Making Mothers Available Labour Force. Unsocial Hours, Negotiation of Presence and Full-Time Grandmothers in the Experience of Full-Time Retail Female Workers

The New International Division of Labour was mainly sustained by greater female participation in the labour market. After massive deindustrialization, Chilean productive landscape became composed by expanded extractive and service industries. Commerce - in particular department stores and shopping malls - grew steady since the 90s, becoming a feminized industry which valued informal gendered skills learnt at home. Despite providing job security and relatively good wages for non-professional occupations, retail work has also been characterised by long, unsocial working hours such as evenings and weekends. Such features pose challenges to the entrance and permanence of mothers of school-age children to this sector, since they are often expected to work in the moments that families are meant to share together.

This paper explores some mechanism that have allowed working mothers to enter and remain in retail work, by attending to how mothers manage to conciliate their maternal duties with the unsocial times retail workers have to work. Through 12 in-depth interviews with working mothers who are/were employed full-time in the retail sectors during more than five years, it shows that grandmothers, especially ‘full-time grandmothers’, have made mother’s labour force available for retail sector at different moments of workers’ family cycle and different periods of the industry which, in the last decade, has been forced to restrict their working and opening times. Since working mothers must be present at the workplace during a great deal of the time their children are free from school, these caring arrangements allow working mothers to somehow ‘extent’ their presence at home. It argues that grandmothers provide working mothers with the most trustable, stable and cheap care for their children and suggest that to a great extent, the productive and reproductive labour regimes of retail in Great Valparaíso has been sustained by Chilean familiar configurations.