The studied is based on companies in Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Guatemala and Mexico, and was produced in collaboration with the following business schools: Instituto Superior da Empresa (Brazil), Instituto de Alta Dirección Empresarial (Colombia), Instituto de Desarrollo Empresarial (Ecuador), Escuela de Negocios Universidad del Istmo (Guatemala), Instituto Panamericano de Alta Dirección de Empresa (Mexico), Escuela de Dirección de la Universidad de Piura (Peru), and Instituto de Estudios Empresariales de Montevideo (Uruguay)
The responses given by the companies surveyed suggest that the cliché of South American dolce far niente is entirely misleading. In fact, workaholism is widespread. More than half the companies expect employees to take work home with them.
A Heterogeneous World
The countries of Latin America are too heterogeneous to allow sweeping generalizations. The vast territory stretching from Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego encompasses a wide diversity of habitats, education systems, natural resources and production systems. The proportion of mixed race, indigenous or African-American people in the overall population also varies dramatically from one country to another. It would be a mistake, therefore, to lump them all together.
Brazil is a particularly atypical case. It has 42 percent of the landmass and 33 percent of the population, and boasts a different language from almost all the other nations. Also, though an emerging world power, it carries only a very limited weight in the concert of Latin American nations, many of which languish near the bottom of the world's human development league tables.
Despite their great diversity, the countries of Latin America have two things in common which, beyond geographical proximity, give them a degree of human and cultural cohesion: Roman Catholicism and language. Another affinity is respect for the family, which obviously exerts a significant influence on any effort to balance work and family life. Of the Brazilian companies included in the study, for example, 88 percent cite respect for the family as part of their corporate culture.
The family plays a fundamental role in every society, but in societies with only a rudimentary social safety net, such as many Latin American countries, it is the only institution that can afford protection against unemployment, illness and migration. As an economist might put it, in these countries, the family represents a vital stock of social capital.
Diverse Legislation
And yet, the Latin American family is not immune to the pressures besetting the family in other parts of the world. While the nuclear family still predominates, the number of female single parent households continues to rise. The result is widespread exhaustion among the female population and poverty in society at large.
In Latin America, as elsewhere, women have started to join the paid workforce on a massive scale. Between 1990 and 2002 the female employment rate in urban areas (in the countries studied) rose from 37.9 al 49.7 percent. As almost everywhere, though perhaps more markedly than in Europe, the increase in the number of women taking paid employment outside the home has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in male participation in domestic chores. As a result, the full burden has fallen on women.
At the same time, work-family reconciliation measures are not yet widely accepted by Latin American companies. There is no comparison to Europe,
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