WUNRN
MATRIARCHY & THE MOUNTAIN VII
Centre of Alpine Ecology, December 2007
Trento, Italy
Hilkka Pietilä, M.Sc.
E-mail: hilkka.pietila@pp.inet.fi
THE UNPAID WORK IN HOUSEHOLDS -
A COUNTERFORCE TO MARKET GLOBALIZATION
Introduction
Today, there is a pressing need for a new, more
comprehensive and relevant perception of human economy as a whole in order to
understand the prerequisites for sustainable livelihood for the whole of the
humanity and to be able to create a lifestyle which could provide a dignified
quality of life for all people, with due respect to the ecological boundaries
of the biosphere.
The new perspective is also needed as the counterforce
in the hands of people against the overriding market globalization, which is
intimidating the democratic power, i.e. the traditional channels of people to
influence in their society and economy. We are seeking the people’s power to
control the market and to have their economy in their own hands.
1. The full picture of human economy
The concept of human economy is used in this paper to
signify all work, production, actions and transactions needed to provide for
the livelihood, welfare and survival of people and families, irrespective of
whether they appear in statistics or are counted in monetary terms.
Here we see the human economy as composed of three
major, distinct components, which are the household economy and the cultivation
economy in addition to the industrial economy. In fact, households and
cultivation have always existed, long before money and industry were ever
invented, but they are still invisible in the eyes of mainstream neoliberal economists.
The major blind spots in the prevailing economic
thinking seem to be:
- the household economy, which is used
here for the nonmarket, unpaid work and production in the family or a group of
people having a household together for the management of their daily life or
even a group of small households living close enough to create a joint economic
unit, and
- the cultivation economy, i.e. the
production based on the living potential of nature, which is the interface
between economy and ecology, human culture facing the ecological laws.
Both of these economies are very basic from the point
of view of a sustainable way of living, and thus for human survival and
people's ability to control their own lives.
A particular feature of the households is the extent
and significance of nonmarket work of people without pay for direct production
of human welfare, and thus as an essential contribution to satisfy the basic
needs. A particularity of the cultivation economy is its profoundly unique
nature by being based on potential of living nature. As we know, the human
abilities cannot control and direct the elements of nature; therefore the
humanity should be wise enough for taking the terms of nature seriously into
consideration.
Figure 1.
THE TRIANGLE OF HUMAN
ECONOMY
HOUSEHOLDS
1.
Skills andability
2.
Voluntary work
3.
Care andwellbeing
Graph: Hilkka Pietilä
Households,
Cultivation and Industry and trade are the basic pillars of the human economy.
Each one of these components has different foundations and terms of operations.
This has to be taken into consideration in the agency of human economy in order
to achieve sustainable exchange and collaboration between all three.
In founding of
economics the processes in cultivation and unpaid work and production in the
households have both been left out of the realm of economic science. Therefore
it is obvious that this kind of economics is only a narrow part of human
economy as a whole. However, during these couple of hundred years this narrow
philosophy of economics has become the only theory and language of economists,
by way of which the value of production and work, exchange and spending is
assessed and measured.
Figure 2.
illustrates the great and essential differences between Cultivation economy and
Industrial economy. The industrial economy can also be called Extraction economy,
since it is based on dead elements extracted from the soil; stone, minerals and
fossil fuels. It also deal only with dead transaction like trade, traffic,
currencies and accounts and its value is measured by money, which is a
nonmaterial fiction.
Figure 2.
2. The historical picture
In human history after the transition from the
gathering economy to the cultivation economy the extended farming family has
been the basic unit of livelihood for long periods. Along the time the people’s
skills and means developed to enable qualitatively better satisfaction of their
basic needs. This kind of “a house-hold” (note: holding the house/farm) was
fairly independent and self-reliant economic unit at the modest level. The
livelihood was based on the quality and accessibility of natural resources and
skills and assiduity of the people living together.
During the course of centuries various kinds of
production and trade, independent artisania, exchange of goods and services,
public institutions and administration were emerging around the farming
families. The public society and economy was in the making. A means of exchange
came into the picture, and people started to buy and sell goods and services.
Figure 3.
The Historical Picture - See
Attached
When the basic functions for
livelihood are performed within families, they cost a lot of time and work, but
when externalized into the public sphere, they will cost money. In this process
many of the traditional vital functions were substituted with commercial ones.
Thus they became dispensable and therefore the status of women as providers was
declining.
A major part of economic
growth in the past centuries has consisted of the functions being transferred
from the private family to the public one, from the non-monetary economy to the
monetary one and thus been made visible and counted. This way the life and
production also has become monetized and commercialized.
From women's
point of view this discussion is very important. The non-monetary economy even
in the industrializing countries has until lately been primarily a female
economy. Its invisibility is a supreme manifestation of women's invisibility in
the society at large. Today the family economy is still primarily in the hands
of women even in its monetized form, the consumption of marketed goods and
services, since the purchasing decisions are made primarily by women.
In the emergence of the public, monetarized
economy, production, politics, culture
and organization outside the private family, all this was designed, planned and
built up exclusively by men, who possessed neither the particular gifts nor the
experience of women acquired over
centuries in the management of the private family and nurturing its members.
A Swedish researcher Ulla Olin, who analyzed this process, was bold enough to conclude
in 1975,
that
the long-term imbalance between male and female rate of influence in planning
and conduct of modern industrial societies is the virtual source of most of
social, economic, human and international problems which we face today.
3. The monetary value of housework
For the statistics the value of work in households can
be calculated in money. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development, OECD, did a lot of work for creating the data sources and methods
for measurement of unpaid, non-market household work and production in the OECD
countries (OECD, 1995). Also the UN Institute INSTRAW has developed these
methods (INSTRAW 1995). It is obvious that the estimates of the value of
household production depend on the method used. (Annex 1.)
In
Table 1. Gender distribution of
unpaid labour in households in Finland
1980 1990 2001
Hours/minutes/day
Women 4.48 3.56 3.47
Men 1.54 2.20 2.27
6.42 6.16
6.14
The distribution of unpaid work between men and women varies
a lot between the families as well as between the countries. But statistically
there is hardly any change taken place between 1990 and 2001.
In these studies in
The monetary value of unpaid work has also been
calculated and the measuring rod has been either the average wages in the
labour market for all employees or the current salary of municipal home
helpers. They give somewhat different figures, but the first one is more
relevant, since the housework requires several skills and competences. When
compared with the GNP of same years the proportions in
Table 2. Value of unpaid work and production in
households in
Hours/minutes/day Mrd
euros % GNP
1980 6.42 13.0 42 %
1990 6.16 39.0 45 %
2001 6.14 62.8 46 %
The percentages given imply that the amount of unpaid
labour in the households would be the highest single contribution into the GNP
if it were counted. In comparison with the state budgets the value of unpaid
work is usually about two times the sum total of the same year’s state budget.
The UNDP/Human Development Report 1995 gives even a
global estimate of the amount of women's unpaid labour. "If more human
activities were seen as market transactions at the prevailing wages, they would
yield gigantically large monetary valuations. A rough order of magnitude comes
to a staggering 16 trillion (dollars) - or (if added, it would make a total of)
about 70 % more than the officially estimated 23 trillion of global output. Of
this 16 trillion, 11 trillion is the non-monetized, invisible contribution of
women."
"Of the total burden of work, women carry on
average 53 % in developing countries and 51% in industrial countries." Out
of the total time of women's work, 1/3 is paid and 2/3 unpaid. For men it is
just the reverse, 3/4 of their working time is paid and only 1/4 is unpaid.
"If women's unpaid work were properly valued, it is quite possible that
women would emerge in most societies as the major breadwinners," concludes
the HD report (UNDP, 1995).
"For the last fifty years national income
statistics have been widely used for monitoring economic developments, for
designing economic and social policies and for evaluating the outcomes of those
policies. Had household production been included in the system of
macro-economic accounts, governments would have had quite a different picture
of economic development and may well have implemented quite different economic
and social policies," concludes the OECD researcher Ann Chadeau, who has done extensive work on this issue (1992).
4. The dogma of the
market versus household-ideology
An Italian economist Mario
Cogoy reminded already in 1995 about the original dogma of industrial
society that economic progress consists of a continual shift of labour and
skills from household-based production to commodity-based consumption. He said
that the extreme form of market utopia
consists of two ideas:
-
on one hand it will aim to the total abolition of work
and skills in the households, in the private life of people, since all labour
and skills are absorbed into the market.
-
on the other hand people are supposed to acquire
professional competence only in one single field, where they will then earn
money enough to buy everything else in life from the market.
The time people spend outside the economic system is
reduced to pure unskilled leisure-time. This way the living households would
cease to exist, the people will become totally dependent on market and the home
remains only as a place to sleep. This would legitimate the continuity of the
market forever, render people market slaves and annihilate the human dignity of
everybody. This is the ultimate ideology of the market (Cogoy 1995).
If market forces are allowed to pursue these aims to
the ultimate, it will imply that people will find themselves helpless and
powerless pawns in their society,
However, the household is still the area of the
economy where people do have power in this world, where they find very few
options to influence macro economic issues. The choice to decide how much one
would like to produce by her/himself and how much to buy from the market is
exactly the leverage of power still in the hands of individuals. It is crucial
to everyone’s own personal independence and integrity in life, whether she/he
keeps this power in her/his own hands or lets it vanish away.
The “ideology” of the households is contrary to the
one of the market. The human being and her wellbeing is the point of departure
for the household, her dignity and integrity are its basic values. According to
the household-ideology all work and production is for people, to serve their
needs and aspirations, physical, mental and spiritual.
We saw above
that households and women have critical position in the human economy, therefore
we can draw the conclusion, that they also could turn the trend. They can
change the values and lifestyle in families back to the basics, less consumption
of the market goods and services, more emphases on commonality, working
together, making family life self-servicing, achieving pleasure and satisfaction
by being and doing instead of buying and paying.
In this school of thinking the purpose of all labour
and production in human societies should serve human needs and purposes. There
would not be other purpose for the production and trade, and no other
legitimacy. According to this thinking
every
individual is indispensable and dignified member of the family and community,
and we are all subjects in our own life, not objects of anonymous market
forces.
5. Turning the trap into an asset - the Utopia for
good life?
We should turn
present trap of shrinking role of the households to an asset. In the early
1980s the founder of futurology, Robert Jungk, made the point that “people
out of work are, in certain way, in a privileged position because they are no
longer chained to the capitalist production machine. They have more time, they
can think and act in ways which may be beneficial for society, if they only
have enough motivation.” (Jungk, 1983)
At that time Robert
Jungk referred to the unemployed people being more or less permanently without
paid jobs. Today we may apply this thought also to the people who have paid job
only temporarily or occasionally. These people are in the trap of constant
job-seeking and they find themselves forced to accept almost any kind of work
on any salary.
However, the thought
of Robert Jungk gives some hope that we could – and we should – stop the rat
race and turn around the wheel. We should not let the lack of a regular job to
render us paralyzed and hopeless. We can realize that this situation will allow
us to command more of our time, and the scarce income could become an incentive
for us to make more use of our skills, knowledge and experience in our own
households. These thoughts could be a hint for finding one’s own creativity and
initiative. While finding her/his own skills for helping oneself will lead
better control of one’s own life, too!
How would it feel
like, if we make our own plans for our household economy and decide to do more
at home in order to decrease our dependence on the money-income and supply of
the markets? Then we will realize
that the more of necessary goods and services we are able to produce by
ourselves, the less we are dependent on the market, both on labour market and
the market of goods and services.
Would this become a
strategy to use power from below to influence the economy around us, too? This kind of an economic transition will make the
household again an asset in the hands of people. A decisive prerequisite for
making these changes possible is the multiplicity of practical skills, which we
can acquire for instance from elderly relatives, the advisory books or various
training lessons and courses – if we have never learned them or forgotten them.
However, we should
not allow this change to increase the workload of women in the house again.
Therefore it is necessary to equalize the distribution of labour between women
and men, girls and boys, at home. Even for the sake of men themselves it would
be necessary to design a new division of labour in the house. When men can no
longer be the single breadwinners anyway, they could become direct supporters
of their families in practice and it will give them a meaningful and rewarding
new role in the family. Within the younger families in the Nordic countries we
already have good signs of this kind of transition.
The richer the family is in the practical skills of
its members, the better chances they have together to decide their
relationships- if it were counted. Together with the monetary contribution of
households as consumer units these contributions make an enormous “hidden
market force” or potential leverage of power in our hands. It is real people’s
power from below over the neoliberal macro economy globally.
Today the globalized capitalist market forces have
become a new “totalitarian super power”, which has rendered our democratically
elected governments and political institutions fairly powerless. And the more
representative democracy is intimidated, the more we need a new kind of
people’s power from below.
To summarize I would like conclude that as individuals
we can reassume our right to decide ourselves, how much of our work, time,
skills and know-how we are willing to sell to the labour market and how much goods and services we are
willing to buy from the commodity market.
This would be the way to regulate our degree of dependence on the market. The
pivotal assets are skills and money, but the skills are more important than
money.
After all, the entire
picture of the human economy should be turned the right side up;
the industrial and commercial
economy should be seen only as auxiliary, serving the needs of families
and individuals instead of using them as means of production and consumption.
This turn around of
the economy will never be made by the market, nor by our democratic governments
any more in today’s world. In the globalizing world we have to do it by
ourselves, to take the power back in our own hands to command our own
lives. For that purpose we have to
denounce the values and rules on which the neoliberal economy operates, such as
constant economic growth, conspicuous consumption, maximization of
profits and competition by
everybody against everybody in everything and everywhere.
If we stop obeying the signals of marketing,
advertising, fachions of all kinds etc. the expansion of the market will stop.
We can stop consuming more than we need. We can start saving instead of
consuming - not only money but the climate, natural resources, goods, our time
etc.
We can cooperate and serve others instead of
competing, Not to believe, obey and go
along with the market will be the end of market-slavery and the beginning of
our new liberation.
The really powerful choice is to buy or
not to buy - to reject all advertising, fashions, marketing and other
manipulation and decide independently by ourselves, what we need and what we
don’t need.
People’s power is
always acts of individuals, democracy is the power of millions of individuals
acting together in the society at large. This will be the democracy in the age
of globalized market hegemony. with both the labour and commodity markets. And
the richer the village, community or local cooperative is in skilful and
multitalented people, the less dependent they are on the goods and services
provided by the market. Furthermore, gaining more control on their own economy
they will also gain insight to influence the economy of their society.
6. Democracy
in the age of globalizing power?
We saw above that the sum total of the unpaid production of goods and services in the families does constitute the biggest single contribution to the national GNP in each country
- if it were counted. Together with the monetary
contribution of households as consumer units these contributions make an
enormous “hidden market force” or potential leverage of power in our hands. It
is real people’s power from below over the neoliberal macro economy globally.
Today the globalized capitalist market forces have
become a new “totalitarian super power”, which has rendered our democratically
elected governments and political institutions fairly powerless. And the more
representative democracy is intimidated, the more we need a new kind of
people’s power from below.
To summarize I would like conclude that as individuals
we can reassume our right to decide ourselves, how much of our work, time,
skills and know-how we are willing to sell to the labour market and how much goods and services we are
willing to buy from the commodity
market. This would be the way to regulate our degree of dependence on the
market. The pivotal assets are skills and money, but the skills are more
important than money.
After all, the entire
picture of the human economy should be turned the right side up;
the industrial and commercial
economy should be seen only as auxiliary, serving the needs of families
and individuals instead of using them as means of production and consumption.
This turn around of
the economy will never be made by the market, nor by our democratic governments
any more in today’s world. In the globalizing world we have to do it by
ourselves, to take the power back in our own hands to command our own
lives. For that purpose we have to
denounce the values and rules on which the neoliberal economy operates, such as
constant economic growth, conspicuous consumption, maximization of
profits and competition by
everybody against everybody in everything and everywhere.
If we stop obeying the signals of marketing,
advertising, fachions of all kinds etc. the expansion of the market will stop.
We can stop consuming more than we need. We can start saving instead of
consuming - not only money but the climate, natural resources, goods, our time
etc.
We can cooperate and serve others instead of
competing, Not to believe, obey and go
along with the market will be the end of market-slavery and the beginning of
our new liberation.
The really powerful choice is to buy or
not to buy - to reject all advertising, fashions, marketing and other
manipulation and decide independently by ourselves, what we need and what we don’t
need.
People’s power is always acts of individuals, democracy is the power of millions of individuals acting together in the society at large. This will be the democracy in the age of globalized market hegemony.
Annex
1.
Hilkka
Pietilä,
Excerpt of
a long paper.
THE METHODS OF CALCULATING THE TIME AND VALUE
OF UNPAID WORK IN THE HOUSEHOLDS
The Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development, OECD has collected a lot of data of the sources
and methods for measurement of unpaid, non-market household work and production
in the OECD countries (OECD, 1995). These main categories of methods are based
on time use surveys as the base line data. Then the value of time is calculated
according the following methods:
- the
“opportunity cost” method is based on the potential salary, what is the
wage opportunity lost by the one who does unwaged work, for example caring for her
children or parents or doing subsistence farming instead of doing a paid job;
- the "global substitute"
method, whereby a general housekeeper's wage rate on the market is taken as a
substitute value for all unpaid housework, which rests on the assumption that
housework does not require any particular qualifications. Therefore also the
average wage in the labour market is used within this method.
- the
"specialist substitute" (also called “the replacement cost”)
method, which relates various types of household tasks to the wage levels for
the type of work performed by professionals such as cooks, nurses, gardeners
etc.
All these
ways of measurement are applying the so called input-based method,
because they measure the household production through the inputs to the process
as the working hours.
The UN
International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women,
INSTRAW, suggests also an output-based method:
-
the “output-based evaluation” implies the valuation of the
non-market production in terms of the market value of the outputs produced,
whereby the products and services produced in the household are assigned a
value equivalent to the price of similar market goods and services (such as the
meals served in the restaurant, the cleaning performed by a professional firm,
etc).
Output-based evaluation method does not require time-use data, but data
about the amount of goods and services produced in the households and their
values in the market.
References:
Chadeau,
Ann. (1992). What is Households' Non-market
Production Worth? OECD Economic Studies No.18, Spring 1992.
Cogoy,
Mario. (1995). “Market and non-market determinants of private consumption and .their
impacts on the environment”. Ecological
Economics 13 (1995) 169-180.
EUROSTAT,
Statistical Office of the European Communities. (1998). Proposal for a Satellite Account of Household Production. DOC E2/TUS/4/98.
Housework Study. (1981). Part 8. Official Statistics of
INSTRAW.
(1995). Measurement and valuation of unpaid
contribution: accounting through time and output.
Jungk,
Robert. (1983). Under Conditions of Humanquake. An interview in IFDA Dossier
34, March/April 1983.
OECD. (1995). Household Production in OECD Countries. Data
Sources and Measurement Methods.
Olin, Ulla.
(1975). “A case for Women as
Co-managers. The Family as a General Model of Human Social Organization and its
Implications for Women's Role in Public Life.” In: Tinker, Irene and Bo
Bramsen, Michele (Eds.), Women and World
Development.
Pietilä, Hilkka.
(1990 b). “The
Daughters of Earth: Women's culture as a basis for sustainable development”.
In: Engel, J.R. & Gibb Engel, Joan (ed.): Ethics of Environment and Development. London/Belhaven Press.
Pietilä,
Hilkka. (1997). “The triangle of the
human economy: household - cultivation - industrial production. An attempt at
making visible the human economy in toto.” Ecological
Economics, The Journal of the International Society for Ecological
Economics, 20 No 2 (1997) 113-127.
System
of National Accounts, 1993. EUROSTAT, IMF, OECD, UN, World
Bank.
UNDP.
(1995). Human Development Report, 1995.
United
Nations. (1996). Platform for Action and the
Varjonen,
Johanna – Aalto, Kristiina. Household
Production and Consumption in Finland 2001. Household Satellite Account,
Statistics
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