The Unwaged

Ask whether someone works, and you are asking, without quite knowing it, whether they are paid. The man at the desk works; the woman raising three children at home ‘does not work,’ though her day is longer and harder. The retiree ‘no longer works’; the volunteer ‘isn’t working’; the parent at home is ‘off work’ — each phrase quietly equating work with the wage, and treating everything done without one as some other kind of thing. The wage, then, is not only a price attached to work; it is the badge that turns activity into work in the first place. What it touches becomes labour, counted and seen; what it does not touch becomes love, or duty, or rest — anything but work.¹1How the household’s labour came to be reclassed as economically ‘unproductive’ over the nineteenth century: Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unproductive Housewife: Her Evolution in Nineteenth-Century Economic Thought’ (Signs, 1991), and the ‘cult of domesticity’ that placed the home outside the realm of economic interest.

It was not always so plainly the case, and it did not happen by accident. Across the nineteenth century, as paid work moved out of the household and into the mill and the office, the household’s own labour — which had always been work, and hard — was slowly redescribed as something outside the economy. The housewife, once a productive member of a producing household, became in the new economic language ‘unproductive’: a dependent, a consumer of the wage rather than a maker of anything. The line between work and not-work was drawn — and it was drawn around the door of the home.

The line had a wage of its own, and a name: the family wage. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, workers and their unions fought for a wage high enough that a single earner could keep a whole household — and the earner they pictured was the man. A ‘family wage’ was a man’s wage sufficient to support a wife and children, so that the wife need not, and ideally could not, take paid work of her own. Seen one way, this was a genuine and decent demand: a wage a family can actually live on is something many would still wish for, and its slow vanishing — the arrival of the two-earner household merely to manage what one wage once managed — is widely and rightly mourned.²2The family or ‘breadwinner’ wage carried a genuine demand for a living income alongside a gendered division of labour: the man as waged worker, the woman as unpaid homemaker dependent on his wage. The male-breadwinner model, though much eroded, remains culturally engrained.

But the same demand drew the line this plate is about. It made the man the worker, whose labour was work and was paid; and it made the woman the homemaker, whose labour was not work, was not paid, and was recast as the natural outflowing of her love and her duty. Her cooking and cleaning and child-rearing — without which his wage-earning could not have happened at all — disappeared, in the official view, into the private warmth of the home, where by definition nothing economic was held to occur. The father’s wage, as one writer has put it, hid the mother’s work.

And it was work the whole edifice depended on. No worker arrives at the workplace ready-made, out of nowhere, fed and clothed and rested and grown. He has to be made — daily, by meals cooked and clothes washed and a home kept warm; and across generations, by children borne, raised, taught, and sent out in their turn to be workers too. Economists since Marx have called this the reproduction of labour-power: the labour that produces and maintains the labourer, the one input without which no other input exists.³3The ‘reproduction of labour-power’ is Marx’s (Capital, vol. I); the worker’s capacity to labour must be restored daily and renewed across generations. Feminist theorists — Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Leopoldina Fortunati, the Bielefeld school — argued that this reproduction is performed largely by women’s unpaid domestic and care work, a blind spot in Marx, who imagined the worker’s renewal mainly as commodities bought. It is real, skilled, exhausting, unceasing work — and in the world the family wage built, it was done overwhelmingly by women, for nothing. The factory could not open in the morning if the home had not done its unpaid work the night before.

Here is the heart of the matter, and its strangest feature. The unwaged labour of the home is not outside the economy — a soft private margin to the hard public business of earning. It is the foundation the earning stands on: vast in quantity, and prior in logic, since the waged worker is himself its product. Yet because no wage touches it, it does not appear — not in the wage, not in the ledgers, not in the great figure we call the size of the economy. The thing the system most depends upon is the thing it is built not to see.

They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.

In 1972 a circle of feminists gave the hidden labour a demand, and the demand was deliberately startling: wages for housework. Meeting in Padua, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Brigitte Galtier founded a campaign to insist that the work of the home be recognised and paid — by the state, by capital, by whoever had been profiting from its being free.⁴4The International Wages for Housework Campaign grew from the International Feminist Collective, founded in Padua in 1972; its early text is Dalla Costa and James, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972). The demand was largely a ‘lever’ — a way to make the labour visible — as Federici’s title Wages Against Housework (1975) suggests. The point was only partly the money. Chiefly it was to compel a recognition: by demanding a wage for housework, they made it impossible to keep pretending housework was not work. The wage, which had drawn the line, was turned about and used to rub it out — for if the labour deserved a wage, then a wage-less labour was exactly what it had always been, and the word for that is unpaid, not free. Their slogan put it with great economy: what the world calls love, they answered, is unwaged work.

The demand was contested from the start, and not only by its enemies. Among feminists it was argued that paying women to keep house might bind them only more tightly to it — gild the cage rather than open it — and that the deeper aim was not a wage for the role but freedom from it. Federici half-conceded as much in the very title of her best-known essay, Wages Against Housework: the wage was a lever to make the labour visible and refusable, not a wish to be paid forever for scrubbing the floor. Yet whether one took the demand at its word or as a provocation, it had done its work the instant it was spoken — by making the invisible labour impossible to un-see.

What the wage does to our idea of work, a second instrument does to our idea of the economy, and far more officially. Gross domestic product — the single number by which nations measure their size and their success — counts only what crosses a particular line the statisticians call the production boundary, and that line runs almost exactly where the wage’s does. A meal cooked in a restaurant counts; the same meal cooked at home does not. A child minded in a paid nursery counts; the same child minded by its parent does not. Nursing in a hospital counts; nursing a dying parent through the night does not.⁵5The production boundary of the System of National Accounts excludes unpaid household and care work. A. C. Pigou’s paradox (The Economics of Welfare, 1920): a man who marries his housekeeper lowers the national income. The ILO (2018) estimates that unpaid care work, valued at the minimum wage, would equal some 9% of global GDP — about US$11 trillion — with women performing over three-quarters of it. The economist Arthur Pigou marked the paradox a century ago: a man who employs a housekeeper adds her wage to the national income, but should he marry her, and her work go on unchanged and unpaid, the national income falls. The labour did not vanish. Only its wage did — and with the wage went its place in the count.

The omission is not the simple scandal it can be made to sound. The accounts were built, in the mid-twentieth century, to measure market activity for the pressing purposes of taxation, money, and war; their architects, Simon Kuznets among them, knew and said that the figure was never a measure of welfare or of all useful work, and that putting a value on unpaid labour was genuinely hard — at what wage, the worker’s foregone earnings or a servant’s, and reckoned how? These are real difficulties, not mere excuses, and statisticians now build ‘satellite accounts’ to estimate the missing labour rather than ignore it. But estimate it they must, for it is not small. The International Labour Organization reckons the world’s unpaid care work, valued only at the minimum wage, at some nine per cent of global output — around eleven trillion dollars a year — with women doing more than three-quarters of it. A tenth of the economy, by the economy’s own arithmetic, is work it has chosen not to count.

The labour did not vanish. Only its wage did.

Step back, and the wage shows a second face. It is a price, yes — for the value of work, as the first of these plates had it; for hours; for trust; paid under compulsion; sized by power. But it is also a boundary: a line that sorts the world into work and not-work, economy and not-economy, the counted and the uncounted — and the sorting is a decision, not a discovery. Nothing in the labour of feeding one’s own child is less real, less skilled, or less needful than the labour of serving a stranger the same food for money; the only difference is the wage, and the wage is just what has been used to tell them apart. What falls outside the line is not less work. It is only less visible, less paid, and less counted — and, as it happens, more often women’s.⁶6Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (1988), showed how the global accounts render women’s unpaid work — and much of nature — ‘of no account.’ She later cautioned that simply folding such work into a GDP that also counts armaments and the felling of forests as gains might be the wrong remedy — that the measure itself, not only its boundary, is in question.

Where to draw the line is, then, a real question, with serious answers on more than one side — whether to pay for care or to provide it, whether to fold it into the headline figure or to keep a truer one beside it, whether naming love as labour honours it or cheapens it. The folio has watched the wage measure value, sell time, stake trust, compel obedience, and ride the seesaw of power; this last plate finds it doing something quieter and larger than any of these — deciding, by the mere fact of what it does and does not touch, what shall count as work at all, and so what shall count as the economy, and so what shall be seen. A society shows itself not only in how it pays for work, but in how much real work it has arranged not to call work. The line is no law of nature. It was drawn, and it can be drawn again.