Understanding the growing movement for paid housework

How do we calculate housework wages?

If we suppose it is universally decided that housewives must be compensated for household work, a crucial hurdle we would have to address is how their wages are to be computed.

The United Nations System of National Accounts in 2008 listed ‘difficulty of making economically meaningful estimates of their values’ as one of the reasons for not including unpaid care work in labour statistics.

To begin with, it is challenging in some cases to distinguish between work and leisure activities. For instance, if we say that a woman is playing with her child, would she be considered to be enjoying or working?

If such child-rearing is considered to be a leisure activity, exploitation is out of question.

However, if this is work, then we can take the number of hours that child-rearing is performed and compare it with the working hours that the husband performs to ensure that the productive and non-productive working hours of both partners are equal and neither is exploited.

Now, if we suppose that childrearing is both a productive and non-productive activity, it would be categorised as work only to the extent that it contributes to the psychological growth of the child.

And since there is no clear standard by which we can separate work from non-work, norms of fairness are tricky to apply when it comes to the separation of work between men and women.

But in such cases, women can be asked to decide for themselves what type of work constitutes leisure and labour. Although, as the “second-shift” concerns in the second wave movement suggest, there may be a possibility that women see household work as largely cumbersome.

Still, such perceptions can shift overtime and the say of women is essential.

Regardless, one formula of calculating wages would be to take into consideration all the household work that can be outsourced to nannies, gardeners, cooks, domestic help, etc. and use it as a maxim to calculate the cost of the work that housewives would do in their place. This is the input evaluation method.

Another solution can be based on the notion that all the work performed by women within the household is aimed towards the betterment of her family members, who are public goods. Hence, these women should be compensated accordingly. This is the output evaluation method, whereby the market value of a task is calculated on the basis of the good that it produces.

Whilst care work has its intricacies in terms of monetisation, there is one aspect of this debate which is imperative to address, and that is the impact it has on the status of women.

Understanding the social impact of unpaid housework

Dr Ara explains, ‘when it comes to monetary power, when it comes to bargaining power- within the household, who has the bargaining power?

The bargaining power is in the hands of the person who has the cash in hand, who has resources in hand. And this “resource-lessness” has degraded women, it has derated their status as they have no bargaining power and no decision-making power.

For example, in any family, whatever bold decision has to be made, usually some men assume that women’s decision do not matter because they are not earning.’

‘I am of the firm opinion that if we cannot [remunerate women], it is not necessary that men have to pay for this. But at least men should get this realisation that whatever they are doing outside the home, it is all because women are giving them their time.

She can also earn, but she is playing such a great role, she is preparing a human resource for the economy, she is feeding the members of the family…we need to value this work.’