UK has got ‘fat’ on decades of free labour by women - Jess Phillips

[IwantToRetire]

The minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls said the country has relied on women providing charity, adding it was a “fundamentally sexist” practice that meant the government was less willing to provide the service itself.

She said she “hated” the title of her role and added that safeguarding against gender-based violence should be “business as usual in every single government department”.

“Do you know what it is? Free labour of women is where it comes from.

“It comes from a fundamentally sexist place in that women didn’t have these services, so a load of women across the country got together and made these services and offered them to other women for free, and they didn’t get paid for their labour.

“So they put down a mattress and made a refuge. They set up counselling services and got people who were trained to be therapists and got their voluntary hours and set it up for free.”

Phillips said people do not recognise how heavily the UK has relied on women providing support that previously did not exist.

“That is what the women in our country did in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and we got fat on that expectation that that service will be provided for free.

“And we also belittled it as an issue that wasn’t absolutely, fundamentally mainstream to the safety and security of our nation.

“Undoing that is really hard and it’s going to take a long time.”

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/aug/02/uk-has-got-fat-on-decades-of-free-labour-by-women-says-mp-jess-phillips

Care of babies, children, care of the elderly. The value of women's unpaid labour is incalculable.

Although of course, people have tried:

https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/statement/2024/10/care-a-critical-investment-for-gender-equality-and-the-rights-of-women-and-girls

'If women’s unpaid work were assigned a monetary value, it would exceed 40 per cent of GDP in some countries. Globally, women and girls spend more than 2.5 times as many hours a day on unpaid care work than men. This disparity prevents women and girls from fully realizing their rights and opportunities, throughout their lives. Women and girls remain the default providers of poorly paid and unpaid care work everywhere, and the most marginalized women – those who live in poverty, migrant women, women in informal work, and women from minority groups – shoulder the largest share of unpaid care work. An estimated 80 per cent of paid domestic workers worldwide are women.

I appreciate this is broadening Phillips' original point, but I feel it would be disengenous to talk about unpaid labour without pointing out how unfathomably massive the assumption is that women are the unpaid skivvies of the world.

https://ilostat.ilo.org/topics/unpaid-work/measuring-unpaid-domestic-and-care-work/

'Every day, more than 16 billion hours are devoted to unpaid domestic and care work around the world. As global populations age, these figures are set to rise, with a disproportionate impact on women.

Uk stats:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentandlabourmarket/peopleinwork/earningsandworkinghours/articles/womenshouldertheresponsibilityofunpaidwork/2016-11-10

'Women carry out an overall average of 60% more unpaid work than men, ONS analysis has shown.
ONS analysis1 of time use data shows that women put in more than double the proportion of unpaid work2 when it comes to cooking, childcare and housework.
On average men do 16 hours a week of such unpaid work, which includes adult care and child care, laundry and cleaning, to the 26 hours of unpaid work done by women a week.
The only area where men put in more unpaid work hours than women is in the provision of transport – this includes driving themselves and others around, as well as commuting to work.
When looking at economic status, full-time students do the least amount of unpaid work, while mothers on maternity leave do the most.
ONS figures for 2014 show that total unpaid work had a value of £1.01tn, equivalent to approximately 56% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).'

Oh yes, the same UN women that is so tuned into Women that it appointed Munroe Bergdorf as their representative for UK women.

I am aware that I am looking at the messenger rather than the message, and I respect what you post arabellascott
But 2 flawed messengers diminishes the impact of an interesting argument, and it's probably my problem.

It's a perfectly valid point. The UN have really fucked up a lot of the good work they've done. I think there's still space for them to be a force for good, but I see them as immensely flawed and compromised these days. I expect genderism is more of a symptom than a cause.

I really dont think we should let it seem that a fixation on the trans issue, means we are happy to throw the baby out with the bath water.

I actually think that JP was making a narrower point.

About the fact that if women hadn't voluntary set up support services for women suffering male violence there would be no support. And now when (tokenistically) political parties recognise the need for such groups they dont want to fund them. A huge number of refuges have closed this year, not because of TW but because funders do not think these services are a priority in a time of cuts. And it is projected that over half of RCC will have to cut counselling services.

And I know other services are being cut, but given the high level of male violence and women needing support it seems unrealistic to think that both refuges and RCC could go back to being totally voluntarily run.

Wages for Housework https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-62980454

I actually think that JP was making a narrower point.

She was, sorry - just that I think that it's part of a wider issue of how women are expected to work for no reward/pay.

It's absurd that refuges are supposed to fund themselves, somehow. They absolutely should be funded by LAs.

Nothing to be sorry about!

Its just I keep reading about closure of refugees by bean counters in local councils, and the threat to rape crisis centres, and worry we will find by next year a very thin level of service providers for women.

In an ideal world each council or LA area would have a local women's groups keeping an eye on women's services quietly disappearing, or at best being "incorporated" into generic service provider.

Yep. Clydebank Women's Aid has recently been forced to close.

www.clydebankpost.co.uk/news/25234792.first-minister-asked-closure-clydebank-womens-aid/

Going back to unpaid work, one of the early ideas of Women's Liberation was that households with or without children would be able to survive with 2 adults each working part time.

With the deliberate idea that the other part time would be for voluntary work, so that local communities could be more in control of provision for services etc..

But funnily enough once capitalism realised that women were prepared to go out to full time work (and come home and still do the domestic work) somehow the cost of housing etc., increased to the extent that in fact households needed two full time salaries to survive.

ie the notion was to equalise out not just who earned the wage, but also who took on the voluntary work whether in the home, or in the community.

I remember travelling through Romania, recently, where there were restaurants which were more like canteens. You would pay by the weight of the meal you bought.
Communism was totally into everybody being part of the machine and everything else was run by the state.
On another note, I remember being a happily sah mother and feeling utterly devalued by the message that Labour and Feminism were putting out. Not everything can be valued by a pay check.
I think the problem has been just this - people like JP think that an activity can only be perceived of as valuable by money and that there is no value in something that has no monetary value. Echoed by Feminism.
And it also forgets that most people have shit jobs and would probably prefer to be at home.