Should women / carers be paid for caring for their 'own' kids?

[AdelaofBlois]

Had a nice argumentative (if in this climate purely hypothetical) discussion last night about whether carers should be paid for looking after their children. Three arguments ran thus:

1. Familial childcare is, even if not done by mothers, predominantly women's work. It is time consuming, skilled and exhausting, contributes enormously in both the short and long term to the economy, yet the women doing it receive no monetary recognition, and indeed risk their security to do so. Financial recognition of the work was a long-standing, although now underplayed, aim of the women's movement.

1. That, until men are equally represented in caring roles, the payment would represent further legal incentive for women to stay at home, which may not necessarily be about their choice. If set at a level that altered decisions it would act as a state scheme to force women back into the home, if too low simply be a drain on resources which creates the same ideological pressure.

1. (where I got bogged down as the wine took effect ) Payment would have to be set against standards because the justification would be value to society. It would seem unfair to pay fulltime carers and not their employed counterparts unless we were willing for the state to say that in all circumstances SAHPs were 'best'. It would also seem unfair to pay 'poor' parents (at the far end of the scale, say abusive ones) money, but monitoring this would involve the state in childcare in a way hitherto unthought of. The whole thing would be a mechanism for enforcing standards of childcare (HE who pays the piper) which reflected neither women's choices nor a feminist outlook.

Conversation drifts off onto CBeebies crushes, this writer feeling but .

Basically, just wondered what others thought. Posted here because don't want this to be the SAHM vs WOHM women-hating discussion it might become elsewhere.

Probably Custardo. What if you have a pet? Do you get bonuses for walking the dog? Ironing your husbands shirts?

Is there a bonus structure linked to exceeding 5 of your families 5 a day?

PMSL

I would work, rather than be a SAHM, in answer to the question earlier. Much of the language and comments keep coming back to the perception that looking after your own children is not real work. And that's not right. I don't know how you get it recognised by society. The language needs changing, maybe. SAHM, emphasis is on the being at home, rather than what you are doing while you are there IYSWIM.

This is daft..

If you are a SAHM and your partner supports you then technically he is paying your wage in return for you keeping home, caring for the kids, enabling him to do overtime etc etc. He may not be paying you a wage but he is paying your living/ lifestyle expenses.

If you are a single SAHM then the government pays your wages by HB, CB, IS, free school dinners etc etc

So you are paid for being a SAHM or carer...

That said, I do think carers should be paid more because it does save the government a lot of money that they would otherwise have to pay nurses.

he or SHE

well yes indeed! Although i said SAH'M' so can I be excused for my potitical faux pas?

well that should be SAHP.

Can I have a part-time payment for caring for them after hours and at weekends, and what about all the times I sort things out for them in work hours and take time off to take them to dentist etc.?

that means that we all get 24 hour payement?

i LIKE IT!

Very little interest in talking about ways of increasing the status of childcare and other "women's work" in our society. I do think it is particularly relevant in the face of dave's "big society" where the effects of policy are putting women back into the home, and presumably it is them the govt has in their sights to provide all this additional free labour.

Also in the way that mothers who do not have a man to provide for them are vilified in certain sections of the press... I do think that this topic is as relevant as it ever was TBH and it's a shame that even in this topic people don't want to talk about it.

The title of the thread is 'should women/ carers be paid...'

I'm more interested in empowering women to make choices other than to do 'women's work' rather than to use government funding to pay them to do so... its a non starter in a serious conversation for me im afraid.

Yes, exactly moraldisorder. Why does it have to be 'women's work'?

There are plenty of jobs that I'm very happy other people do. Cooking, cleaning, gardening etc. It means I can go out for dinner, have a clean workplace, clean streets, neat parks. But just because some people do it for a living doesn't mean I expect to be paid to do it for myself in my own house. Same goes for raising children.

Riven - Apologies for my use of special, rather than additional (I do think all children are special, so I do agree that some have additional needs).

Would they need to be empowered to make other choices besides the bottom of the pile 'women's work' if 'women's work' wasn't the bottom of the pile? What makes it the least desireable job going?

All 'caring' work suffers when a large part of it is unpaid and when women themselves scoff at the idea that it is worthy of remuneration. It is too easy for society at large (read 'men') to dismiss the work of women when so much of the work of women is volunteer work. Men equate the value of work and the status of an individual with the amount paid for that work. It's twisted logic but that's how it is. We do ourselves no favours when we clamour for the right to work for free.

'Women's work' In the sense of caring for your own children and cleaning your own house is the bottom of the pile wage wise because it doesnt involve any training or qualifications, it is not montiored or targetted and doesnt involve any kind of official budget. It doesnt require you to be responsible or answerable to anyone outside of yourself or your children (whom you are legally oblidged to be responsible for).

And as I said, it is rarely un-paid anyway. EG. If a SAHM does 10 hours of childcare a day and say, 3 hours of cleaning a week... I dont think it's bad going that in return she lives in a 3 bedroom house, with 1 holiday a year, her own car and new clothes every couple of months. She is in fact being paid, it's just not through the usual channels of a wage slip.

The question that interests me is why is it that women's work (outside of her own home) is paid less than the equivelent man's role. i.e gardeners, bin men etc get paid more than cleaners and nursery nurses..?

Sure, thats a problem. But if you really think people should receieve a wage for caring for their own house and children then you are quite clearly mad.

Wow, such a lot of responses!

On the thread title (particularly 'caring') I was seeking deliberately to a more neutral word to describe what 'parents' do, which would include anyone looking after kids. Caring seemed right, because it's the standard 'neutral' word used nowadays. But, yes 'women' because (although I don't fit that stereotype and don't wish it to be true) the effect of any such change would be felt most immediately by women, who do do the majority of this work. And I wasn't really thinking of a 'utopia' in which everything else was up for grabs, just a society in which there was money to do this. And, as I said, in many ways the question was more why has something which was an absolute norm of women's activism a generation ago become marginalised and contested?

I'm still wedged between the intrusiveness and potential limitation of choice, and the fact it is so hard not to accept the basic moral case for not rewarding a (in practice female gendered group) for work which limits their individual freedoms and benefits everyone.

I guess the real questions to me then moves to how to value 'work' without making it 'employment' (with all the standards and intrusiveness that go with it). Perhaps parenting should and would not be amenable to such models, but parents aren't exactly spending hours doing something of no general worth either. Any ideas for how to recognise that outside of 'employment'?

MoralDisorder, the reasons 'women's work' gets paid less than bin men are (1) women do it, and (2) it is not work since a large number of the women who do it (sahms) don't get paid for it.

This is why unions are opposed to slavery.

Using your argument, are WOHFs the employers of their SAHM partners? Doesn't the sort of cosy domestic arrangement you describe in fact place the WOHF in the position of head of household/employer?

Adela, I don't know if it will survive the next Budget in Ireland, but it always seemed to e that the children's allowance in Ireland was something akin to paying sahms a (very small) stipend. It was conceived as a means of keeping the families of the very poor from starving due to alcoholism of the main bread winner (a huge problem in Ireland at the time, way back in the early 20th century).

I agree that wider society accords no status whatsoever to the work that is done in the home by parents -- as with any work that is considered a 'vocation', the person doing it is considered to be something of an idiot by a society that defines individuals according to their wage, not necessarily their value to society.

Sadly, this tenet of feminism, that sahms provide a valuable service to society, and that it is possible to put a price on it, has been shot out of the water not by men, but seemingly by women themselves, who are (by the evidence of this thread anyhow) blind to the way society uses working for free as an excuse to pay less, and also unable to see the value of unionising or professionalising so to speak.

Using your argument, are WOHFs the employers of their SAHM partners? Doesn't the sort of cosy domestic arrangement you describe in fact place the WOHF in the position of head of household/employer? Well, yes.

It is not as simple as, the more money you generate, the more money you are paid... that seems a bit too simplistic but I can't off the top of my head think any way around that being the case... And if so, surely that's just economics?

Brian Cowen, Irish Taoiseach, gets paid 354,000 euros a year. Does he 'generate' that much? The average starting salary for an air traffic controller in the US is something close to 50,000 USD. What do doctors make? Vets? Nursery teachers? Newsreaders? Football players?

You make what you demand balanced against what the market will bear. It's nothing to do with how much you generate.

In the case of women's work in the home, no, it's not just economics, it's women willingly or even willfully refusing to put a price on it out of a misplaced sense of there being some sort of moral duty attached to it above all other considerations, and that seems to me to indicate that women have swallowed a very outmoded version of what they are here on earth for, i.e., to be the 'helpmate of man', unpaid and unappreciated and performing invisible work. Everyone employed in every job has a duty to fulfill the obligations of that particular job to the best of their ability if you want to look at things from a moral perspective, but that doesn't stop them taking a paycheque for it or sending a bill later.

All these people generate money dont they? Particularly footballers...

Don't misplace my opinion, i too beleive that women have swollowed the pill here to... why they continue to do so is beyond me.

Should people who can't/don't have children be paid to look after their dog?

This is a bad idea all round. If you pay people to stay home, then the people who work have pay higher taxes, then they have to work longer hours, hence decreasing the thime they get to see their own children. So, you get into a situation where person x works horrendous hours and never sees his/her children so he/she can pay for person y to stay home with theirs and see them all day long.

It would make far more sense to stop encouraging women to stay home and start encouraging men to do their fair share.

Sorry mathanxiety, I fail to see why, even if they are willingly doing 'their' lot in life, they should be paid a salary for doing so as a SAHM by the State. Because while they are doing the nation a service by raising future tax-payers (as are WOHPs, incidentally), they are avoiding having to pay for childcare, and are in effect earning money for their household by doing cleaning/childcare duties which would otherwise have to be outsourced at some cost.

It all depends on your outlook. Some might see it as the SAHP being 'employed' by their partner. Others might see the incoming salary as a joint income, equally earned by both indivuduals doing their part of the arrangement.

"I agree that wider society accords no status whatsoever to the work that is done in the home by parents "

It's not a question of not according status because it isn't paid. It's the simple fact that the work would be done regardless of whether it was paid or not. Nothing to do with having a vocation, it's simple what human beings do. If there was only one parent(male or female) on the scene, the children (in all but the most dysfunctional families) would still be cared for. That is why it isn't paid. Regardless of the fact I enjoy my paid work, if it wasn't paid I wouldn't be doing it. The same could not be said for my 'job' of caring for my children.

I would prefer to see the job of caring being shared more equally between men and women. And IME men aren't averse to being the SAHP if they are given the chance.