What Is Domestic Work, and Why Isn’t It Valued?
A key premise of this book is that domestic labor is generally believed to be void of economic value, and that the current movement for domestic workers’ rights is doing critical work to change this perception. But before delving more deeply into this idea, it is worth discussing what “domestic work” is, why it should be included within labor protections, and how it contributes to the economy.
The National Domestic Workers Alliance issued a report in 2012 presenting survey data about the treatment of domestic workers nationally. The report’s foreword, written by author and activist Barbara Ehrenreich, describes exactly what domestic work is and why it is unique:
Domestic work is, by necessity, intensely personal in nature. A nanny is entrusted with the care and wellbeing of the employers’ most precious loved ones. She is a witness to all the family’s foibles and dysfunctions, sometimes even a confidante to her employers. Though a housecleaner may make little verbal contact with her employers, they have few secrets from her. She changes their sheets, dusts their desktops, scrubs their bathroom counters, and sometimes overhears their quarrels. The caretaker for an elderly or disabled person often functions explicitly as a companion, providing conversation and emotional support, as well as help with dressing and bathing.12
The report goes on to point out the differences between “reproductive”—work performed within the domestic or private sphere—and “productive” economies, and how each one is valued, or devalued:
Domestic work is unseen in the way that most work dedicated to cleaning and caring is unseen. At the end of the domestic worker’s day, no durable goods or consumer products have been created or distributed; neither the flow of capital nor the accumulation of profits has been directly served. Instead, a child is another day older and still safe and healthy. An elderly parent is well fed and attended to. The absence of dirt on a kitchen floor is silent witness to a laboring hand. In a capital-dominant world, work that does not appear to produce value or facilitate its exchange is devalued and rendered socially invisible. Yet this labor, whether performed by a family member or by an employee, supports and subsidizes all other productive work.13
Consistent with the invisible nature of “women’s work,” the legal history of domestic work has been one of exclusion from protection and recognition. What is at the root of this sweeping, global, systemic failure of law and policy to protect people who take on the caring responsibilities for homes, children, and elders? What causes ordinarily “upstanding” people of means to mistreat other human beings so egregiously? Unfortunately, contemporary feminist dialogue has failed to provide us with a better understanding of these questions. Until relatively recently, not many feminist thinkers and writers focused on this issue. In a 2013 article in Dissent titled “Trickle-Down Feminism,” author Sarah Jaffe wrote about how feminist energy has been misplaced, with writers devoting countless articles to dissecting the every move of wealthy superwomen like Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer instead of the economic trends that impact so many more women’s lives, such as the rapid growth of domestic work.14
Despite this gap in modern-day feminist writing, decades of feminist theory have addressed this question of how to value reproductive labor through an examination of the economics of the public and private spheres, and our socio-cultural perceptions of each. The intimacy inherent to domestic work is sometimes given as the argument for why domestic work should not be included within labor protections: it is supposed to be work that comes from the heart, rooted in love, an extension of a woman’s “natural” tendencies—thus not necessarily worthy of compensation or labor protections.15 However, the fallacy of this framework has been clear to feminists for years. Writers from Gloria Steinem to Angela Harris to Mariarosa Dalla Costa have shed light on the view that domestic labor is labor worthy of economic value. A confluence of contemporary circumstances is finally enabling theories and understandings of the domestic sphere to take shape as policy and cultural change.
Historically, feminist theory helped establish the framework within which domestic labor is now being recognized in law and policy, and which guides the consciousness of many domestic workers’ rights advocates today. Take Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James’s The Power of Women and the Subversion of Community, a pamphlet published in 1972.16 By using a “feminist reading of Marx to challenge the left orthodoxy on the role of women,” Dalla Costa and James were among the first to apply Marxism to the gendered division of labor, analyzing how domestic labor has always been completely invisible to capital markets:
Serving men and children in wageless isolation had hidden that we were serving capital. Now we know that we are not only indispensable to capitalist production in those countries where we are 45% of their waged labour force. We are always their indispensable workforce, at home, cleaning, washing and ironing; making, disciplining and bringing up babies; servicing men physically, sexually and emotionally.17
Dalla Costa and James also praised the ideas of Malcolm X and other black intellectuals who tied together the relationship between racial injustice and labor inequality; they applied all these principles to their organizing work, reflected in the International Wages for Housework Campaign, founded by James, which demanded that the government compensate work that took place inside the home. Dalla Costa and James’s relevance is clear today, with the domestic workers’ movement slowly shifting legal, societal, and cultural opinions about what type of labor ought to be valued, who performs the labor that is valued, and why some labor is generally invisible to capital markets. Barbara Ehrenreich remarked upon their work in 2000, stating that “Marxist feminists Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James proposed in 1972 that the home was in fact an economically productive and significant workplace, an extension of the actual factory, since housework served to ‘reproduce the labor power’ of others, particularly men.”18
In her 1994 essay “Revaluing Economics,” Gloria Steinem argued that labor is valued in accordance with prevailing social constructs about race, sex, and class. Jobs in high finance are valued with comfortable compensation, for example, while the work of caring for people is often deemed unworthy of a minimum wage. “Categories of work are less likely to be paid by the expertise they require—or even by importance to the community or to the often mythical free market—than by the sex, race and class of most of their workers,” Steinem wrote.19 The sex, race, and class of domestic workers are overwhelmingly female, non-white, and low-income or poor.
Consistent with Steinem’s analysis, America’s relationship to those who work within the domestic sphere has long been troubled and generally starved of the political will to protect and regulate. Slavery, which was legal in the United States until 1865 and still exists globally to varying degrees, has influenced how domestic laborers are currently treated. In addition to having no legal freedom or power over their own lives, slaves who labored in American homes were subject to unspeakable cruelty, sexual assault, and abuse. As the United States has evolved away from slavery to New Deal–era labor policies and to an economy influenced by globalization, the line connecting slavery to paid domestic work continues to be deeply intertwined. The blog Gender Across Borders corroborates this idea, noting, “In patriarchal power dynamics, domestic work is typically assigned to a woman of the household. In a society with great income disparities, if this woman is rich, she can delegate her domestic work to another, poorer woman.”20
Scholar V. Spike Peterson discusses the economic value of “subject formation,” which is what rearing children and caring for adults is all about:
Feminists have long argued that subject formation matters structurally for economic relations. It produces individuals who are then able to “work” and this unpaid reproductive labour saves capital the costs of producing key inputs. It also instills attitudes, identities