Apparently Productivity is More Popular Than Equality
When we give people money for the work they are already doing in the home, we increase gender equality, and this should be reason enough to do it
The State of the Union is always a bit of a bust because while it’s usually framed as hopeful and reflective and forward-looking, increasingly it’s just a lot of political posturing— standing and clapping or not standing and not clapping, fur coats and heckling and—whatever. I don’t put too much stock in these events, and I didn’t watch all of the State of the Union, but I read the rundowns, and I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how we talk about policies that benefit parents (and all of us) in the US.
I’ve been trying to use this Friday space to talk about lighter stuff, but these big speeches offer a kind of political temperature check, and like many, I was happy to see a concerted effort by Biden this week to at least pay lip service to calls by parents, caregivers, and advocates for care policies. But here is my little soap box moment.
Biden promised sick days, paid family medical leave, and affordable childcare to American families, and even mentioned restoring the child tax credit. This is huge.
He did this, unfortunately, by saying it would “enable millions of more people to go and stay at work” and by arguing that these policies “increase productivity” and “increase economic growth.” (Access to education was also couched in “economic competition,” which, well, for another essay.) At the same time, he and his team also threaded into this long read-aloud graf the idea of giving more “breathing room to American families looking after their loved ones.”
“Breathing room,” okay, that sounds nice! But when the focus is productivity and economic growth, “breathing room” does not tend to be what anyone really gets, especially women, who still do the most unpaid work at home in this country.
I know people will say these motions towards productivity and economics are rhetorical moves to appeal to capitalist Americans and moderate voters. I have no doubt this is true. I see this a lot among those agitating for important and crucial and urgent policy shifts around care.
But it’s important to keep in mind that when we talk about the work performed in the home, there is a long history of denying its productivity—the essential quality of the work done there—as a way to avoid paying for it and to devalue work that has historically been done by women, as well as to hide the sneaky little plan to keep women in the home and shore up the hetero nuclear family as a source of free labor that benefits men.
Social safety net policies are also often touted by Democrats as helping “the worker” to work more and better, but this continues the legacy of denying that the work in the home is itself productive— that it both creates and sustains, for instance, future labor power and social relations. You know, humans and society.
The move to tie these policies to greater productivity outside the home, in the realm of Real Work™, misses precisely this point— the work performed in the home is also productive. It produces the possibility of everything we do for money outside the home—i.e. it makes possible Real Work™.
This is sort of danced around in political platforms like these, and to me, it all feels more confusing than necessary, but also smacks of racist and sexist perspectives on welfare and freeloading moms and people who supposedly just “don’t want to work,” and usually comes with means-testing and other qualifiers in regard to who deserves these policies and how far we as a country might be willing to go with them (i.e. more support—but only for the most productive citizens who are at their breaking point!). Not to mention that this framing really shows some cards in terms of what is valued most of all here.
Women’s Unpaid Labor is Worth $10,900,000,000,000. (You can find out exactly what the patriarchy owes you here, with my friend Patti Maciesz’s Bill the Patriarchy calculator.) That means that if women were paid for the labor they currently do for free— we’re talking “routine housework, shopping for necessary household goods, child care, tending to the elderly and other household or non-household members, and other unpaid activities related to household maintenance,” work that is not currently factored into the GDP and other measures of economic growth—if they were paid just minimum wage, the total income for that labor “exceeds the combined revenue of the 50 largest companies on last year’s Fortune Global 500 list, including Walmart, Apple and Amazon.” We are all plenty productive already.
Countries with strong welfare programs also have more gender parity in the home.
In other words, when we give people money for the work they are already doing in the home, when we value that work as work, we increase gender equality.
And so I wonder (but also I don’t wonder): Why can’t we just say THIS?