Careworn: The Economic History of Caring Labor

Abstract

Economists ignore caring labor since most is provided unpaid. Disregard is unjust, theoretically indefensible, and probably misleading. Valuation requires estimates of time spent and the replacement or opportunity costs of that time. I use the maintenance costs of British workers, costs which cover both the material inputs into upkeep and the domestic services needed to turn commodities into livings, to isolate the costs of paid domestic labor. I then impute the value of unpaid domestic labor from these market equivalents, and aggregate across households without domestic servants. Historically, unpaid domestic labor represented c. 20 percent of total income, a contribution that suggests the need to revise some standard narratives.

Tenacity Besides Depletion: Pandemics, Protests, and Workers from the Sri Lankan Apparel Sector

“…Feminist contributions to the COVID-19 crisis have reignited debates around the centrality of social reproduction to examine labour, work, and global production, which also matter for gendered political economies of global production. They argue how the pandemic emphasises the significance of social reproduction and the shift of balance between the productive and reproductive to reorganise household and global labour markets (Arslan 2022;Cohen and Rodgers 2021;Humphries 2024;Mezzadri et al 2022;Pham 2020;Tejani and Fukuda-Parr 2021). Coupling production and social reproduction to appreciate the nature of work, however, is age-old feminist advocacy; from early Marxist feminists to recent debates on SDGs underscoring these social relations (Barrett 1980;Bhattacharya 2017;Elias and Rai 2019;Gidwani and Ramamurthy 2018;Humphries 1977Humphries , 2024McGrath 2018;Rai et al 2019).…”

“…They argue how the pandemic emphasises the significance of social reproduction and the shift of balance between the productive and reproductive to reorganise household and global labour markets (Arslan 2022;Cohen and Rodgers 2021;Humphries 2024;Mezzadri et al 2022;Pham 2020;Tejani and Fukuda-Parr 2021). Coupling production and social reproduction to appreciate the nature of work, however, is age-old feminist advocacy; from early Marxist feminists to recent debates on SDGs underscoring these social relations (Barrett 1980;Bhattacharya 2017;Elias and Rai 2019;Gidwani and Ramamurthy 2018;Humphries 1977Humphries , 2024McGrath 2018;Rai et al 2019). Feminist geographers had picked on these themes before the pandemic, especially those contributing to dis/articulation perspectives on global production (Jenkins 2024;McGrath 2018;Strauss 2015;Werner 2016).…”

“…Social reproduction is "how reproductive dynamics co-constitute the 'everyday' in the global economy in manifold ways" (Mezzadri et al 2022(Mezzadri et al :1783; see also Dutta 2020;Gidwani and Ramamurthy 2018;Humphries 2024;McGrath 2018;Werner 2012). When Bhattacharya (2017:74) says the "myriad capillaries of social relations extending [to] ... a wider social whole, sustained and coproduced by human labor in contradictory yet constitutive ways", she captures the essence of social reproduction.…”

“…Victimhood tropes were not the core register workers themselves frequently asserted. Rather they drew attention to the duplicity of boarding owners, politicians, the political system, and misplaced development priorities-showing cognisance of structures impeding a better life (see also Humphries 2024;Surendran 2020).…”