Through a letter, the Associations of Judiciary Officials asked the Supreme Court for safe conduct for their home advisers during quarantine by Covid-19, arguing that the document has been awarded “to health officials, Carabineros of Chile and Chilean Investigation Police”.
In the misiva, the highest court is asked to “manage before the Ministry of interior and public security, an amendment to the current Displacement Instruction (…) so that safe conduct is granted to home advisers, all judicial staff, who are in charge of them, children or adolescents, and that they are responsible for attending rotating shifts of face-to-face work.”
From the Association of Chilean Magistrates he expressed his rejection of this request but also make a diagnosis of the situation: “The care work of children, the sick and older adults rests almost exclusively on women”. “The high petition by some of the judiciary’s guilds reproduces the discriminatory pattern of workers who enjoy lower bargaining skills in front of their employers and who do not have a guild that represents their problems,” they add.
“In an institution like the Judiciary, where female staff are more than 60% of the service and judges exceed 50%, it is necessary to address the unwanted gaps in inequality that affect us, like all workers, generating mechanisms that balance labour and domestic obligations, between men and women,” they add.
Therefore, they require that the proposals “return to work consider telework as a basic premise for women who have daughters, sons, the sick or older adults in their care, imposing the face-to-face return only of those male officials who do not meet this obligation”.
They also referred to the issue in the Government. Undersecretary of Crime Prevention Katherine Martorell noted that “this work of home advisers is not allowed and essential.”
On the contrary, he stated that safe conduct is only for “health personnel, that is, those who are every day fighting and working to combat this pandemic and to take care of the lives of all the inhabitants of our Republic”.
