COUNTING THE CAREWORN

This and the other pull-out quotes in this article are from Principles of Economics (9th edition) by Gregory N Mankiw.

Every year, approximately 700 students take Brown University’s introductory economics course. This class, like similar college classes across the country, has used the Principles of Economics textbook quoted above and later in this piece for more than a decade. From the very start of thousands of students’ economics education, care work, including childcare, elder care, household care, etc., is enforced as merely an inconvenience. Pedagogy and practice in neoclassical economics, the foundation of liberal capitalist systems, blatantly belittle care work while reinforcing gender constructions. Care and domestic work, or household management, is ironically undervalued in a field (economics) named after the Greek word for “household management.”

What is care?

Economist Nancy Folbre defines the care economy as a “site of production, development and maintenance of human capabilities.” Such work can entail different tasks depending on cultural and socioeconomic context, such as cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes; providing healthcare and psychosocial support; reproductive labor, childcare, and eldercare; shopping for groceries and household needs; keeping living spaces clean and maintained; protecting the sanitation and hygiene of household members; traveling long distances to collect water, food, firewood for the family; and managing household savings and finances.

Unpaid care and domestic work, performed in most households around the world, is never counted in chief macroeconomic indicators like GDP, despite GDP being the measure of all goods and services produced in a country in a given unit of time. This results in labor markets biased toward those who have no care responsibilities or who can delegate them to others— family members who are forced or convinced to assume such responsibilities, or, increasingly, paid care workers.

Who cares?

Paid care work is compensated in terms of perceived ‘productivity’ and labor value, which are difficult to measure due to the multiple physical, mental, and emotional aspects of such work, typically resulting in the labor being undervalued and undercompensated. Moreover, “productivity” doesn’t encompass the benefits of such services to those who receive them or to the economy as a whole. The outsourcing of care labor relieves its customers from performing their own care responsibilities, allowing them to go to work. Additionally, a babysitter or a parent is not just looking after a child’s physical needs. They are also generating value by contributing to the child’s overall development with returns in education, future earnings, and overall productivity.

Imagine a world where no care tasks were carried out, where everyone was entirely independent from the day they were born to the day they died, responsible for their own care needs. Without this vast unrecognized infrastructure—which nurtures, protects, and cares for us—the entire world would stop in its tracks. In economic language, care work reproduces and sustains the world’s labor force to be fit, productive, and innovative. Care work is essential to sustaining human life.

All around the world, both paid and unpaid care are gendered and racialized. Those who identify as women and girls, or who happen to have ‘feminine’ traits, are often pushed to take on care work to sustain their households. In the U.S., men spend just 63 percent of the time women spend on unpaid care work, per the Institute of Policy Studies. On average, according to time-use data compiled by the International Labour Organization, men’s average contribution to total unpaid care work is 27.5 percent globally. Just 29 percent of men’s total working time (including time spent on all labor or ‘productive’ activities) is spent on unpaid care work. Meanwhile, on average, women around the world spend 65 percent of their working time on unpaid care. Care is gendered in economics, too—in Mankiw’s textbook, each use of the word “women” is followed by words relating to childcare, single motherhood, and/or domestic work.

Those performing care work can be loved ones, household members, community members, or, increasingly, in most regions, professional care providers such as nannies, babysitters, household cooks, home cleaners, and house healthcare aides, working in both formal and informal labor markets. Across most countries and cultures, families who can afford it rely on paid care workers, who often come from communities of color and/or migrant communities. The determination of who provides care has patriarchal, racial, and colonial origins, with much of care labor coming from women who were historically enslaved, colonized, trafficked, or forced to perform their ‘roles’ as wives, daughters, aunties, and sisters. Male care workers are also feminized, racialized, and overall underappreciated in their workplace. In the U.S., women form 91.5 percent of paid domestic workers working for private households, and Black, Hispanic, and AAPI women form around 52.4 percent of this workforce, according to the Economic Policy Institute. 35.1 percent of these workers are born outside the U.S., more than half of whom are not U.S. citizens.

Despite being one of the fastest-growing sectors in the U.S. economy, paid care work is increasingly undervalued. Domestic workers earn 25.9 percent less than other wage earners (even after controlling for demographics and education), largely work part-time due to the lack of full-time jobs, are subject to illegal labor practices like wage theft, and are three times more likely to be in poverty. These intersections of race, class, citizenship, and gender contribute to making the domestic care sector one of the most vulnerable workforces in the country.

The outlook on paid care work outside the U.S. is bleak as well. Data often simply doesn’t exist, especially due to the various informal aspects of the industry and the precarity and obscurity of international migration. In OECD countries, 28.5 percent of domestic workers are immigrants. According to the International Labour Organization, nearly one in five domestic workers across the world is an international migrant. Prominent in the existing literature around care are migrant women coming from countries in the Global South to provide care services to wealthy households in the Global North, forming what are known as Global Care Chains. In South Asia, upper-middle class and wealthy households commonly employ part- or full-time paid care workers, mostly internal migrants of marginalized caste identities. These workers, alongside workers from Southeast Asia and, increasingly, Africa, are an integral part of these Global Care Chains, especially to the Middle East and the Global North. As such, care work across the world is an intersectional issue, reinforcing the gendered construction of society across class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and caste.

Economic theory and care

gospel of wealth from the Global North to the South has also transported the gender division of labor via international development policies aimed at poverty reduction. This phenomenon, called the “feminization of poverty” by academic Sylvia Chant, refers to anti-poverty programs frequently designed to target women, claiming that such targeting is the most “effective” way to reduce poverty overall. Several non-profits, using the neoclassical framework of maximizing output and minimizing input, problematically provide aid and services to women in households instead of men, as they believe that women are more likely to dispense the received aid to the entire household, while men might use such aid for individual ends and consumption. Such distribution is more “efficient.” This again pushes the responsibility of poverty reduction for an entire community or country onto these women while distracting from issues of men’s poverty and gender issues.

Care during emergencies

Care work and its centrality to life comes to the forefront when households are in trouble. Even in so-called ‘progressive’ and ‘gender-aware’ countries, a household facing any kind of emergency, be it unemployment or an unplanned pregnancy, often relies on the traditional household caregiver to sacrifice individual goals and desires for continued household ‘stability.’ ly, time. This results in what economist Jayati Ghosh calls “time poverty.” Care workers, paid and unpaid, are deprived of the time needed to engage in personally and socially meaningful activities and relationships, leading to deterioration of physical and mental health and relationships. Families who can afford to do so outsource care work to professional caregivers, while families who cannot must work harder, longer hours. Often, professional caregivers come from low-income communities and spend their day doing labor—paid labor for the families they serve, and free labor for their own families. Meanwhile, women at the top rungs of the capitalist hierarchy (often rich white women in the West) can hire professional care providers, usually migrant women of color, to sustain their households. These wealthy women become ‘inspirations’ to other working women, who are told to “lean in” to girlboss feminism and capitalistic ideals (thanks Sheryl Sandberg).

The idealized “economic man” touted in neoclassical economics maximizes his individual “utility” (economic jargon for happiness) or profit. He consumes and produces more and more using as few inputs as possible (“efficiency”). To do so, he must minimize time spent on care and domestic work, which are rarely accounted for in the first place, so that he has enough time and energy to maximize individual welfare for each hour of the day. His choice to work is dictated only by his “demand for leisure”—for every additional hour he works, all he forsakes is leisure.

Self-interested and alone, he has no external responsibilities to himself, family members, or friends. He reproduces without needing to consider prenatal or postnatal health and recovery. Children can raise themselves or be raised by childcare workers, which he can afford. The only value they hold are as human capital investment opportunities for the next generation. He doesn’t have any aging relatives—if he does, there are eldercare professionals whom he can pay to tend to them. If the economic man chooses to ask for parental benefits or a leave, or any workplace benefits for that matter, he will raise his cost of labor for rational employers, reducing labor demand in the market and lowering his wages and employment options. Caring for others, even close loved ones, is not a priority. At best, it is an inconvenience, a cost to be minimized, instead of the sustaining force and infrastructure of social and economic life.

Hence, neoclassical economics relies on an intensely individualistic construction of society, where only self-interest and productivity have value. Its theory and policies only appreciate the care economy’s value when it serves the efficient delivery of public goods and services. These perspectives dominate economics as a field today, especially among power-holding institutions in the West, heavily influencing policy and corporate decisions on an international level.

The spread of neoliberal ideology and its

During such emergencies, the nature and quantity of care responsibilities, how they are distributed, and the time and effort they require undergo significant changes, often leading to increased labor, vulnerability, and negative coping mechanisms for care providers. Care providers sometimes actively endanger their physical and mental health, often disproportionately dropping out of school and work to perform more care work duties, traveling long distances to provide food and water for family members, and caring for sick family members. Often, such tasks entail exposing themselves to risks like gender-based violence and sexual harassment. The care economy thus becomes a ‘shock absorber’ for entire economies and societies when in crisis.

During both the Ebola crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, in places with a lack of or declining investments in health systems or a breakdown of existing health services, many of the healthcare responsibilities were offloaded onto women, resulting in self-exploitation, increased reliance on family, and outsourcing of care. In fact, a 2019 study found increased psychological trauma for care workers can result from being solely responsible for providing care in a household while risking contracting and spreading the virus, especially to children. From 2020 to 2021, women’s rate of participation in the labor force in the U.S. dropped by 1.7 percent, and even more so for women of color. During the COVID-19 pandemic, domestic workers, especially those of Black immigrant communities, disproportionately faced food insecurity, lack of healthcare access, unemployment, and risk of eviction, but were fearful of seeking government help due to their vulnerable citizenship status.

As we crawl out of a worldwide pandemic and hurtle closer toward repeated climate disasters, increased proportions of the human population are being exposed to humanitarian emergencies, which can impact millions of households at once, pushing millions of care workers into this state of emergency.

Costs of care

That care work has historically gone uncompensated has allowed it to be taken entirely for granted. The hidden infrastructure of care, along with those who provide it, incidentally does not need to be taken care of via legal protections or fair compensation. Meanwhile, imbalances in the labor market push specific individuals and identities into care work while ‘liberating’ others from such work.

Care labor restricts a caregiver’s mobility, social interaction (and thus social capital), access to paid employment, and most important-

Not all care providers have the luxury of outsourcing their care responsibilities. In various places around the world, traditional care providers must stay home to fulfill their caregiving responsibilities, even if paid domestic help is a viable option. Additionally, choosing to go to work instead of providing unpaid care at home, especially to one’s own family members, can result in physical and mental harm, often from other household members, and even in feelings of guilt. After all, caring is also an emotional activity. It is a primary language of love and attachment. Thus, withdrawing care support has significant emotional implications for care providers, which in turn can heavily impact their ability to set their own boundaries. Being socialized into responsibility for an entire household’s well-being can exert significant emotional and mental pressure for the care provider, especially if other household members reinforce such pressure through guilt-tripping, abuse, and, at times, violence.

It is important to emphasize that the social responsibility we have to other individuals in our day-to-day life should be respected, and the needs of those who we love and interact with every day cannot be dismissed for the sake of toxic, individualistic “self-care.” Care labor, although it consumes time and energy, is not a burden. However, our present moral, family, and social values attached to care make it almost impossible for care providers to negotiate fair reduction, redistribution, or rewarding of care work.

Taking care of care

While we cannot overthrow the entire neoliberal system which has constructed these choices and our society, realistically nearing this vision is still possible through reduction, redistribution, and fair compensation of care work. Several attempts have been made by international organizations like Oxfam, UN Women, CARE, ILO, etc., to compute a value of care work as a proportion of the GDP with the support of feminist economists. Oxfam values the contribution of unpaid care work to the global economy at nearly $11 trillion a year, measured just in minimum wages—three times the value of the global tech industry. Several of these organizations and feminist economists like Jayati Ghosh and Nancy Folbre have been advocating for investments in the care economy, including increased public care services, increased compensation for care workers, parental benefits and leave, etc.

What if we envisioned a world centered around care and not production? Caring for loved ones and communities would be equally prioritized as self-care. Governments would invest in social and care infrastructure, and distribution of care work could be equitable, regardless of identity. Choices between individual aspirations and caring for others would not have to be made.

ANUSHKA KATARUKA B’24 wonders why we care about economics.