I've been familiar with the notion of wages for housework for the last thirty years. I've always been sympathetic to the idea without ever having to think about it - I just got on with my working life, as did most of my friends, male and female alike. I worked, I joined unions, I went on strike, I swapped jobs for other better paid or more fulfilling jobs. I got married, my wife left her job, we had children, I went down to well-paid part-time work and, eventually, I moved into self-employment or, as it really should be called in these recessionary times, underemployment.
I've mentioned the words "work", "jobs" and "employment" several times in the opening paragraph, but what I'm really talking about here is PAID work or employment. The easy use of the language of "work" betrays the underlying assumption that holds sway within our modern capitalist society - only purposeful activity (labour) that is exchanged for money (capital) is deserving of the concept of "work". Any other activity, no matter how well intentioned or productive, that is done "for free", can't be work. Because this is "work" that can't possibly be measured; and if it cannot be measured, if it does not have a cost or a price, then it can't have any economic value either.
And so we all, in our own ways, are complicit with the silent conspiracy: there is "proper" work (often referred to as "wealth creation") and there is "improper" work (often referred to as "not working" or "sponging off the state").
Traditionally, the domain of "work" has been seen as a male domain. The domain of "non-work" has traditionally been female. The main political challenges to the prevailing economic order have traditionally been fought within the work domain. For over two centuries trade unions have fought to protect and improve the employment and human rights of all workers. More recently, the feminist movement has fought to put women on an equal footing with men, particularly in the workplace.
But there have always been voices speaking out for those who do not fit into the work domain, those working-age adults who don't participate in the labour market: the marginalised, the demonised, the ones who, in time-honoured Tory folklore, spend their idle days watching daytime television. These are the disabled, those struggling with physical and mental health problems, and - most threatening of all, because they actually have the choice to go out and work if they only so desired - carers and homemakers throughout the land...
If you are in paid work, it could be surprisingly easy to sign up to this dominant worldview, where people are either deserving of money (a whole swathe of working society stretching to the dizzy heights of the "idle rich") or undeserving (the rest of us "non-workers" stretching all the way down to "benefit scroungers"). But what happens if you are suddenly catapulted out from the comfort of the deserving into the nightmare realm of the undeserving, when all the flimsy props that kept you in your allotted place in the scheme of things crumble to dust around you - when all of a sudden you are confronted with the spectre of redundancy or disability or mental breakdown, when you are no longer a "worker"?
That's when you are confronted with real work at its most naked - the tasks we all have to do because they have to be done, because we can't pay anyone to do them for us, and if they didn't get done, the results would be catastrophic. Of course, they've been there all the time, and we have always done them or had them done for us, but they were never seen as having any "value" in themselves. And now, we need to find a way of valuing them, so that we can continue to value ourselves; we need to "valorise" and validate the domain of housework and caring for ourselves and others.
(to be continued)
