The Perspective of Caring Q&A
The Perspective of Caring Why Mothers and All Carers Should Get a Living Wage for their Caring Work A Q&A on caring, the vital human relationship that ensures survival and well-being, the international petition
The Perspective of Caring Q&A
The Perspective of Caring Why Mothers and All Carers Should Get a Living Wage for their Caring Work A Q&A on caring, the vital human relationship that ensures survival and well-being, the international petition to get a living wage for this work, the origins of this demand and who supports it. By Nina Lopez, 2016.
1. What is the perspective of caring?
Caring is basic to human relationships. It ensures survival and well-being, especially of children, and ill, disabled and elderly people. It protects us in the home and outside, in the city and the countryside, in peace and in war. Caring is hard and skilled work, physically and emotionally. There is no community without it. The perspective of caring puts life, not market forces, at the centre of everything society does.
Caring for others is accomplished
by a dazzling array of skills in an endless variety of circumstances. As well
as cooking, shopping, cleaning and laundering, planting, tending and harvesting
for others, women comfort and guide, nurse and teach, arrange and advise,
discipline and encourage, fight for and pacify. Taxing and exhausting under any
circumstances, this service work, this emotional housework, is done both
outside and inside the home …
And we women are the first to defend and protect those in our care. It is usually women – mothers, wives, partners, sisters, daughters, grannies and aunties – who are the driving force of justice campaigns, whether or not we are prominent or even visible in them.
2. Who does caring work?
Women are the primary carers everywhere in the world. In the non-industrial world, growing food is integral to caring work. Women grow most of the world’s food and are the majority of subsistence farmers.
|Women do 1 to 3 hours a day more housework than men; 2 to 10 times more caring (for children, elderly, and the sick). In the UK, women are 90% of primary carers. In Malawi, 93% of women’s agricultural work is unpaid.|
Men and children, especially girls, also do caring work. Older girls raise the younger ones, fetch water and fuel, cook … In England and Wales, 1/4 million children and 2m men provide some unpaid care (UK Census 2011).
3. Why campaign for a living wage for mothers and all carers?
To ensure that the needs of carers, starting with mothers, and all who need care, are prioritised. We want the economy to be at the service of human beings, not human beings at the service of the economy. To pay mothers and all carers a living wage would redirect economic and social policies towards survival, health and well-being – for every individual and for the planet which sustains us all.
Caring is a fundamental contribution to society, and women do most of it. This should be a source of social and economic power for carers, not of impoverishment, dependence and overwork. If all carers (regardless of gender) were paid a living wage for this work, caring would be valued and carers would have more power to shape policies – on economic growth, the budget, the length of the working day, technology, war …
While paid work is assigned a monetary value and features in national [accounts] such as GDP, unpaid work remains largely unmeasured … and consequently invisible in discussions of economic policy. UNDP 2015
4. Where does this demand come from?
A century ago, UK suffragetteand member of parliament ELEANOR RATHBONE campaigned for a wage for mothers.
can justify the subordination of one group of producers – the mothers – to the
rest, and their deprivation of all share of their own in the wealth of a
community which depends on them for its very existence. Eleanor Rathbone,
The Disinherited Family, 1924
Feminist author VIRGINIA WOOLF called for:
A living wage to be paid by the State legally to the
Three Guineas, 1938
In 1972 SELMA JAMES, co-author of The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, launched the domestic labour debate, and formed the Wages for Housework Campaign that now co-ordinates the Global Women’s Strike.
|Sex, Race and Class –The Perspective of Winning, 1952-2011||Women produce and reproduce the whole labour force, the whole human race.|
Nigerian women losing rural income after migrating to the city demanded wages for housework. (Ester Boserup)
US Black mothers called for a Guaranteed Adequate Income. JOHNNIE TILLMON (above left), Chair of the National Welfare Rights Organization, wrote:
If I were president, I
go a long way toward liberating every woman. I’d just issue a proclamation that ‘women’s’ work is real work. I’d start paying women a living wage for doing the work we
are already doing – childraising and house-keeping.
Welfare is a women’s issue, 1972
The 1977 US Conference on Women:
The elimination of poverty
must be a priority for all those working for equal rights for women … just as with other workers, homemakers receiving
payments should be afforded 