Exploiting women to support yourself

I'd have thought that Adam Smith would have sufficiently well off to afford to employ domestic staff - to cook for both him and his mother.

Thanks Buffy for that name. Just been looking her stuff up, and it is very helpful.

I never knew economics could be so interesting. I'll come back to this thread once I've done some housework!

I have only looked at the comments underneath the videao, almondpudding (will watch video this evening when children not around) but it looks great. Thanks.

And you, Buffy.

This might be different to what Buffy was referring to, but is relevant to the topic.

Sorry to leap in, Buffy.

Thanks, almondpudding.

There is a video of Waring's most recent talk on the economy and unpaid. labour:

vimeo.com/122208914

CatfromJapan, try Counting For Nothing by Marilyn Waring.

Would you recommend anything in particular, Buffy? I've not even come across the term before, so would be starting from nowhere.

In some sense I think you are agreeing with Cadno?

The work that smallholders (often women) do is often invisible in the economy, yet many societies would collapse without it.

Not sure what you mean here by 'farm workers' Cadno.

It's an interesting debate. I work as a minimum waged TA and my brother works as something very highly paid and profit making. We were having one of those late night discussions about work and he was asking about my role. I gave him a quick outline which includes dealing with children who are highly distressed eg through bereavement or wanting to run away from school. He commented that it would be really hard to put a monetary value on that role. So I suppose that is what is meant by invisible emotional work.

There are real issues about how we think of 'work'. We do tend to think of it as something that can be calculated in terms of a direct relation to some sort of profit-making end result.

Even as we re-theorise 'women's work', it is still in terms of this profit-making end result.

A lot of women's work isn't easy to see in these terms. Yes, you can often trace a circuitous path to profit but I do wonder if, in doing so, we still miss something very important abut a lot of 'women's work'. Perhaps there really is work which is not about profit, and benefit, etc. ...

No, cadno. The work 'farmers' is seen, has been seen, will be seen. 'Women's work' was utterly invisible for a long time, and is still massively under -theorised.

There's a great, recent example, which I have to hunt down and look at.

A charity gave families a cow in order to lift them out of poverty. A group of economists studied the effect of giving the cow. They came to the surprising realisation that, in fact, the only way that the cow-giving could be seen to lift the family out of poverty was by not calculating the labour costs of the woman (and it was the woman of the family) in tending for the cow.

If the labour involved in tending the cow was calculated at any rate at all, the family went into deficit. The cow-giving, in effect, led to the (further) super-exploitation of women. For the cow-giving to be a benefit, it was necessary to calculate the women's labour at zero.

The invisibility arises from the fact that, prior to that study, cow-giving had been going on for some time and no-one had even noticed the women's work.

(I seem to remember Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak having written a good article about super-exploitation and women. But I am really sorry that I remember no more than that.)

There are lots of other - even more invisible - examples. My personal favourite is emotional work. This is often done by women. It's hard to identify, talk about, quantify. It's not really taken seriously. It's not really seen as work. Even raising it as a serious issue will set people off spluttering ('It's not just women who do that'; 'You mean women listening to each other complaining about men?'; etc.).

However, there was a thread on Mumsnet about 'wmotional work' a while back. Interestingly, it had arisen because of the issue of women feeling they were being expected to do teh lion's share of 'emotional work' in the workplace. It was becoming visible. But still very hard to talk about.

I find the invisibility of women's work fascinating.

No cadno.

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

Like say, Farmers versus Farm Workers - that sort of irony ?

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

Yes, absolutely.

This thread has been interesting. I am about to find a cleaner because, due to health reasons, I am now unable to do dusting, however, I will be paying them a good hourly rate, which seems to be the best way to deal with the dichotomy.

I'll just throw this into the mix, too: I think a lot pf progressive political movements used to be - and perhaps still are - slightly hypnotised by the desire to find some position (embodied by some idealised poitical subject) of political purity. In that position, the person is wholly innocent: exploiting nobody.

A similar quest is that of finding the subject position of 'the most oppressed/exploited'. I guess that person will be extremely exploited and exploiting nobody.

While I think that it is useful to think about those positions, I wonder how inhibiting it also is. For example, is it the reason that some people will leap on the idea of the middle class woman exploiting her working class sisters in order to 'discredit' a (rather undeveloped) notion of feminism? (I say 'undeveloped' because I think most of us have longs since moved away from the notion of an undifferentiated mass of 'sisterhood' which automatically bestows a seamless political innocence).

Personally, I like the idea of individuals with multiple aspects to their social-political identity. And, yes, in one aspect of your identity you may be exploited/oppressed, whilst in another aspect you are conferred privilege. It certainly seems to describe life in a more realistic way: as a first-world woman, I am enormously privileged - but I am aware that the developing world is paying the cost for that. I can choose to struggle against it, say 'not in my name' but the privilege still flows to me.

I also don't think I believe in political innocence any more: the idea that there are positions that are completely free of the taint of exploiting others. Or rather, I don;t think I want to let the quest for that kind of purity inhibit the ability to think about the complex web of exploitation and being exploited that goes on in most people's lives all the time.

(Not sure how much sense any of that makes. Ive only started thinking about all this sort of stuff recently, after years of being burned out and unwilling to think at all!)

When we're talking about the gendered aspect of exploitation, I also think that we should bear in mind that, while a lot of women may be employed in NMW work, historically (and probably even now) a vast number of women are engaged in work that is not paid at all and therefore invisible.

It is an irony that it is only as (some) women left the home to move into paid employment out of the home that the work they were performing in the home was only categorised as 'work' when other people (women, mostly) performed that work in exchange for money.

(That is one horrible sentence - congratulations if you read it! )

I really agree with almondpudding when she says that capitalism relies on the unpaid (largely invisible) labour of women. I believe that was one of the purposes of the 'Wages for Housework' group (though I think they dispute that!) - it sounds like a small demand but if it were to happen, it would put enormous strain on capitalism.

In a sense, we're seeing what happens when you do pay wages for housework. The difference is that the effects are global (with societies in developing countries feeling the effects).

I wonder, Fela, if what you are after is a way of bringing into focus the gendered aspects of this situation? There clearly are gendered aspects. These need to be borne in mind whilst simultaneously using that knowledge of the role of gender to extend the questions and analysis out to include men and capitalism into the analysis (as people have done).

I don't think any of this seeks to abolish the agency of women. It is rather to find analyses that best describe the situation.

Also this notion that if we close a sweatshop the employees move to a brothel!

Somewhere is the business rival to the sweatshop- the factory that pays decent wages. When that business is closed down because everyone's buying from the sweatshop, don't that factory's employees end up in a brothel instead?

Someone, somewhere loses their job whichever one is bought from. It's still better to buy from the factory with safety standards for workers.

And Primark doesn't have a worse record on buying from sweatshops than most other high street stores. It just gets singled out because it is associated with the poor.

Also, refuse collection is not poorly paid. This is all part of that illusion where we have to pretend 'the poor' include men like refuse collectors and builders so we can ignore the fact that the UK poor are mostly women.

I don't see why we are blaming 'middle class women.' Under various government benefits regulation, there simply is no choice for many often single women to stay at home and do their own childcare. They have to work and put their kids in childcare heavily subsidised by the government paying a childcare benefit. Many, often cohabiting, women have no choice but to stay home or work part time because they are not entitled to many benefits and can't afford childcare.

I don't want to destroy the whole of capitalism, but I believe we have to accept its limitations. If we want every family to be able to afford somewhere to live, adequate heating, clothing and housing and access to education and health and childcare for their children, the truth is that is not possible under pure capitalism, even in the UK. Somewhere or other the state has to step in and pay for many of those things. They are not going to appear for most people through the market.

It is ultimately up to the state to regulate and subsidise many of these things. Capitalism relies on people, usually women, to do unpaid caring work to create and maintain the work force. The state has to pay to maintain the workforce or Capitalism will collapse. Although of course they are pursuing the alternative method of women in other countries doing unpaid caring work and then us reaping the benefits by the young adults they raised moving here.

Women do most NMW jobs. From your report, CarolDecker:

An important aspect of the social make-up of the NMW is that women were 50 per cent more likely than men to be in minimum wage jobs. Around 6 per cent of jobs held by women were paid at or below the minimum wage compared with 4 per cent of jobs held by men. Consequently, women made up the majority of the minimum wage workforce (59 per cent), higher than their share of the total workforce (50 per cent), as shown in Figure 2.9. Looking at the gender split by hours worked, around 41 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by female part-time workers, almost twice as high as their share of all jobs. A further 18 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by female full-time workers. The remaining 41 per cent of minimum wage jobs were held by men. These were fairly evenly split between full-time
(22 per cent) and part-time (19 per cent).'

I also think that it's worth pointing out that women going out to work as a modern 'thing' is a complete fallacy. Women have always worked. True, the wealthier families have had less women working, but then the truly wealthy had men who didn't work either. The lord of the manner probably put as many hours into speaking to the estate manager as her ladyship put into speaking with the housekeeper. It's only ever been the middle classes where women staying home (in part as a display of their wealth) while the men went out to work has been done. After the second world war there was a HUGE push to get women to leave jobs, as western european governments were desperate to have jobs available for men returning from the war. At that point there was so much emphasis on the role of the mother in the home, along with a baby boom, and suddenly that became seen as 'normal'.

It's no accident that 2nd wave feminism kicked off a few years later.

Getting women to stay out of work, and to see doing housework as their role in life was a deliberate ploy to create jobs for men. When there aren't enough jobs to go around, the people with less agency are expected to step down. Then in times of boom, when there's more employment, they're expected to step up and get called lazy for not doing so.

Compared to that cycle of treatment, whether some people are employing cleaners/gardeners etc. isn't really the main area of exploitation.