This is a reflection written by Professor Orna Blumen, Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, Department of Human Services, University of Haifa, Israel, and Naama Bar-on Shmilovitch, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Social Welfare & Health Sciences and the manager of the Center for the Study of Organizations & Human Resource Management at the University of Haifa, for the new series from The Bahá’í Chair for World Peace on Learning During the Covid-19 Pandemic.
The social emergency caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lays bare certain hierarchies within democratic societies. This essay casts light on one of the many social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic – inequalities within the labor market. In this brief essay, we examine pregnant employees’ increased vulnerability in the Israeli labor market – a country where mothers-to-be are broadly protected by legal statute.
In Israel, as in many democratic societies, gender equality is a lauded value but discrimination against women in the labor market is still very common. Such discrimination is largely justified by the double burden of motherhood and the job that narrows women’s potential to meet the icon of the “ideal worker” whose primary commitment and energy are invested into work.
In the workplace, the distinctiveness of pregnancy is largely overshadowed by motherhood’s long-term effects. While clearly connected, pregnancy is a separate sociocultural concern with specific structural disadvantages for women’s employability. Pregnancy dismissal however, has rarely been addressed outside the lawful regulation of employment relation.
Worldwide, lawmakers have moved to protect pregnant employees, including the UK Equality Act (enacted 2010), the US Pregnancy Discrimination Act (of 1978) and across the European Directive of 1992. These widespread, legal protections reflect an understanding that pregnancy fundamentally changes employment relations; it may limit employees’ job availability, undermine managerial control, and cut productivity and revenue.
The prevalence of pregnancy dismissals in many developed, democratic, capitalist societies evidences that there is an inherent clash between business interests and the general good as is embedded in the social structures of fertility, family and education of the future generations. Israel is no different, but how the COVID-19 crisis uncovered some of these underlying principles with regard to pregnancy is interesting.
Whereas the status of Israeli women in the labor market resembles other developed societies, Israeli women’s familial involvement is comparatively significant. The traditional family is a key sociocultural value, stronger than in other post-modern societies, there are also high fertility rates (Jews–3.11; Arab-Palestinians citizens– 3.17) and low rates of single parent households with young children (6.1%).
Israeli lawmakers formulated a unique method of protection for pregnant workers employed at a particular workplace for more than six months, which captures the majority of pregnant employees. Shortly put, it is primarily carried through an exceptional process – the social welfare intervention mechanism, which prohibits any changes that bear negative impact on the employment conditions of pregnant employees unless previously approved by the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor (MITL).
Such extended protection is rare worldwide, existing in Austria and the Netherlands. Elsewhere, negative impacts and dismissals are handled through lawsuits filed independently by the dismissed pregnant employees. (Israeli pregnant workers employed at a particular workplace less than six months, are also lawfully protected but only after their dismissal). Yet pregnancy discrimination and dismissals persist, validating the risk of being pregnant at work.
In Israel, as elsewhere, times of crisis emphasize social hierarchies in the labor market. By mid-March 2020, two weeks after a national election, during a time of political instability, the Prime Minister’s office enacted an emergency, temporary health order instructing people to stay home. Many businesses closed entirely, others were licensed to function partially with only those specified by their employers as “essential workers” allowed to continue working. Economic activity dropped by approximately 70%. In attempts to prevent massive dismissals across the nation, the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor conceived and promoted “leave of absence” and unemployment benefits as two means to stabilize employment relation:
Employers could avoid dismissing employees while employees were partially compensated by the state and could maintain their jobs. Yet, employers were not compelled to assume the leave of absence and could lawfully dismiss all or some employees. Employees were also not compelled to accept employers’ proposition to take a leave of absence or resign.
In other words, the pandemic emergency created a two-steps method requiring consent by both parties. This method was assimilated into the governmental emergency order, which was not brought for voting in the parliament, and which also temporarily cancelled the social welfare intervention mechanism (i.e., employers’ duty to obtain approval before implementing any negative impact on pregnant employees). This was the first time since the Women’s Labor Law (1954) was enacted that the lawful protection granted to pregnant, employed women was removed. This is especially remarkable in a country like Israel, where national security emergency injunctions are recurrent and experienced by public and private institutions and by the public more generally. Never before, neither in times of war on the borders nor under missile attacks on civilians in dense urban centers was this lawful protection undermined by any of the previous administrations.
So what has changed now? As is widely known from other places, wars propel men to the front and women’s labor is required to maintain the economy at the national and the household levels. Under missile attacks on civilians, women’s labor is needed in order to guarantee some ordinariness and assure reasonable provision of essential, mostly public, services in education, health and welfare where women comprise the majority of professional and non-professional labor.
The COVID-19 crisis however, casts a different value to women’s paid and unpaid work. As the majority of workers were sent home and schools – major potential contagion sites – were closed down, hundreds of thousands of young children and adolescences were also sent home. All educational and extra-curriculum services disappeared and help from the extended family (mostly grandparents) and neighbours vanished as avoiding persons from outside the household was proscribed.
Abruptly, families were joined up at home in the most traditional way such that women’s significantly higher share of unpaid domestic work persisted (though both men and women increased their unpaid family and domestic work) and men’s ability to fulfil their traditional breadwinning role was eroded. In the media, articles on the unknown threats of the COVID-19 pandemic were supplemented by items that emphasized the curfew as an opportunity to re-acquaint spouses and children and (re)discover the joy of family life.
Women’s traditional role as mothers and homemakers also gained social attention, appreciation and importance (only later was this emphasis replaced with reports on stress, domestic violence and economic hardships). As the comforting order of the traditional family was praised and the survival efforts of businesses lauded, women’s greater vulnerability in the labor market was shown by women’s significantly higher rates of dismissals and leaves of absence. The family-job double burden was clearly shown as the usual facilitators were no longer able to assist.
In this chaotic atmosphere, the long-lasting, lawful protection of employed mothers-to-be was removed. While many employers were aware of this removal, probably due to legal counselling, pregnant employees were taken by surprise. It was only three weeks later, three days before the Seder (Passover ceremonial dinner) and after the accumulation of many complaints in the legal departments of women’s organizations, that this change was noticed.
Women leaders and lawyers in public and academic law-clinics designated this act as immoral and publicized it. It was also time for the government to renew the emergency temporary health order, and activists informed the Israel’s Attorney General of their plan to appeal to the Supreme Court and argue against the legality of the emergency order as a whole. Still before the Seder, the government withdrew and reverse-established the social welfare intervention mechanism, re-institutionalizing Israel’s 66-year protection of pregnant employees.
Is this a happy ending? Clearly we must be hesitant. On one hand, it is unquestionable that the wide-ranging protection of pregnant employees was targeted. The attempt to remove the protection of pregnant employees, when women employees are most vulnerable, is indicative of the inclination to change the social order that the law has promoted and imposed during the last seven decades. The familiar order that gives preference to motherhood and by implication to women’s rights in accessing collective resources – primarily income – could have been replaced by a new order that prioritizes businesses’ financial and economic interests, disregarding women as employees while advocating the traditional gender order that places women in the family where their work is unpaid.
On the other hand, public attention yielded an instant withdrawal. This indicates that although normally the burden borne by employers invites some grumbling and discontent, the extensive, lawful protection granted to pregnant employees is widely valued, particularly during economic crisis. It also proves that persistent attention of gatekeepers and of the public in general is essential in order to foil such (un)intentional attempts and consequences. Thus, as much as this is a happy ending it also seems to be a warning that we must always take seriously our commitment to women and the vulnerable.
About the authors
Orna Blumen is at the Faculty of Social Welfare and Health Sciences, Department of Human Services, University of Haifa, Israel. Her research focuses mainly on gender and home-work links, spanning from the investigation of workers’ commuting patterns and the ride experience to the study of how workers’ job involvement is perceived in their families, notably by their children and spouses. She unpacks these circumstances in the diverse Israeli society with regard to high-tech engineers, upper middle class women, and with special attention to the intersection of gender and the meaning of paid/unpaid work in the Ultra-Orthodox community and to the transformation of Arab society, mostly the Druze collective. She was among the founders of the Israeli Association for Feminist and Gender Studies, served on the editorial board of Journal of Managerial Psychology, of Migdar (gender): An Interdisciplinary Academic Journal for Gender and Feminist Research, and among the founders of the recently launched journal The Study of Organizations and Human Resource Management Quarterly, and guest co-editor of Hagar: Studies in Culture, Polity and Identities (Vol.11). in last eight years she serves on the steering committee of the IGU Commission on Gender and Geography.
Naama Bar-on Shmilovitch is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Social Welfare & Health Sciences and the manager of the Center for the Study of Organizations & Human Resource Management at the University of Haifa. She holds a LLB in Law and an MA in Human Services. Her research interests are workplace diversity, gender, employment relations and labour law. Her dissertation highlights socio-cultural aspects of pregnancy at the workplace.