Will Wages for Housework Solve Our Crisis of Care?
Rachel is a public school teacher in Houston. After teaching 6 classes of 180 students per day, she cooks, feeds, and cares for her husband who has multiple sclerosis and her three children, ages 1, 5, and 7. Only until they fall asleep, is she able to resume the work she has brought home from school, communicating with students and parents, grading papers, and planning the next day’s lessons. At times, Rachel hires a housekeeper to help with housework she has no time for.
Veronica is such a housekeeper. For the past 13 years, the single mother has been cleaning other families’ homes, picking up their children from school, and cooking and caring for them. Working from 8 in the morning to oftentimes 8 at night, and earning $400 a week, she paid part of her salary to an older woman, near her home, to care for her two children while she was at work.
The burdens of caregiving have been generating greater attention recently. Democrats have not long ago touted the child tax credit as the “most progressive” piece of legislation in American history,” Congress is now poised to pass provisions of Biden's American Families Plan, which would expand the child tax credit and invest public money in childcare.
But will this money liberate women, like Rachel and Veronica, from the super-exploitation and long hours they face both at their work and home?
Wages for Housework?
The national attention on pay for caregiving has regenerated interest in the works of the Wages for Housework Campaign from the 1970s, led by Silvia Federici, who spearheaded the New York Committee of the International Feminist Collective.
An 1976 IFC poster reads: “We want wages for every dirty toilet, every indecent assault, every painful childbirth, every cup of coffee, and every smile, and if we don’t get what we want we will simply refuse to work any longer!”
The campaign posits that to ask for wages for housework is a revolutionary demand women can make “because it attacks capital and forces it to restructure social relations in terms more favourable to us and consequently more favourable to the unity of the class.” While Federici qualifies this demand as one that does not seek to “enter capitalist relations” but to “break capital's plan for women,” her insistence that the demand functions as a means-to-another end (to attack capital and unify workers) has been wholly abandoned by its disciples who have reduced it to the narrow economic demand she sought to refute.
In social-democratic countries, feminists have pointed out that subsidies for caregivers, including long-term pay for parental leave, have reinforced “occupational segregation along gender lines, limited women’s employment to the private sector, and reproduced the gender division of labor in the household.” Even when caregiving is finally paid for, it is still predominantly women who take up the brunt of this responsibility.
Because reproductive work is privatized, it is women who bear the brunt of the work at home, turning them into a secondary reserved labor force. They are paid less than other workers, and when the market undergoes a crisis, women are always harder hit. During this pandemic, women, faced with caregiving responsibilities, left the workforce at 2x the rate than men did. As a secondary labor force, women returned to relying on the traditional patriarchal structures in order to survive. Thus, capitalism’s division between private reproduction of labor and public labor of production trap us in a patriarchal structure.
The notion that wages for housework challenges capitalism essentially calls for reproductive work to enter the realm of the market economy and makes it a commodity, subject to the rules of capitalist accumulation. This means that how well we buy or sell this commodity, whether it be housework or caregiving, must depend on our position in the labor market and the fluctuations of the market, as exemplified in the conditions of Rachel and Veronica. Before the pandemic, Rachel was able to afford help. Now, she must assume all the work herself, a trend that has left many domestic workers, like Veronica, unemployed and indigent.
Men as Enemies?
The demand for wages for housework and caregiving is based on a belief that the source of women’s super-exploitation is based on the subordination of the wageless worker to the waged worker, the woman to her husband.
The argument is out of touch with a reality that working parents, like Rachel- exploited from long hours of work on the job, and unable to do housework- pass the exploitation onto an underclass of undocumented workers, like Veronica. In turn, Veronica then has to pass on this exploitation to yet another layer of super-exploited labor, in order to work. Many of us have exploited another chain in this exploitation, by calling upon generous grandparents or other family members to labor for free.
Rather than liberating women and “destroying” the existing class relations, wages for housework merely transfers the exploitation from one working person to another, creating layers of super-exploitation within the working class, while doing nothing to fundamentally change the system of exploitation and super-exploitation. Fixated on the question of “pay,” this narrow demand only undercuts the unity of the working people: middle-income professional workers getting by from the exploitation of low-income service workers, partners squabbling at each other for not doing the laundry in the house, all while they could be supporting each other to demand working people have control over their time.
Make the System Work for Us!
What's the ultimate solution? One of Wages for Housework's solution is “commoning”: a future of mutual-aid networks for caregiving. But far from eradicating the nested layers of exploitation, even Federici admits its danger in extricating the public’s and state’s responsibility for caring for society’s generations of workers. To boil down what the proposal really means — you don’t have the time to take care of your house because your boss overworks you, and don’t have the money to hire someone because your boss pays you subminimum wages? Don’t focus on fighting that exploitation, when you can call your neighbor to help you out for free!
Ultimately, the root cause of women’s super-exploitation and oppression does not stem from the fact that reproductive labor is un-commodified and unpaid — but rather, it originates from the relegation of reproductive labor to a private sphere. It is deemed an individual responsibility to raise and care for society’s working people, and thus, caregiving is alienated from the collective responsibility of the larger society.
In a capitalist society, the separation of the private reproduction of labor and the public labor of production makes the redistribution of caregiving work a “zero-sum game.” No matter how much money women make, or how much housework their husbands take up, reproductive labor still falls solely on the nuclear family, and that burden is growing as Americans are working longer hours in deteriorating conditions. It’s no wonder that birth rates are declining, as Americans express they have no time or money for children.
In a neoliberal state, the nuclear family suffers more when the state makes excruciating cuts to healthcare benefits, benefits to mothers, retirement benefits, and other social safety nets. In a social-democratic state, the nuclear family still suffers, albeit to a lesser extent, when the government subsidizes some of these costs and makes capitalism a bit more family-friendly. Either way, you are left to toil long hours to raise the next generation of our labor force and educate them to ensure they can turn a profit for the ruling class. When you’re no longer young and as “exploitable,” you hope to rely on your progeny to care for you or use state subsidies to send you to some caregiving facilities with underpaid and overworked staff. At the end of the day, it’s not society’s responsibility. It’s still on you.
Under President Biden's American Families Plan, Rachel would receive $300 monthly child-tax credit, which would only pay for a week of daycare for her children. Meanwhile, Veronica, an undocumented immigrant, would receive nothing.
So if “the most progressive legislation this nation has ever seen,” simply calls for more compensation and redistributes caregiving in the market economy, relying on state forces to cushion our exploitation, or has working people pass our exploitation from one worker to another, then we truly need to reassess the myopic limitations of our imaginations.
Instead of sitting and waiting for empathetic policymakers, we need to actively overcome the “nuclear-family unit of analysis” — which the ruling class uses to rationalize our exploitation — and unite against our common exploitation. Workers are already challenging this exploitative system and the racism and sexism that propels the super-exploitation of women and communities of color. For example, in NYC, white-collar professionals, forced to toil endless hours at work, are uniting with home care workers, and workers from other industries to end the 24-hour workday and to take control of their time. Working people of color, immigrants, families in the Chinatown-Lower East Side community are coming together to stop the pro-developer agenda of the City government. Many full-time mothers and grandmothers are leading this fight to protect their homes and their community; including the schools, day cares, senior centers, health clinics, and public spaces part of the community.
These struggles demonstrate that the role of the working class cannot merely be to hold out our hands and wait for the state's largesse, but to lead the fight against our exploitation and put forward a vision for how our workplaces and communities should look like. Our demands cannot only end in more social programs and money for caregiving, but must include demands to collectively address the worsening conditions faced by all workers, such as longer working hours, deepening exploitation at work, the displacement of our communities, all of which add to the burden of caregiving.
The increasingly popular demand of wages for housework is a leading example of how economism has a stranglehold on progressive/left policy ideas. Ignored is the fact that workers everywhere are working longer hours and getting paid for it. Liberation does not come from getting paid for our work. Instead, we must learn from workers uniting around the control of time. These workers challenge the super exploitation, which prevents us from developing ourselves and our communities.
As working people, we build the wealth and care for generations of workers in this society. Nothing short of social revolution can meet our collective needs.