Re-configuring the Care Economy for Gender Convergence 3 October 2019 The Point, Level 7, Mercu UEM 9.30am – 12.00pm
Care, the macroeconomy and women’s work Jayati Ghosh Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi Khazanah Research Institute, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 3 October 2019 .
Why care about care work? Care work: activities that involve “looking after” someone else, meeting the physical, psychological and emotional needs of dependent adults and children. Social reproduction: cooking, cleaning, provisioning for the household and other domestic services; looking after the young, the elderly, the sick, disabled or differently abled as well as healthy adults. Key feature of care is that it is fundamentally relational and involves human interaction, even when mediated by technology. Direct care work: services that are essential for human survival, or to improve the quality of human existence Indirect care work: enabling such services to be provided.
The public value of care work Essential for human survival Contributes significantly to human well-being and social development. Unpaid and underpaid care work provides a very significant subsidy to the formal economy. Care work can be a significant source of good quality employment generation, especially with fears of technology-related job losses and has strong multiplier effects on employment.
Social undervaluation of care Care work is mostly undervalued by society, markets and governments. So it is underprovided and provided in poor conditions with low/no pay Performed by women, migrants, those at lower end of social spectrum Association with women’s work adds to inequalities for workers and to those receiving care.
Nature Children Elderly Sick/ Healthy Self Provider/Recipient of care Differently adults work abled Feeding, Assistance Nursing, Counselling Seeking bathing, in eating, assisting medical Unpaid work Direct cleaning, bathing or mobility help, by household members watching moving and daily exercising within household over around functions and by volunteer workers in community Growing food for own consumption, cooking, cleaning, laundry, Indirect providing other essential services like shopping for necessities, fetching and carrying fuelwood and water for household consumption Feeding, Assistance Nursing, Providing bathing, in daily therapy personal Direct cleaning, functions and other services watching and assistance Informal over, mobility, in daily market work by paid teaching nursing functions workers Informal paid work for cooking, cleaning, laundry, providing Indirect other essential household services, procuring water or fuel, shopping for necessities Child care Geriatric Nurses, Therapists, providers, services, Doctors, Counsellors, Day care, Family Physio- Nutritionists Direct Pediatric day care, therapists, workers, Old age other Early home clinical Paid formal education workers and employment workers medical services Managers, administrators and other service providers (like Indirect clerical or sanitary services) in child care, elderly care and day care facilities, clinics, hospitals, nurseries and kindergartens, schools
Care is a relational activity Even in its most “unskilled” form, care work is never “routine” and requires cognitive input and responses. So technology can never replace human engagement completely, even if it can assist in reducing drudgery of some care activities and make others easier to perform more efficiently. Demand for care is hard to adjust and in some cases cannot be adjusted at all – non-delivery of such care will result in actual detriment to the potential receiver rather than simply deferment or reduction of perceived wants. Care work will expand at a faster rate than many other economic activities, with income elasticity of demand greater than one.
Productivity in care work Better quality care (paid or unpaid) typically requires more intensive human input. So standard concepts of labour productivity are irrelevant, misleading and counterproductive. Productivity cannot be raised significantly through mass production, and productivity measured in terms of number of people served is a misleading indicator. Increasing “productivity” in numerical terms (like patients per nurse) can make things worse: Overwork of caregivers reduces the quality of care and can cause impatience or irritation or neglect on the part of the caregiver, thereby leading to harm for the recipient.
Technology and care work Some aspects of care delivery can be made more productive by reducing drudgery, difficulty and repetitiveness by substituting machine labour for human labour. Artificial Intelligence and new digital technologies can make care work more efficient and streamlined, with faster and more flexible responses. This will require skilling workers to be able to utilise these processes. But new technologies would supplement rather than replace most care workers
Skills in care work - 1 Different care activities require different degrees of skill and prior knowledge. Some (like doctors) are known to be highly skilled requiring advanced qualifications. But skills and training required for some crucial care work are not adequately recognized, For example, early childhood education, geriatric care, dealing with differently abled persons.
Skills in care work - 2 Many of these services are performed in informal settings by unpaid or low paid workers, so the care provided can be inadequate quality because of lack of training. Societies then undervalue both the skills and the workers When mostly women do such work, it compounds the gender discrimination and hierarchy.
The affective element in care Human emotions and empathy play important roles. Much care work, especially unpaid care, is delivered in context of socio-cultural norms about familial duties, responsibilities and commitment. These interact with patriarchal structures and values to create gendered divisions of care work. So across all societies, women are seen as dominantly responsible for paid and unpaid care work.
Feminisation of care Globally, around 75 per cent of total unpaid care work (in work hours) is performed by women . Most women across all societies typically work longer hours than men, whether or not they are recognised as doing so. This adversely affects labour force participation of women. It creates “wage penalty”, lower wages and worse working conditions for all care work, even when performed by men.
Gender distribution of care work is universal
Paid-unpaid care work continuum Care work is often performed by those with lower educational attainments (even when levels of skill required are quite high) and by disadvantaged workers like migrants. Because so much care work is unpaid within families, it is not valued even when it is paid for. The nature of such work – more amenable to part-time employment and informal contracts – also contributes to its devaluation both in market terms and in social perception.
Time poverty Time poverty is the shortage of time available to devote to purely personal requirements, including leisure and relational activities. Most people who are time-poor are also income poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations. Presence of time poverty adds to overall deprivation in a significant way that is rarely captured, even in newer multidimensional measures of poverty.
Care work and time poverty Poorer people cannot afford to buy various goods and services (especially care) from the market, and if these are not provided by public policy, then they can only consume them if they produce these goods and services themselves. So in addition to having to work often long hours for relatively low wages, or paltry remuneration for self-employment, they must also engage in unpaid labour to meet the essential consumption needs of themselves and their family members. This lowers the quantity and quality of such goods and services.
The double burden of time and income poverty In all societies, unpaid labour increases sharply as the income of a household falls – and this is mostly performed by women. Time poverty also reduces volume and quality of goods and services provided in unpaid form and so adds to the material deprivation of that family. So more than loss of leisure – it actually affects material conditions. So time poverty is not a disease of the rich – it is actually much worse for the poor and adds to their material deprivation.
Globalisation of care work Global value chains emerging in care economy, driven especially by migration of women for care work. Nurse migration one significant example: out-migration from the Philippines (the world's largest supplier of temporary migrant nurses) to the United States (the world's largest demander of internationally trained nurses) affected by political economy, wages and working conditions in both. Migration of domestic workers: 80 per cent of all female cross-border migrant workers are domestic workers.
Domestic workers around the world, 2010
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