The high cost of unpaid work

Without massive amounts of unpaid household labour - most of it performed by women - the global economy would collapse

By: Penney Kome

  When Martha Stewart Living placed a public offering on the New York Stock Exchange last fall, the doyenne of domesticity sold more than a billion dollars worth of stock in the first day alone. Does that sound like a lot of money for housework? Actually, it's a pittance, compared to what economists now say that housework is worth.
  Indeed, the more that economists examine what one Club of Rome paper called "the Whole Economy", the more obvious it becomes that the market economy could not operate without the invisible support of women's unpaid work. In the same way that industry relies on no-cost access to clean water and clean air, the marketplace also relies on no-cost domestic support.
 

Statistics Canada has consistently estimated the value of household work at 34 to 39 per cent of GDP - or about $255 billion a year

  "A substantial part of women's time and resources is dedicated to unpaid work - the work of producing and caring for human resources - which underpins the paid economy," as feminist economist Isabella Bakker wrote in "Unpaid Work and Macroeconomics," a 1998 research paper for Status of Women Canada.
  After collating the 1996 census, which contained the first official questions on hours of unpaid work, Statistics Canada reported that WOMEN do two-thirds of the 25 billion hours of unpaid work Canadians do every year. That's 831 hours of an average man's year, compared to an average of 1,483 hours for women. As Babe Bennett (Cathy Jones) put it on CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes, "Women work an extra month every year." And of course single mothers have to carry a double load.
  Over the decades, StatsCan has consistently estimated the value of housework as equivalent to 34 to 39 percent of the GDP - or about $255 billion a year. Globally, the United Nations has estimated the value of the unpaid work that ordinary women do in their homes at about US $11 trillion, annually. None of that work is accounted for in the monetary economy.
  Such an oversight would be comic if it did not have such devastating effects. Internationally, aid programs' attempts to build the monetary economy have often destroyed the subsistence economy. For instance, women grow two-thirds of the food in the world, mostly on hardscrabble subsistence farms. After decades of foreign aid programs that incorporated those farms into huge cash-crop plantations - thus increasing the nation's GDP, but letting the children go hungry - the World Bank is finally developing gender analysis for policymaking. CIDA incorporated gender analysis into all its programs as of March 1999.
 

Single mothers on welfare are being forced to find minimum wage jobs because their childrearing is not acknowledged as work

  Domestically, here in North America:

• women's willingness to work for free undercuts the wages they collect in the workforce;
• because of their unpaid duties at home, women are more willing to accept part-time jobs with no benefits;
• working unpaid makes women more vulnerable to domestic violence and less able to leave abusive relationships;
• half of women over 65 who live alone, live in poverty, because they have little or no pension of their own;
• single mothers on welfare are being forced to find minimum wage jobs because their childrearing is not acknowledged as work;
• governments find it easy to push all caregiving work, such as teaching, nursing, and childcare, out of the monetary economy (schools and hospitals) and back into the unpaid realm.

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