Topic: 2024-Unpaid Care and Domestic Work
Country: Thailand
Delegate Name: Tess Kelkar
UN Women
Unpaid Care and Domestic Work
Kingdom of Thailand
Tess Kelkar
Forest Hills Northern
Unpaid care and domestic work is defined as the provision of direct or indirect care without remuneration, carried out within the household. It includes caring for children, elderly and sick individuals, washing, cooking, shopping, cleaning and helping other families with their chores. This work does not contribute to the GDP. Globally, 76.4% of unpaid care is performed by women. Women who perform unpaid care and domestic work are not considered to be equal or valuable to society because of the lack of remuneration and contribution to the GDP. The resolution A/RES/77/317 in the UN general assembly has recognized October 29th as the International Day of Care and Support. This deceleration was done to raise awareness for the importance of care and support and its key contribution to the achievement of gender equality and the sustainability of our societies and economies, as well as of the need to invest in a resilient and inclusive care economy, including the development of strong and resilient care and support systems. In the Kingdom of Thailand, 21.7% of working age women perform unpaid care and domestic work. The Kingdom of Thailand is requesting to address this topic because as a developing nation, we need support from the UN to implement the proposed policies in this paper.
Unpaid labor is an issue in the Kingdom of Thailand. Despite our country making significant progress, Women continue to spend 3.2 times more time on unpaid domestic and care work than men. The Kingdom of Thailand has put in effort to try to enact policy that will help unpaid caregivers. The issues that affect the unpaid care givers the most is child-care, elderly-care, social stigma, and lack of job opportunities due to COVID-19. Our nation has implemented some strategies to help alleviate some of this pressure. For example, we offer a government subsidized child care programs for children ages 3-4. We have also joined with the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women), and the International Labour Organization (ILO), in collaboration with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) who are implementing the United Nations Joint Programme (UNJP) accelerating progress towards an integrated and modernized social protection system for everyone in Thailand. This report conducts a policy assessment with the objectives of reviewing existing policy and legislation and identifying barriers for the inclusive, effective and gender-responsive social security coverage of domestic workers.
The Kingdom of Thailand proposes a 6 step solution that targets the main issues that affect women the most; child-care, elderly-care, social stigma, and lack of job opportunities due to COVID-19 as previously mentioned. We propose to implement an educational program for the youth that teaches them about unpaid domestic work and its contributions to our societies, create government funded programs that provide child-care and elderly-care for households with women who are qualified to participate in the workforce but are currently unpaid caregivers, have free primary and secondary education programs for women, implement policies that extend goverment subsidized paid parental leave for men to redistribute the unpaid care done in a household, create policies that decrease the taxes for mulitnational companies that support women in the workforce, child-care and elderly-care, and extended parental leave, and finally implement early childhood education centers that are funded by the government. The Kingdom of Thailand requests the UN committee to help fund these programs.
