some sophisticated machines and the number required by an elderly person.

–For my book, The Invisible Costs of Illness , I studied the staffing ratios required for care, from the most intensive clinics to the most economically staffed, those for young mental patients, who are not ill but require caregivers. It's a difficult number to calculate since many services today are outsourced, but I concluded that a minimum of three caregivers per patient is needed. In Spain, caregivers work 37 hours a week. But at a certain forum, while I was presenting about the caregivers required by an advanced Alzheimer's patient, an assistant in charge of equipment told me that certain telescopes require five people per day in rotating shifts. And I immediately thought that in the area of ​​Alzheimer's, this isn't superfluous given that it's a sector where workers have a very high level of burnout . Keeping caregivers healthy is no small issue. Moreover, since caregivers are unionized, they now form a group with high levels of union conflict. They were the most conflictive four years ago; They filed lawsuits with the Judiciary, outnumbering metalworkers and those in the transport sector.