Taking Unpaid Housework for Granted Is Wrong

Noah Zatz is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law.

September 9, 2014

Valuing housework is not only about so-called housewives. It equally is about single parents and two-earner couples who need child-care during their paying jobs and lack time for housework after they get home. It is about domestic workers who do get paid, yet face inadequate wages, protections and respect. Devaluing housework for one’s own family also means discounting its importance when done by others. These points suggest a broader agenda than “wages for housework,” one that acknowledges and crosses differences in family composition, race and class.

Many problems flow from how the government measures economic well-being. In short, it privileges cash. If someone earns $15,000 and spends it on child care, the government sees income earned to help support the family. But if she cares for her kids herself, this economic activity disappears: no income, no work, no spending.

This economic invisibility has profound consequences. Unlike the low-wage worker, the “housewife” gets no credit for contributing to the household economy. That means no protection against future disability, unemployment or retirement via Social Security or related social insurance programs. Her labor also gets ignored by tax credits and other policies that support “working families” who struggle to make ends meet. Such problems can be addressed without providing a direct wage for housework.

Housework’s economic invisibility also harms those who cannot do it all themselves. Government poverty measurement still assumes that families have an unpaid adult staying home to do the housework. “Poverty” just means not having enough cash from a paid breadwinner to cover other needs. When that archaic assumption fails, there is no accounting for the financial and time burdens on employed adults who need to pay for housework or do it on the “second shift,” not just buy food and pay rent. The result is inadequate child care assistance and work-family conflict.

Finally, taking unpaid housework for granted means undervaluing those who do this essential work for pay. Historically, domestic workers have been excluded from many labor protections. Despite some progress, the Supreme Court recently gave that ignoble tradition a constitutional imprimatur by disparaging home care workers as “quasi,” not “full-fledged,” employees and undermining their collective bargaining rights. Even when public policies do support necessary domestic labor, they often pay absurdly low rates and constantly seek to shift work onto unpaid family members. This comes full circle when close kin are barred from getting paid for what would earn a stranger wages.

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A Better Solution to Household Chores: Work-Family Balance

Heather Boushey is the executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

September 9, 2014

As I sit down at my desk at home to write this brief column on the value of housework, I also find myself staring at a very large pile of laundry. Most families today in our nation do not have someone at home whose full-time job is to care for children and others, clean house and take care of other domestic chores. Certainly, that is not the case at my house. Yet, these chores still need to get done. Clean clothes and dinner on the table at a reasonable hour are the kinds of things that make a house a home, at least in our imaginations.

Paying women wages for doing housework presumes that women are and should be the ones who do the housework, and that they do not already have a paying job. In most families in the United States today men and women are sharing housework (although she still does a lot more than he does, men are doing more each year) and most women work outside the home.

So a more practical solution is to encourage greater household sanity by addressing the long-term rise in family hours of work and the long-term stagnation of family wages. If all adults work outside the home then someone will need to be paid to care for children, the elderly and, yes, take care of the laundry. Yet, for most families, the cost of these important services are beyond their family budgets. For the bottom 80 percent of all U.S. families, incomes are the same today as they were over a decade ago, after factoring in inflation, which means affordable high quality child care and solutions for ailing elders (let alone being able to outsource some of the household chores) is quite frankly out of reach.

Another solution would be to make it possible for more families to have adults work just a little bit less than full time. Surveys show that this is something people would like. If everybody were to put in 30 or 35 hours a week, then there would be enough time to not only do well at work but also do some of those chores at home.

Laundry, of course, takes a lot less time to do today than it did 50 years ago. But it still takes time. And with two jobs and no one at home all day, that extra added burden after work is a real chore. Maybe I have read too many Harry Potter books, but I know that I wish that we had a magical chore-completing household elf.

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Give Women Equitable Opportunity in the Public Sphere

Milad Doroudian, a writer, columnist and historian, is the senior editor of The Art of Polemics magazine.

Updated September 10, 2014, 11:44 AM

If monetary value were placed on housework, marriage would be an employee-employer relationship, creating disparity and inequality since money means power.

Whoever pays a partner to take care of the family would be able to exert further control. Although this is completely acceptable within the public domain, it would be pernicious for a family. Children would feel dejected when they learn that the person who loves them, and whom they have called mother or father, was in fact getting paid to raise them.

The real way to achieve the equality is to give all women real equitable opportunity in the public sphere, where they could use the money they earn to hire someone to do the housework. That's an employee-employer relationship that would not harm any personal relations.

What is the true value of housework? The prospect of seeing your children grow up, healthy and happy.

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Compensation for Housework Should be a Family Decision

Porcshe N. Moran is a multimedia lifestyle journalist. She is on Twitter.

September 9, 2014

A couple of years ago, I wrote an article titled “How Much is a Homemaker Worth?” I set out to come up with a salary for the services that a typical stay-at-home mom or dad might provide. I looked at industry standards for things like meal preparation, childcare, housekeeping and driving. My estimate came to more than $96,000 a year.

I understand why advocates have pressed for laws to make husbands pay their wives for housework. The job of a homemaker is often taken for granted. The women and men who devote their days to keeping their households in order deserve respect and appreciation.

But I don't think laws are beneficial or practical in this situation. It is a complicated proposal that requires examination. For starters, every homemaker has different responsibilities depending on their family's circumstances. How would the government determine a monetary value for housework that would fit every family? India's Ministry of Women and Child Development wants a mandatory percentage of men's incomes to go to their wives in exchange for housework. This makes a wife's earnings dependent on her husband's earnings, not the value of her work. Unless the government is going to provide subsidies for homemakers, there is no real economic gain. I suspect that most homemakers would recycle their earnings back into the needs of the household. Furthermore, I'm troubled by the thought of spouses as employees. Will we have to sign a W-9 with our marriage licenses? Also, how will the government enforce these laws?

I support compensation for homemakers. But I think it is best left up to individual families, not a government mandate, to figure out the best way to do it.