Tag: wages for housework

It’s Time We Start Valuing Women’s Household Work by Paying Homemakers

Paying salaries to women for housework can give women respect, recognition, dignity and empowerment. The question then is, who will pay for it?

“They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.”

– Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (1975)

Shashi Tharoor tweeted on January 5, 2021, “I welcome @ikamalhaasan’s idea of recognising housework as a salaried profession, w/the state govt paying a monthly wage to homemakers. This will recognise & monetise the services of women homemakers in society, enhance their power & autonomy & create near-universal basic income.”

Last December, Kamal Haasan promised a salary to homemakers, as part of his poll promises in his seven-point governance and economic agenda, if his party, Makkal Needhi Maiam (MNM), is voted to power in the 2021 Tamil Nadu assembly elections.

But, Kangana Ranaut opposed the idea, saying, “Don’t put a price tag on sex we have with our love, don’t pay us for mothering our own, we don’t need salary for being the Queens of our own little kingdom our home, stop seeing everything as business. Surrender to your woman she needs all of you not just your love/respect/salary.”

Tharoor responded, “I agree w/@KanganaTeam that there are so many things in a homemaker’s life that are beyond price. But this is not about those things: it’s about recognising the value of unpaid work & also ensuring a basic income to every woman. I’d like all Indian women to be as empowered as you!”

MNM noted in their agenda, “The MNM government will take steps to realise Bharatiyaar’s dream of ‘Pudhumai penn’ through education, employment and entrepreneurship for women. Women will break through established glass ceilings by the equal opportunities provided to them by our MNM government. Homemakers will get their due recognition through payment for their work at home which hitherto has been unrecognised and unmonetised, thus raising the dignity of our womenfolk.”

A few weeks ago, a member of MNM sought the opinion of economists on this issue. This led to a flurry of articles in various dailies. Thus, the matter gained prominence, and not wanting to miss the bus, all the major parties in the fray for the Tamil Nadu Assembly elections in April 2021 are now stealing the thunder of Kamal Haasan by making payment of salaries to homemakers part of their election manifestos.

Also read: Women and the Burden of Unpaid Labour: What Is the Way Forward?

DMK chief M.K. Stalin announced on March 7 that if his party is voted to power, they would give Rs 1,000 per month to every homemaker in the state. Kamal Haasan was quick to accuse the DMK of copying many of its promises in its election manifesto, including providing a monthly salary to homemakers.

Following DMK’s announcement, the very next day, on March 8, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, E.K. Palaniswami, announced a monthly allowance of Rs 1,500 to homemakers as part of the AIADMK’s manifesto, saying that the DMK had got wind of it and announced it hurriedly a day earlier. Of course, Kamal Haasan’s party has not indicated how much they would pay the homemakers. Moreover, it is not clear at this stage how these parties are proposing to source the funds needed for this and other freebies they are promising in their manifestos.

Thus, the battle lines seem clearly drawn on this issue. According to a recent government economic survey, 60% of women in the “productive age group” of 15 to 59 were engaged in full-time housework. Note that nearly 84% of women’s working hours are spent on activities they do not get paid for, while the reverse is true for men – 80% of their work time is spent on paid work. These gender disparities begin early. The average boy spends more time on leisure and learning than his sisters, while the average girl spends more time on household work than her brothers. Boys participate less in regular household chores, such as cooking, cleaning and washing.

A typical woman’s day starts at about 5 am and ends after 9 pm. Thus, women have little time for themselves. It is estimated that the value of women’s unpaid household work amounts to nearly 40% of India’s current GDP (globally, it is 13% of the economy).

Although the Indian constitution grants men and women equal rights, a strong patriarchal system shapes the lives of women with traditions going back many millennia. Manusmriti, compiled around 200 BC, lays down how a woman’s life is to be regulated: “In childhood, a female is subject to her father, in her youth to her husband, and when her ‘lord’ is dead then to her sons.” Parents see daughters as liabilities and make them feel inferior to their brothers.

Also read: The Laws of Manu and What They Would Mean for Citizens of the Hindu Rashtra

This strong patriarchal tradition makes it difficult to remove the gender disparities. These disparities include sex-selective abortions, dowry deaths, low educational levels and high illiteracy in women, in addition to gender disparities in employment opportunities and wages. Unless these disparities are addressed by respecting the rights of girls and women India cannot become a developed nation.

It is rather ironic that the Census of India classifies as “non-workers” all household workers — all those attending to household chores like cooking, cleaning of utensils, looking after children, fetching water and collecting firewood. Hence, over 400 million women in India, nearly 65% of all females, constitute nearly 75% of those listed as non-workers in India. This categorisation has negative consequences in policies and programmes aimed at women.

Recently, the Supreme Court of India, in a motor accident claim case, observed, “The sheer amount of time and effort that is dedicated to household work by individuals, who are more likely to be women than men, is not surprising when one considers the plethora of activities a housemaker undertakes … A housemaker often prepares food for the entire family, manages the procurement of groceries and other household shopping needs, cleans and manages the house and its surroundings, undertakes decoration, repairs and maintenance work, looks after the needs of the children and any aged member of the household, manages budgets and so much more.”

“… In rural households, they often also assist in the sowing, harvesting and transplanting activities in the field, apart from tending cattle… However, despite all the above, the conception that housemakers do not ‘work’ or that they do not add economic value to the household is a problematic idea that has persisted for many years and must be overcome. … Fixing a notional income for a homemaker … is a step towards the constitutional vision of social equality and ensuring dignity of life to all individuals.”

Campaigns in support of wages for ‘housework’

In 1972, Selma James started the International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) in Manchester as a grassroots women’s network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. They wanted to change the situation of dependency of women, reverse the relations of power, and redistribute the wealth that they produced. Because the demand was for a wage ‘for housework,’ for any individual who performed it, and not a wage ‘for housewives,’ it was in a position to destabilise the socio-sexual division of labour. The “Statement of the International Feminist Collective” issued in 1972 in Italy, rejected a separation between unwaged work in the home and waged work in the factory, pronouncing housework as a critical terrain in the class struggle against capitalism.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the IWFHC lobbied the United Nations Conferences on Women on unpaid work, and got the UN to pass resolutions that recognised the unwaged caring work that women do in the home, on the land and in the community. On March 8, 2000, women from over 60 countries around the world participated in the Global Women’s Strike (GWS). This strike was called for by the Wages for Housework Campaign, demanding among other things, “Payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land and other resources.”

In a 2018 interview to the Boston Review, Silvia Federici noted, “The politics of wages for housework was shaped by women who had an understanding of capitalism, imperialism and the anti-colonial struggle. Thus we could not accept that women’s liberation could be a struggle for ‘equality with men’ or that it could be limited to equal pay for equal work. We saw that in the same way as the racialisation of Black men and women had served to justify slavery, so had gender-based discrimination served to exploit women as unpaid workers in the home.”

Thus, it is time we started valuing women’s household work. Paying salaries to women for housework can give women respect, recognition, dignity and empowerment. The question then is, who will pay for it? Can the government take on this additional burden? It is time we started working out the logistics to implement this idea whose time has come.

In fact, in 2012, the UPA government was seriously considering a proposal to make it mandatory for men to share a certain percentage of their income with their wives for doing household chores. Let us revisit that proposal. The feminist slogan of the 1970s – “The personal is political” – is coming to roost.

Samarender Reddy has a masters in economics from Johns Hopkins University.

Note: This article was edited on March 19, 2021 to remove a reference to Venezuela’s policy on paying homemakers. While the then president of Venezuela did announce such a policy in 2006, no universal income for homemakers has been implemented in the country.

China: In a First, Divorce Court Orders Husband To Compensate Wife for Housework

The ruling, however, has sparked intense debate about the value of domestic work, with some arguing that the compensation was too low.

New Delhi: A divorce court in Beijing has ordered a man to compensate his wife for the housework she did during their marriage, in a landmark ruling that also triggered a debate on the value of domestic work.

According to the BBC, the woman will receive 50,000 yuan ($7,700 or Rs 5.6 lakh) for unpaid labour during their five-year marriage. The ruling comes after China introduced a new civil code which allows spouses to seek compensation in a divorce if they bear more responsibility in “childraising, caring for elderly relatives and assisting partners in their work”, the BBC reported.

The man, identified by his surname Chen, had filed for divorce last year from his wife, surnamed Wang, after getting married in 2015. They had been living separately since 2018. Wang was initially unwilling to divorce but later sought financial compensation, arguing that her husband had not shouldered any housework or childcare responsibilities.

The Fangshan district court in Beijing ruled in her favour, ordering Wang to pay the one-off compensation of 50,000 yuan in addition to monthly alimony of 2,000 yuan.

News agency AFP reported that the amount was arrived at after factoring in “the length of time the couple were married plus ‘the effort Wang put into housework, Chen’s income and the local cost of living'”.

According to the BBC, the presiding judge told reporters on Monday that while the division of a couple’s property after marriage usually covers splitting only tangible property, “housework constitutes intangible property value.”

The case was hotly debated on Chinese social media, with AFP reporting that a hashtag related to the ruling was viewed more than 570 million times on Weibo, the country’s version of Twitter.

Also Read: Should There Be Wages for Housework?

Some users pointed out that the compensation was too little for five years’ work. “I’m a bit speechless, the work of a full-time housewife is being underestimated. In Beijing, hiring a nanny for a year costs more than 50,000 yuan,” said one commenter, according to the BBC.

The debate gained momentum after local media reported that Wang had appealed the ruling, since she had originally requested 160,000 yuan as compensation.

According to AFP, comments on social media read, “Women should never be stay-at-home wives… when you divorce, you are left with nothing whatsoever. 50,000 yuan in housework compensation is bullshit.”

“A full-time nanny could cost more than this for half a year, are women’s youth and feelings this cheap?” read another.

Users also pointed out that men should assume more household duties in the first place.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) estimates that Chinese women spend nearly four hours a day on unpaid work, which is roughly 2.5 times higher than the average for men.

“It is higher than the average in OECD countries, where women spend twice the amount of time as men on unpaid work,” the BBC said.

Zhong Wen, a divorce lawyer based in China’s Sichuan province, told the South China Morning Post that under the new civil code, “The two parties should negotiate measures, and if negotiations fail, the court should rule.”

The Struggle Keeps You Going: Selma James

Veteran feminist Selma James talks about the need for wages for housework, women’s struggle for pay equity and how waged caring labour is fundamental to women’s economic autonomy.

Veteran feminist Selma James talks about the need for wages for housework, women’s struggle for pay equity and how waged caring labour is fundamental to women’s economic autonomy.

Selma James at the Crossroads Women’s Centre. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

Selma James at the Crossroads Women’s Centre. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

Theresa May, in her debut speech as the prime minister of UK, stated that she was committed to fighting the gender pay gap. But the latest figures by UK-based Women’s Budget Group predict that women will be twice as affected by the pay gap, losing double the money as men due to tax and benefit changes from 2010. I meet with Selma James, founder of the Wages for Housework campaign, at the Crossroads Women’s Centre (which began as a squat for the women’s movement in 1975), to discuss the need for wages for caring labour, that might help bridge the gap.

James walks into the room and gives me a hug: I am not expecting this; partly because I am over-awed by the legacy of her activism and partly because I had expected her to sneer at a 20-something feminist out to interview a veteran who has hung out with the likes of Angela Davis and Fred Hampton. James had called me back personally upon receiving my interview request and although our interview had been postponed twice, she had profusely apologised both times. The second time, upon being asked to show up, I had accidentally crashed a birthday party and been invited in to eat ice cream with the members of Crossroads Women’s Centre, where James works. “We really mean it, help yourself,” she says, pushing the plate towards me, much to my embarrassment. In the feminist circuit, James is something of a legend due to her seminal work, A Woman’s Place, which focused on the daily lives of women with respect to surrounding relationships and the agency afforded to women.

The need for wages for housework

When the Wages for Housework (WFH) campaign exploded onto the international feminist stage, it sparked the first debate on unwaged care work that women are forced into due to the social roles they are expected to perform. It demanded money from the state as compensation for the labour that was not merely a “role” that women were performing, but formed the backbone of the economy due to the physical and emotional investment made by women into housework.

“All I knew was that the basic weakness of women was that we did work that was unwaged and that payment for that work was absolutely central to our autonomy – to our right to have children and our right not to have children, to pay equity,” says James.

A Wages for Housework Campaign poster. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

A Wages for Housework Campaign poster. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

It was the 1972 seminal publication, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, co-written with the feminist Mariarosa Dalla Costa, that first theorised housework and caring work as unwaged labour that women are forced to do; the very labour whose output supports the working class and through it, the market economy. Soon after, James launched into praxis.

However, her plan had very little shape in the beginning: “The campaign for Wages for Housework has been very different from what I imagined, because we didn’t know how to put it into practice except as a general demand. It is a political perspective that can be used in all kinds of ways. For example, we know that women are the object of rape in domestic situations because we haven’t got the money to run away, to defend ourselves and our children. Right now, the whole question of caring work has exploded among feminists: we were the first ones to raise that.”

In fact, in May 2015, the tongue-in-cheek Twitter hashtag #GiveYourMoneyToWomen went viral. Initiated by Lauren Chief Elk, it highlighted how women’s time and attention is often taken for granted, and suggested that if it were in such high demand, perhaps it deserved to be paid for.

When WFH was first introduced, the campaign met with criticism centred around whether domestic work was a role or work. “Women in third-world countries never had a problem with wages for housework. They understood it immediately because the question of money was not mystified. If you didn’t have it, you didn’t have the power of it, and you needed it. Not only to defend yourself from men, but to defend men, which is what women were also doing; when men were being persecuted, women had campaigns against false arrests, against stop and search, deportation,” she adds.

The question of pay equity, James argues, is based on women being able to refuse jobs with low pay. Therefore, if women had an income from caring responsibility, they had the right to say no to employers. Virginia Woolf, one of her favourite writers, wrote about this extensively in A Room Of One’s Own: how women were kept from writing what they wanted because of the poverty they were forced into due to the lack of a basic income.

Credit: Manisha Ganguly

Credit: Manisha Ganguly

Silvia Federici, one of the key founders of the WFH movement along with James, defined in 1975 how unwaged housework enslaved women:

“[N]ot only has housework been imposed on women, but it has been transformed into a natural attribute of our female physique and personality, an internal need, an aspiration, supposedly coming from the depth of our female character. Housework had to be transformed into a natural attribute rather than be recognised as a social contract because from the beginning of capital’s scheme for women this work was destined to be unwaged. Capital had to convince us that it is a natural, unavoidable and even fulfilling activity to make us accept our unwaged work.”

A poster at the centre makes the argument for child benefits. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

A poster at the centre makes the argument for child benefits. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

James begins gushing as she mentions Eleanor Rathbone and achieving the goals of WFH. “Nobody knew the need for wages for caring labour more than her: she fought and won.” An independent British MP and suffragette, Rathbone had campaigned for family allowance (now known as child benefit), which passed into an Act in 1945, the year before her death.

In retrospect

“I really do believe that to have a parent in the movement for social change is a great education for children,” says James, about her upbringing. Her father, a truck driver, was a trade unionist. “A crucial part of education is how your situation relates to those of others. Otherwise you get an enormous ego: you think you’re special, unique and of course you are special and unique, but you’re also not unique because you’re suffering as others suffer and have joy as others do. It keeps your ego in control. This is important when the 1% is very anxious for you to think of yourself as unique to control you. They want you to strive against everyone – competition is good they say from the moment you begin to breathe it seems. I think working collectively with other people is a very good basis individuality.”

When James was 15, she joined the the Johnson Forest Tendency, a splinter group of the Workers Party in the US. “I wanted to be involved in a political organisation – I went to a few and didn’t think people were very nice. Johnson Forest had a perspective of working class people being able to win despite the forces against us. I thought, that’s the only thing that makes sense to me, otherwise why would I be here if I didn’t expect to win?” she laughs, before looking alarmed and asking me how I knew all this information about her youth.

Johnson Forest changed her views on racism, especially mixed-race relationships, as her relationship with C.L.R James, a Trinidadian activist, progressed into marriage. “I had grown up in a mainly black neighbourhood and I was just as racist as any other white person. Johnson Forest helped me because we talked about the civil war in US and the ending of slavery and I got a sense of how history was made and how people risked everything for their freedom: you respect people who do that and it clearly overcomes a lot of your racism,” she smiles.

Selma James with activist and writer Angela Davis in 2013. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

Selma James with activist and writer Angela Davis in 2013. Credit: Manisha Ganguly

We are, however, further away from realising her dream of women’s right in the form of pay equity and wages for housework than ever before. “The election of [Donald] Trump indicates that we’re far from any kind of liberation. On the other hand, there are massive movements that have been happening in the US led by Bernie Sanders and here headed by [Jeremy] Corbyn,” she pauses to point to the Corbyn badge pinned to the front of her sweater. “We don’t know which way it’s going to swing – only that the right and left wings will have a confrontation,” she frowns, before adding that with the impending Brexit, it is essential for women to organise collectively and fight back as they have always done at the centre.

Crossroads and the fight that continues

Crossroads Women’s Centre began as a squat in 1975 that was later evicted in 1978. In response to the eviction, a group of women of all races, ages and class occupied Camden Town Hall in protest. According to the history given on their website, one of the women “chained herself to the first floor balcony and dramatically unfolded yards and yards of a petition with thousands of signatures demanding a women’s centre”. The centre was finally granted property near King’s Cross and was King’s Cross Women’s Centre for 17 years before finally moving to its location in Kentish Town, aptly renamed Crossroads. “It’s an area where women and men can always come and bring their problems. The basis is self-help and there are ways in which we organise with people who are ready to do the work. If they’re not ready to do the work, we give them a nice cup of tea and we say goodbye. It’s only on the basis of self-help, otherwise you invite a power relation that is objectionable to us,” explains James.

When I ask her about her most significant victory at the centre, she excitedly tells me, “The time we screamed the loudest with pleasure was when we won a court case against a man who had raped two sex workers.” In 1995, the Crown Prosecution had decided not to prosecute the accused Christopher Davies, who was later found guilty of rape and sentenced to 14 years of jailtime, reduced on appeal to 11 years. The English Collective of Prostitutes, Women Against Rape and Legal Action for Women arranged for a private prosecution at Maidstone Crown Court.

“We filled the seats everyday. Dozens of women went to hear the case, and the judge and jury were very aware of the fact that the court was full of women.” After the hearing was over, James and the women were in Beijing, attending a UN conference, when the ruling came out. The judge had told the accused, “This was an extremely serious rape and you remain a danger to women”. James recalls, “We just began to scream our lungs out and everyone thought we had gone mad. But we were confirmed – we had stopped him from raping others. We had proven that sex workers could be believed. We were all thrilled and we were thrilled that we were all thrilled – it was such a collective emotion,” says James, beaming. “A play was later made out of the transcript of the case, put up at Crossroads Women’s Centre and other local theatres in London.”

At 86, James is remarkably optimistic. She refuses to give in to activism burnout. “The struggle keeps you going. We always count our victories and see what we won when others don’t. We look around at this centre and say, look at what we’ve done”.

Manisha Ganguly is a freelance journalist based in London. Follow her on Twitter @manisha_bot

Should There Be Wages for Housework?

Paying salaries for housework could help build respect for domestic labour, and give women dignity, recognition and independence.

Paying salaries for housework could help build respect for domestic work, and give women recognition and independence.

Women filling water. Credit: Shome Basu

Women filling water. Credit: Shome Basu

May 1 is May Day, celebrated the world over in honour of workers

Labour of love. That’s how we define the workload of a homemaker. Their contribution to the economy is seldom counted as productive. Should homemakers be paid? How do you monetise their work? These questions remain taboo.

The closest anybody came to answering these questions was in 2012 when Krishna Tirath, the then Women and Child Development minister, considered a proposal that the work of homemakers be quantified and remunerated by their spouses. This was a flawed argument, at best. It presumed that the onus of the labour fell upon the spouse, conversely meaning that the spouse was the owner. The proposal also reflected the stance of the state in shrugging its own responsibility in the matter.  Besides, making it mandatory for the husband to deposit a portion of his salary in the wife’s account wouldn’t essentially increase the household income, per se.

While it is a fact that the wife is meant to be an equal partner in a marriage, it is often observed that she has no say in the decision making of the household if she is not an earning member. The social structure in a country like India gives her little space to do her own thing, take up a new vocation, help a needy relative, or make any purchase without being questioned. Though the work she does is real, in terms of efforts and its visible output, it is not monetised. It is labour, but not recognised to be so because it’s unpaid.

A study conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in its 26 member countries and three emerging economies of India, China and South Africa, said that household production constitutes an important part of economic activity. Since this unpaid work is mostly done by women, neglecting to include it would mean underestimating women’s contribution to the economy. The study found that Turkish, Mexican and Indian women spend 4.3 to 5 hours more on unpaid work than the men. It also said that the Indian men spend considerably more time sleeping, eating, watching TV; relaxing in general.

Why then is the work done by homemakers not eligible for being paid? In a predominantly agrarian economy like India, there are ample precedents in religious as well as mythological texts on the role of a woman at home. Parallels can also be found in the West, where there was a clear division of labour between men and women. Most men worked on the farms and the women at home. However, the Industrial Revolution changed that scenario. The men still worked outside the homes, this time in the cities and in the factories, and the women continued to work at home. But the men were now paid in cash, as against the previous earnings in food or in kind. The standardisation of the economy began and money became an important criterion for the worth of people.

The ‘cult of domesticity’ found ground around the same time in the nineteenth century in the middle and upper classes in America and Britain. Similar to Indian culture where the woman is patronised and put on a pedestal, this cult promoted the virtues of piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness while constraining her sphere of work to the home. This kept married women from entering the job market, as it was looked down upon, making them dependent on the salary of their husbands.

Wages for housework

The International Wages for Housework Campaign started in Italy in 1972 under Selma James. It was based on the premise that housework was the basis of industrial work and should be duly paid for. The movement further spread to Britain and America. Silvia Federici, among the founders of the movement, in her book ‘Wages Against Housework’ wrote: “To ask for wages for housework will by itself undermine the expectations society has of us, since these expectations – the essence of our socialisation – are all functional to our wageless condition in the home.”

More recently, in 2014, Giulia Bongiorno, an Italian lawyer and ex-parliamentarian, proposed that homemakers should be paid a salary as a way of addressing the debate on domestic violence. She argued that most women continue in an abusive relationship because they don’t have a way out, as they are financially dependent on their partner. This does not mean that the salary would be dependent on victimisation, but that the role of the homemaker needs to be revisited and valued. However, the proposal said that the salary needs to be paid either by the state or in the case of an affluent partner, by the partner himself, reducing the argument to the same flaws as that of the proposal by Krishna Tirath.

The International Labour Organisation equates the homemaker with a student, terming housework activities as ‘non-economic’, and the work of homemakers as voluntary. Is a homemaker’s work voluntary in reality? In the Indian context, social pressures lead a woman to give up her dreams of pursuing a career, though some women also choose to stay at home and look after the kids. The participation of women in the ‘labour workforce’, in the conventional sense, has now increased, and more Indian women work outside the home compared to their counterparts from previous generations. Many women are involved in some form of money making activity even as they stay at home and manage their household. But in the absence of such resources, should she  hesitate in asking for something that rightfully belongs to her? A salary.

Venezuela pays its homemakers 80% of the minimum wage (approximately $180 per month) since 2006. Though it is a modest sum, it has been helping women in the country. However, it failed to make much news, maybe strategically so, for the fear that it could set a precedent and the rest of the world may have to follow suit. In a  financially tumultuous world, where ‘austerity’ is the new buzzword, the mention of a salary for homemakers sounds forbidden.

Countless arguments are made against wages for housework. That it would ghettoise women and further confine them to the home. Well, the converse is also possible. She may gain a new confidence and train herself to become financially independent. Another question asked is who will pay for it? Would it not put additional stress on the economy? But if Venezuela could do it, can the rest of the world in general and India in particular not consider the option and start working out the logistics?

Needless to say, women constitute almost half the population and their needs and issues have to be addressed. A homemaker doesn’t need any favours. She is already contributing  to the economy. A salary for her work at home would be a tool towards her empowerment, give her a life of dignity. As International Labour Day is being celebrated, we need to make sure that her labour and the love that she put into it, is not being ignored.