The Office for National Statistics is launching a study to calculate the value of unpaid work. For women, who make up the majority of unpaid workers, such a thing is long overdue. Nevertheless, I wonder how it will work in practice. How do we put a price on what we do for our nearest and dearest? And when is a job really a job – and when is it just a matter of personal standards?
The study will be using “the market cost of paying someone to perform the household chore”. This sounds straightforward, but it assumes that the only alternative to paying someone to do a task is doing it yourself. For many of the tasks mentioned, such as ironing, vacuuming and cleaning, I happen to know of a third alternative: just not doing it at all. Rather than “employing myself” as my family's unpaid maid, I've opted for us wearing crumpled clothes and living in a filthy house. It’s not something I'm particularly proud of – I don't have a secret collection of those “boring people have tidy homes” fridge magnets – but the truth is, there are things I'd rather do once I've finished work and put the kids to bed (such as sit here, in a dust-and-toy-strewn living room, blogging about how useless I am at keeping things clean).
But does this mean I'm failing to prove my worth? Perhaps, if one applied the thinking of the average management consultant, it would turn out I'm actually more efficient than the average housewife/husband. I've done away with all the superfluous roles and am running the ultimate streamlined, competitive organisation. This household is fully focussed on just a few key roles: cooking, washing up, laundry, the odd squirt of Mr Muscle Shower Shine, and the twice-yearly mad cleaning panic whenever my mum's coming to visit. There may be further efficiencies to achieve (perhaps I could keep my visiting mum confined to one room only?) but thus far we're meeting all our immune system targets and the iron hasn't been used in months. Of course, it's been sad to let Mr Sheen and Barry Scott go, but there just haven't been any suitable vacancies in the organisation.
Clearly I'm being flippant (although my house is a tip), and what I haven't yet mentioned is the hardest “household” task of all: that of being a carer. Not doing the ironing is one thing; neglecting children and/or sick and elderly relatives is quite another. The cost of women's caring work is, I think, immeasurable, and I find it strange to see it lumped together with more general household tasks, many of which I'd instantly shove into the category “can't be arsed”. I don't think caring works like that. Indeed, it's hard to describe how it does work within our current system of rewarding labour, and I doubt the ONS survey will be able to capture this.
There is a type of physical and emotional labour that we demand of women in particular which can't be shoehorned into our current frameworks. There's no clear way of breaking down what women do for others within a domestic setting. We're not cleaners, teachers, nurses, nannies, therapists rolled into one; some of the time, we're just there. To put a price on the work of parents and/or carers is to disregard the hardest part of what they do. What would be the market value of this level of commitment? How could you ever describe it?
Mothers At Home Matter argue that “there has never been, in the history of time, any ‘cost-free’ childcare for any family”. This is, sort of, true. There have, however, always been designated carers upon whom to depend: slaves, working-class women and women in general, and our systems of reward have been based on the assumption that such people will simply do what's necessary without the need for any great recompense. A route out of this could be to re-examine the monetary value of caring, but another might be to look at the human cost and to try to see how a truly fair, humane society would approach the carer role. The academic Nancy Fraser proposes that rather than “elevating caregiving to breadwinning” through financial allowances (in order to create a type of artificial parity between the two), feminists should be pushing for a “universal caregiver model […] which would induce men to become more like women are now: people who combine employment with primary caregiving responsibilities”. We need to position caregiving at the centre of all our lives; it is not just an alternative job. The fact that something so important has been treated as worthless ought to make us question our priorities overall.
I hope the ONS calculation does make people realise the degree to which unpaid workers, and carers in particular, support the economy. I hope, too, that this is understood in gendered terms (reporting in The Times and The Telegraph has thus far been resistant to this, focusing on the more unusual example of a heterosexual couple in which the man does the majority of unpaid work). In the long term, however, I think we need to move beyond seeing the workplace as the default setting for “doing any activity that is of value”. It's not possible to measure everything. If we were truly committed to sharing our resources – our time, our labour, our compassion – we wouldn't even need to try.