DT 17/21 - Licencias para el cuidado de los recién nacidos: Relevamiento internacional y análisis de la situación en Uruguay

This document presents an overview of the family policies for newborn care and analyzes the situation in Uruguay in the international context. With this objective, in the first place, we analyze the current policies on maternal, paternal, and parental leave. We describe the state-of-the-art both worldwide and in the Latin American context, placing emphasis on some cases that stand out for their level of progress in the matter. Second, we conduct a detailed analysis of the situation in Uruguay, describing the evolution of these policies in the country and providing a characterization of the employment situation of fathers and mothers of newborns, as well as the care strategies adopted by them. We use data from the National Household Surveys from 2006 to 2019; the Nutrition, Child Development and Health Survey of 2018 and the birth records of the Ministry of Public Health. The analysis is carried out comparatively for formal and informal workers, seeking to generate evidence that illustrates how care is resolved by people inserted in the informal sector of the labor market that is not covered by the current leave regime.