User:Consast/Care work

Who does care work?

Family and community

Before the Industrial Revolution, care work (such as taking care of the household and raising children) was done by the entire family, and often involved the contributions of an entire community. In this sense, the core sphere was not seen as separate from daily business interactions, because the idea of the market did not yet exist as it does today.

The Effects of Industrialization

With the dawn of the Industrial Era, the core sphere became more separate from jobs and business, which were performed outside and away from the home. Largely as a product of patriarchal societies, men became the ones who left the home to do their work in factories and other non-domestic jobs. Women, who were considered better suited to nurturing, were left at home and expected to provide childcare and do the housework. This familial hierarchy persisted and has continued to show itself in the contemporary American family, with a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother, and their children. However, not all families were structured as such. Contrary to White women, Black women and women of color were expected to work. Almost 80 percent of single black women compared to 23.8 percent of single white women worked in 1880. Despite the typical declining rates of labor participation after marriage among white women, labor force participation remained stable for black women. Thus, both black men and women financially contributed to the household.

Domestic work arose as an important element in caring and maintaining a stable workforce. With the abolition of slavery in the U.S., African American women were increasingly hired as domestic workers. The history of domestic work in the United States is one of gender, racial, citizenship, and class hierarchies. Despite domestic work being a paid job, it was not recognized as real work by either the law or society. Because domestic work lies within the private sphere and is typically performed by women, it was often depicted as an “act of love” or rewarding in itself. This mentality has served as a justification for the lack of legal protections in this area of work that exist even today, such as in the exclusion of domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing the right to form labor unions. Similarly, “live-in” workers such as “live-in” nannies and housekeepers are still not provided overtime protections under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Whether women worked or stayed in the home, their duties were believed to be unimportant and were largely ignored.

This issue persists today in the field of economics. Acts performed in the home often carry considerable replacement costs but are not factored into productivity. It is possible to pay others to perform many of the tasks associated with care work, but to do so is often prohibitively expensive. When adding up the potential costs of work such as round-the-clock childcare, housekeeping, cooking, and the cost of a person such as a home health aide to provide care for elderly family members, it proves much more cost effective for families to substitute their time rather than pay the replacement cost. While paid care work is considered employment, work undertaken by family members is not counted as productive towards the economic market and is therefore overlooked when considering things such as employment status.

Despite persisting complications regarding the perception of care work, the economic environment has changed from what it was a century ago. Many more women now participate in the labor force at least part-time, and many more believe that the "cult of domesticity" for women of the 19th and 20th centuries is a thing of the past. However, studies show that women have come to dominate caring professions - such as teaching, childcare, nursing, social work - and that most of these professions are paid considerably less than the occupations more frequently held by men. To add to this, women frequently are still expected to do the housework and to raise the children in many families. The persisting idea that care work is unimportant combined with these factors explains why care work continues to be ignored from an economic point of view, and why women still have a difficult time shirking gender roles.

Women and unpaid care work

Many studies have shown that women provide the majority of unpaid childcare, while some have shown men to be more likely to support the elderly than to care for children. The comparative willingness of women to perform unpaid care work has historically contributed to the poor compensation received by people in care-based professions. The historical and cultural pressure on women to provide these services without assurance of financial compensation has devalued care work, leading to these professions being heavily underpaid in comparison to professions which require a similar amount of training and work but are not equivalent to any domestically performed tasks.

Women also carry a heavier burden of care work in the home in comparison to men. This is largely due to differences in gender socialization as well as historical and cultural traditions. The biological differences explain that women show more affection and love in performing care work when compared with men. As they are growing up, women are taught to be more caring and affectionate in their behavior, compared to their male counterparts. This does not imply however that women are more biologically predisposed to do care work. Historical and cultural traditions explain the widely held ideology of women's role in caring for others. In Nepal women work 21 more hours each week than men, and in India, 12 more hours. In Kenya 8- to 14-year-old girls spend 5 hours more on household chores than boys. In all these cases most of these extra work hours for women are spent on care work. This poses a particular problem for women in that these extra hours of domestic care work translate into a difficult balance for women between market work and domestic work. Since the division of household labor women have not been given many choices other than care work as patriarchal systems have used their physical force, property rights, and cultural norms to force women to take over specializations that are deemed unfit for men.

The creation of separate spheres, public and private, in the nineteenth century contributed to the belief that caring was incompatible with the workplace and belonged to the family only. The historical push of women into care work combined with the contemporary dominance of women in these fields, accounts for the modern conceptions that care work is inherently feminine work. However, care work is not naturally feminized. Instead, care work is only socialized into a feminine sphere, and is also done by males. Despite the social nature of the feminization of care work, it has become so feminized that there is often a stigma against men who engage in care work. This stigma may discourage men from entering care work as well as further propagate the belief that care work is inherently women's work. Moreover, the conflation of women's work and care work can lead to the ignoring of cultural, political, racial, and ethnic differences among women.

Furthermore, there are many differences in earning between high school graduates and college graduates. This difference is especially pertinent between male and female individuals searching for a job. If unemployed, the differences between the rates of high school graduates and college graduates may even be similar. However, women tend to find more opportunities in unpaid care work if they are unable to get into the paid work force. If individuals are unable to achieve a degree, they will not meet the threshold of what many jobs require. This inevitability is felt by much of the world population who are unable to attend school due to staying in their household to take care of elderly or sick family members.

Recently, individual people are not the only ones who claim to provide care. An increasing number of companies are claiming that they will care for you in order to attract you into purchasing their services. For example, Lufthansa, an airline company, had an advertisement that read, "Service as dependable as a shoulder to lean on." The accompanying picture displayed a woman leaning her head on a man's shoulder, with both sound asleep. In this case, the take-away message seems to be that a high degree of care translates into high quality. Another airline company, British Airways, had an ad that displayed the same message. It read, "New Club World cradle seat. Lullaby not included." The image accompanying the statement showed a woman caring for a baby in her arms. The baby's head, however, was switched with that of a relaxed and content passenger. These are only a few of the companies that are now promoting themselves as care-oriented in order to gain customers.

Division by socio-economic class

Most paid care work is performed by members of the working class, predominantly women of the working class. Most of the paid work that members of the working class perform is care work. The domestic workforce, for example, is composed of approximately 2.2 million workers in the U.S., out of which a large majority (91.5%) are women. Half of these identify as Black, Hispanic, or Asian American Pacific Islander. Black and Hispanic women are particularly overrepresented in the domestic workforce. About 35% of domestic workers were not born in the U.S., thus this particular workforce is composed of a large proportion of immigrant women of color. Scholars have described this phenomena as the ‘international division of reproductive labor’ or ‘care chain’. In this ‘chain’, housework is commodified. Those women who can afford it pay other women, usually immigrant women of color, to do their housework. Back in their home country, other women perform their housework for them. Care work does not necessarily have to be face-to-face. Scholar Hung Cam Thai, for instance, in his study of Vietnamese transnational marriages suggests that migrant remittances can be considered a form of care work as well.