"Most of us derive considerable satisfaction from caring for others as well as being cared for," says Nancy Folbre, author of a new book on the subject.
Decent Societies Must Recognize the Value of Care Work
"A crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn't care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity."
Capitalism only cares about profits, so it is not surprising that care work is undervalued in capitalist societies. Yet care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy, while “adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work,” as renowned socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre points out in the interview that follows. Subsequently, she makes a makes an argument for structural reforms in the care economy and highlights strategies for organizing care workers. Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First.
C. J. Polychroniou: Your new book, Making Care Work, has an anti-capitalist subtitle: Why Our Economy Should Put People First. Could you explain the connections you see between capitalism and the undervaluation of the work of caring for ourselves and others?Nancy Folbre: In many societies, capitalist institutions such as market exchange and wage employment were shaped by preexisting patriarchal institutions, including laws barring women from property ownership, access to higher education and well-paying jobs. The dynamics varied across countries and were shaped by patterns of imperial power, but patriarchal institutions served the purpose of keeping the cost of producing and maintaining the labor force relatively low by creating a “reserve army” of wives and mothers who also worked to the advantage of men. The economists and national income accountants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reinforced women’s subordination by insisting that their unpaid work was a moral obligation rather than a productive contribution that deserved economic recognition.
Echoes of this view are apparent today, in a perverse campaign to slash public care programs and impugn the very concept of public service. The market-centric mania that has taken hold pretends to be “pro-family” but seems aimed primarily at sending women back to the home to help cut social spending. A crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn't care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity.
C. J. Polychroniou: How should we define care work and is there a way to measure its true value? What does “undervaluation” really mean?
Nancy Folbre: I define care work as the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. This can take the form of self-care, of active care for others that involves personal interactions that generally involve some concern for the well-being of the care recipient, indirect care devoted to the care of the environment for direct care, and “on-call” care that involves being present and available to someone who might need active care.
Care for dependents such as children, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly is a particularly important aspect of care work, but as Bruce Springsteen puts it, “everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Most of us derive considerable satisfaction from caring for others as well as being cared for.
There’s no way to put a precise number on the value of unpaid care work. All we can do is provide lower-bound estimates by asking questions like, “What would it cost to hire someone to replace this activity?” For instance, a parent staying home to keep on eye on a sleeping child knows that they could, in principle, hire a babysitter to take their place. We can also ask, “If this person wasn’t engaged in care work, how much could they be earning on the job?” Willingness to sacrifice income is an indicator of the personal satisfaction a caregiver derives.
As I explain in Making Care Work, data from time-use surveys shows that in the US today, adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work. Partly this reflects the activities of students and retirees, who are less likely than others to be employed, but it also testifies to the hours that people devote to activities such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, yard work, household management, childcare and elder care.
Surveys are not as effective at capturing the responsibilities of on-call care, which often restrict paid employment. However, because we have data on how much time people spend on various activities, and we also know what people are paid for different jobs, we can estimate the total value of unpaid work and even compare it to the value of all the goods and services bought and sold in the US — what’s called (misleadingly) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The US Bureau of Economic Analysis makes this calculation, and their estimate of the value of unpaid work is about 25% of GDP.
But this is an underestimate—and an “undervaluation” for several reasons. First, it doesn’t count the on-call time that many parents provide for children under 13, and which often limits the time they can devote to paid work outside the home. Second, it sets a value on all unpaid work equal to a housekeeper’s wage, which reflects the low bargaining power of a paid labor force consisting largely of immigrants and people of color. Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t include any consideration at all of the social benefits generated by work that develops individual and social capabilities, which includes the value of increased mental and physical health, enhanced skills, and stronger families and communities.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out, care work encompasses both paid as well as unpaid labor, and it is also one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Doesn’t the fact that capitalist economies undervalue care work have ramifications for paid care workers? If so, what are those ramifications?
Nancy Folbre: Have you ever wondered why investment bankers make more than college professors? They produce something that is easy to measure in dollar terms because…it is mostly dollars. What I produce is far less tangible—human capabilities that may or may not pay off for my students in the labor market—and even if they do pay off, I’m not getting a share.
Capitalist logic tends to reward workers who make measurable contributions to profit. This pattern is evident even in one of the most highly-paid occupations in the US — physicians. Plastic surgeons, many of whom who cater to affluent customers who pay out of pocket (rather than through insurance) for cosmetic alternations, are at the top of the physician’s pay scale. Their final “product” is generally easy to see. Public health physicians, who try to combat epidemics, contagious disease, and environmental threats, serve people who never even see them and often don’t even realize who has saved their lives. They earn, on average, 40% as much as plastic surgeons.
Many employees in care occupations, such as childcare and elder care workers, social workers, teachers, and nurses, as well as professionals and managers in care service industries (health, education and social services) are paid significantly less than their counterparts with similar educational credentials in other jobs, a pattern that has come to be termed a “care penalty.”
Numerous other factors, such as race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and gender affect relative wages, but the care penalty crosses all these boundaries. One big reason is that paid care work generates social benefits that employers can’t directly measure or capture. Who knows what effects a good childcare worker or teacher will have on a child’s future? Who knows whether a nurse has made a decision that saved someone’s life? Who knows whether a good elder care worker has kept someone alive and happy for additional years?
The undervaluation of paid care services hurts “consumers” as well as care workers, because it often leads to shortages—such as difficulty finding a primary health care provider--or high turnover, a serious problem in the childcare and elder care work force.
C. J. Polychroniou: What strategies do you consider vital for organizing care workers and improving pay and working conditions in the care economy?
Nancy Folbre: Unionization is a key strategy. National and regional nurses’ unions such as National Nurses United have raised wages and improved working conditions, in addition to successfully pushing for mandatory staffing ratios, which improve patient safety. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has raised wages for nursing home and home care workers above federal/state minimums, expanded access to benefits, and formalized employment relationships for home care workers. Teachers’ unions (including the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have improved teachers’ pay in Republican-dominated “Red” states as well as others, and lobbied hard for increased commitments to public education.
Another key strategy is legislative setting of industry-level wage standards (as well as a higher national minimum wage). New York State’s Home Care Worker Wage Parity Law requires a minimum total compensation level (wages + benefits) for Medicaid-funded home care workers. Advocates in many states are pushing for wage boards that can, as the Oregon Center for Public Policy puts it, do the “fact-finding and analysis needed to recommend workable solutions to the issues that harm the industry and people depending on long-term care services.”
These are very complementary strategies, and they can both be enhanced by evidence showing how higher wages for care providers reduce turn-over, improve service quality and pay off in the long run by improving social well-being.C. J. Polychroniou: Is universal basic income (UBI) a necessary strategy for resolving the problem of unpaid care work?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, but most UBI proposals fail to account for the needs of caregiving families, -- a better-designed approach brings children and other dependents into the story.
Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend,” proposes $1,000 a month to all adults 18 and older. Elon Musk’s call for a “Universal High Income,” leaves all details unspecified. Many of the small-scale pilot research experiments on UBI have structured payments to low-income individual per adult recipient. This obviously ignores the extra needs of families that caring for those who can’t care for themselves.At the other extreme, the success of the expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 in reducing child poverty has prompted some policy-makers to call for what is essentially a UBI for children—a universal child allowance that could go to their parents but would not benefit non-parents or those caring for a disabled or dependent adult. I see a need to reconcile these two approaches and think harder about the form that a UBI should take. This is an issue I’ve just begun to work on.
I will just add that a UBI for children, while a big improvement over current US policies, would not in itself resolve the care crisis facing parents. It would need to be combined with access to free universal high-quality childcare services and paid family and medical leave from work. I am currently collaborating with colleagues to develop a better picture of such a “care package.”
C. J. Polychroniou: Care work is disproportionately carried out by working-class women, but it is also heavily racialized. Wouldn’t this ultimately mean that a transformative politics of care must necessarily address the very structural oppressions that shape it?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, a transformative politics of care needs to provide a very clear analysis of structural oppressions and ways of eliminating them. Contrary to liberal feminist approaches that focus almost entirely on gender, socialist feminists seek cross-race, cross-class, international coalitions—because care needs are genuinely universal. In practice, “structural" reform requires policies such as campaign finance reform, higher taxes on income from capital, workplace democracy, targeted investment in communities of color, and immigration reform.
I don’t have magic potion that can speed such reform along, but my book tries to provide an antidote to the toxins that have infected political debate in the US — the loss of confidence in democratic governance, the every-man-for-himself cynicism, and the sneering dismissal of public commitment to the common good. I think many people are willing to challenge traditional measures of economic success in order to prioritize policies that put people first.
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Capitalism only cares about profits, so it is not surprising that care work is undervalued in capitalist societies. Yet care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy, while “adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work,” as renowned socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre points out in the interview that follows. Subsequently, she makes a makes an argument for structural reforms in the care economy and highlights strategies for organizing care workers. Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First.
C. J. Polychroniou: Your new book, Making Care Work, has an anti-capitalist subtitle: Why Our Economy Should Put People First. Could you explain the connections you see between capitalism and the undervaluation of the work of caring for ourselves and others?Nancy Folbre: In many societies, capitalist institutions such as market exchange and wage employment were shaped by preexisting patriarchal institutions, including laws barring women from property ownership, access to higher education and well-paying jobs. The dynamics varied across countries and were shaped by patterns of imperial power, but patriarchal institutions served the purpose of keeping the cost of producing and maintaining the labor force relatively low by creating a “reserve army” of wives and mothers who also worked to the advantage of men. The economists and national income accountants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reinforced women’s subordination by insisting that their unpaid work was a moral obligation rather than a productive contribution that deserved economic recognition.
Echoes of this view are apparent today, in a perverse campaign to slash public care programs and impugn the very concept of public service. The market-centric mania that has taken hold pretends to be “pro-family” but seems aimed primarily at sending women back to the home to help cut social spending. A crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn't care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity.
C. J. Polychroniou: How should we define care work and is there a way to measure its true value? What does “undervaluation” really mean?
Nancy Folbre: I define care work as the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. This can take the form of self-care, of active care for others that involves personal interactions that generally involve some concern for the well-being of the care recipient, indirect care devoted to the care of the environment for direct care, and “on-call” care that involves being present and available to someone who might need active care.
Care for dependents such as children, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly is a particularly important aspect of care work, but as Bruce Springsteen puts it, “everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Most of us derive considerable satisfaction from caring for others as well as being cared for.
There’s no way to put a precise number on the value of unpaid care work. All we can do is provide lower-bound estimates by asking questions like, “What would it cost to hire someone to replace this activity?” For instance, a parent staying home to keep on eye on a sleeping child knows that they could, in principle, hire a babysitter to take their place. We can also ask, “If this person wasn’t engaged in care work, how much could they be earning on the job?” Willingness to sacrifice income is an indicator of the personal satisfaction a caregiver derives.
As I explain in Making Care Work, data from time-use surveys shows that in the US today, adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work. Partly this reflects the activities of students and retirees, who are less likely than others to be employed, but it also testifies to the hours that people devote to activities such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, yard work, household management, childcare and elder care.
Surveys are not as effective at capturing the responsibilities of on-call care, which often restrict paid employment. However, because we have data on how much time people spend on various activities, and we also know what people are paid for different jobs, we can estimate the total value of unpaid work and even compare it to the value of all the goods and services bought and sold in the US — what’s called (misleadingly) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The US Bureau of Economic Analysis makes this calculation, and their estimate of the value of unpaid work is about 25% of GDP.
But this is an underestimate—and an “undervaluation” for several reasons. First, it doesn’t count the on-call time that many parents provide for children under 13, and which often limits the time they can devote to paid work outside the home. Second, it sets a value on all unpaid work equal to a housekeeper’s wage, which reflects the low bargaining power of a paid labor force consisting largely of immigrants and people of color. Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t include any consideration at all of the social benefits generated by work that develops individual and social capabilities, which includes the value of increased mental and physical health, enhanced skills, and stronger families and communities.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out, care work encompasses both paid as well as unpaid labor, and it is also one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Doesn’t the fact that capitalist economies undervalue care work have ramifications for paid care workers? If so, what are those ramifications?
Nancy Folbre: Have you ever wondered why investment bankers make more than college professors? They produce something that is easy to measure in dollar terms because…it is mostly dollars. What I produce is far less tangible—human capabilities that may or may not pay off for my students in the labor market—and even if they do pay off, I’m not getting a share.
Capitalist logic tends to reward workers who make measurable contributions to profit. This pattern is evident even in one of the most highly-paid occupations in the US — physicians. Plastic surgeons, many of whom who cater to affluent customers who pay out of pocket (rather than through insurance) for cosmetic alternations, are at the top of the physician’s pay scale. Their final “product” is generally easy to see. Public health physicians, who try to combat epidemics, contagious disease, and environmental threats, serve people who never even see them and often don’t even realize who has saved their lives. They earn, on average, 40% as much as plastic surgeons.
Many employees in care occupations, such as childcare and elder care workers, social workers, teachers, and nurses, as well as professionals and managers in care service industries (health, education and social services) are paid significantly less than their counterparts with similar educational credentials in other jobs, a pattern that has come to be termed a “care penalty.”
Numerous other factors, such as race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and gender affect relative wages, but the care penalty crosses all these boundaries. One big reason is that paid care work generates social benefits that employers can’t directly measure or capture. Who knows what effects a good childcare worker or teacher will have on a child’s future? Who knows whether a nurse has made a decision that saved someone’s life? Who knows whether a good elder care worker has kept someone alive and happy for additional years?
The undervaluation of paid care services hurts “consumers” as well as care workers, because it often leads to shortages—such as difficulty finding a primary health care provider--or high turnover, a serious problem in the childcare and elder care work force.
C. J. Polychroniou: What strategies do you consider vital for organizing care workers and improving pay and working conditions in the care economy?
Nancy Folbre: Unionization is a key strategy. National and regional nurses’ unions such as National Nurses United have raised wages and improved working conditions, in addition to successfully pushing for mandatory staffing ratios, which improve patient safety. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has raised wages for nursing home and home care workers above federal/state minimums, expanded access to benefits, and formalized employment relationships for home care workers. Teachers’ unions (including the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have improved teachers’ pay in Republican-dominated “Red” states as well as others, and lobbied hard for increased commitments to public education.
Another key strategy is legislative setting of industry-level wage standards (as well as a higher national minimum wage). New York State’s Home Care Worker Wage Parity Law requires a minimum total compensation level (wages + benefits) for Medicaid-funded home care workers. Advocates in many states are pushing for wage boards that can, as the Oregon Center for Public Policy puts it, do the “fact-finding and analysis needed to recommend workable solutions to the issues that harm the industry and people depending on long-term care services.”
These are very complementary strategies, and they can both be enhanced by evidence showing how higher wages for care providers reduce turn-over, improve service quality and pay off in the long run by improving social well-being.C. J. Polychroniou: Is universal basic income (UBI) a necessary strategy for resolving the problem of unpaid care work?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, but most UBI proposals fail to account for the needs of caregiving families, -- a better-designed approach brings children and other dependents into the story.
Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend,” proposes $1,000 a month to all adults 18 and older. Elon Musk’s call for a “Universal High Income,” leaves all details unspecified. Many of the small-scale pilot research experiments on UBI have structured payments to low-income individual per adult recipient. This obviously ignores the extra needs of families that caring for those who can’t care for themselves.At the other extreme, the success of the expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 in reducing child poverty has prompted some policy-makers to call for what is essentially a UBI for children—a universal child allowance that could go to their parents but would not benefit non-parents or those caring for a disabled or dependent adult. I see a need to reconcile these two approaches and think harder about the form that a UBI should take. This is an issue I’ve just begun to work on.
I will just add that a UBI for children, while a big improvement over current US policies, would not in itself resolve the care crisis facing parents. It would need to be combined with access to free universal high-quality childcare services and paid family and medical leave from work. I am currently collaborating with colleagues to develop a better picture of such a “care package.”
C. J. Polychroniou: Care work is disproportionately carried out by working-class women, but it is also heavily racialized. Wouldn’t this ultimately mean that a transformative politics of care must necessarily address the very structural oppressions that shape it?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, a transformative politics of care needs to provide a very clear analysis of structural oppressions and ways of eliminating them. Contrary to liberal feminist approaches that focus almost entirely on gender, socialist feminists seek cross-race, cross-class, international coalitions—because care needs are genuinely universal. In practice, “structural" reform requires policies such as campaign finance reform, higher taxes on income from capital, workplace democracy, targeted investment in communities of color, and immigration reform.
I don’t have magic potion that can speed such reform along, but my book tries to provide an antidote to the toxins that have infected political debate in the US — the loss of confidence in democratic governance, the every-man-for-himself cynicism, and the sneering dismissal of public commitment to the common good. I think many people are willing to challenge traditional measures of economic success in order to prioritize policies that put people first.
Capitalism only cares about profits, so it is not surprising that care work is undervalued in capitalist societies. Yet care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy, while “adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work,” as renowned socialist and feminist economist Nancy Folbre points out in the interview that follows. Subsequently, she makes a makes an argument for structural reforms in the care economy and highlights strategies for organizing care workers. Folbre is professor emerita of economics and director of the Program on Gender and Care Work at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is the author of several books, including, most recently, Making Care Work: Why Our Economy Should Put People First.
C. J. Polychroniou: Your new book, Making Care Work, has an anti-capitalist subtitle: Why Our Economy Should Put People First. Could you explain the connections you see between capitalism and the undervaluation of the work of caring for ourselves and others?Nancy Folbre: In many societies, capitalist institutions such as market exchange and wage employment were shaped by preexisting patriarchal institutions, including laws barring women from property ownership, access to higher education and well-paying jobs. The dynamics varied across countries and were shaped by patterns of imperial power, but patriarchal institutions served the purpose of keeping the cost of producing and maintaining the labor force relatively low by creating a “reserve army” of wives and mothers who also worked to the advantage of men. The economists and national income accountants of the late 19th and early 20th centuries reinforced women’s subordination by insisting that their unpaid work was a moral obligation rather than a productive contribution that deserved economic recognition.
Echoes of this view are apparent today, in a perverse campaign to slash public care programs and impugn the very concept of public service. The market-centric mania that has taken hold pretends to be “pro-family” but seems aimed primarily at sending women back to the home to help cut social spending. A crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn't care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity.
C. J. Polychroniou: How should we define care work and is there a way to measure its true value? What does “undervaluation” really mean?
Nancy Folbre: I define care work as the production, development and maintenance of human capabilities. This can take the form of self-care, of active care for others that involves personal interactions that generally involve some concern for the well-being of the care recipient, indirect care devoted to the care of the environment for direct care, and “on-call” care that involves being present and available to someone who might need active care.
Care for dependents such as children, people with disabilities, and the frail elderly is a particularly important aspect of care work, but as Bruce Springsteen puts it, “everybody’s got a hungry heart.” Most of us derive considerable satisfaction from caring for others as well as being cared for.
There’s no way to put a precise number on the value of unpaid care work. All we can do is provide lower-bound estimates by asking questions like, “What would it cost to hire someone to replace this activity?” For instance, a parent staying home to keep on eye on a sleeping child knows that they could, in principle, hire a babysitter to take their place. We can also ask, “If this person wasn’t engaged in care work, how much could they be earning on the job?” Willingness to sacrifice income is an indicator of the personal satisfaction a caregiver derives.
As I explain in Making Care Work, data from time-use surveys shows that in the US today, adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work. Partly this reflects the activities of students and retirees, who are less likely than others to be employed, but it also testifies to the hours that people devote to activities such as cooking, cleaning, shopping, yard work, household management, childcare and elder care.
Surveys are not as effective at capturing the responsibilities of on-call care, which often restrict paid employment. However, because we have data on how much time people spend on various activities, and we also know what people are paid for different jobs, we can estimate the total value of unpaid work and even compare it to the value of all the goods and services bought and sold in the US — what’s called (misleadingly) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The US Bureau of Economic Analysis makes this calculation, and their estimate of the value of unpaid work is about 25% of GDP.
But this is an underestimate—and an “undervaluation” for several reasons. First, it doesn’t count the on-call time that many parents provide for children under 13, and which often limits the time they can devote to paid work outside the home. Second, it sets a value on all unpaid work equal to a housekeeper’s wage, which reflects the low bargaining power of a paid labor force consisting largely of immigrants and people of color. Third, and most importantly, it doesn’t include any consideration at all of the social benefits generated by work that develops individual and social capabilities, which includes the value of increased mental and physical health, enhanced skills, and stronger families and communities.
C. J. Polychroniou: As you point out, care work encompasses both paid as well as unpaid labor, and it is also one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy. Doesn’t the fact that capitalist economies undervalue care work have ramifications for paid care workers? If so, what are those ramifications?
Nancy Folbre: Have you ever wondered why investment bankers make more than college professors? They produce something that is easy to measure in dollar terms because…it is mostly dollars. What I produce is far less tangible—human capabilities that may or may not pay off for my students in the labor market—and even if they do pay off, I’m not getting a share.
Capitalist logic tends to reward workers who make measurable contributions to profit. This pattern is evident even in one of the most highly-paid occupations in the US — physicians. Plastic surgeons, many of whom who cater to affluent customers who pay out of pocket (rather than through insurance) for cosmetic alternations, are at the top of the physician’s pay scale. Their final “product” is generally easy to see. Public health physicians, who try to combat epidemics, contagious disease, and environmental threats, serve people who never even see them and often don’t even realize who has saved their lives. They earn, on average, 40% as much as plastic surgeons.
Many employees in care occupations, such as childcare and elder care workers, social workers, teachers, and nurses, as well as professionals and managers in care service industries (health, education and social services) are paid significantly less than their counterparts with similar educational credentials in other jobs, a pattern that has come to be termed a “care penalty.”
Numerous other factors, such as race/ethnicity, immigrant status, and gender affect relative wages, but the care penalty crosses all these boundaries. One big reason is that paid care work generates social benefits that employers can’t directly measure or capture. Who knows what effects a good childcare worker or teacher will have on a child’s future? Who knows whether a nurse has made a decision that saved someone’s life? Who knows whether a good elder care worker has kept someone alive and happy for additional years?
The undervaluation of paid care services hurts “consumers” as well as care workers, because it often leads to shortages—such as difficulty finding a primary health care provider--or high turnover, a serious problem in the childcare and elder care work force.
C. J. Polychroniou: What strategies do you consider vital for organizing care workers and improving pay and working conditions in the care economy?
Nancy Folbre: Unionization is a key strategy. National and regional nurses’ unions such as National Nurses United have raised wages and improved working conditions, in addition to successfully pushing for mandatory staffing ratios, which improve patient safety. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has raised wages for nursing home and home care workers above federal/state minimums, expanded access to benefits, and formalized employment relationships for home care workers. Teachers’ unions (including the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) have improved teachers’ pay in Republican-dominated “Red” states as well as others, and lobbied hard for increased commitments to public education.
Another key strategy is legislative setting of industry-level wage standards (as well as a higher national minimum wage). New York State’s Home Care Worker Wage Parity Law requires a minimum total compensation level (wages + benefits) for Medicaid-funded home care workers. Advocates in many states are pushing for wage boards that can, as the Oregon Center for Public Policy puts it, do the “fact-finding and analysis needed to recommend workable solutions to the issues that harm the industry and people depending on long-term care services.”
These are very complementary strategies, and they can both be enhanced by evidence showing how higher wages for care providers reduce turn-over, improve service quality and pay off in the long run by improving social well-being.C. J. Polychroniou: Is universal basic income (UBI) a necessary strategy for resolving the problem of unpaid care work?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, but most UBI proposals fail to account for the needs of caregiving families, -- a better-designed approach brings children and other dependents into the story.
Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend,” proposes $1,000 a month to all adults 18 and older. Elon Musk’s call for a “Universal High Income,” leaves all details unspecified. Many of the small-scale pilot research experiments on UBI have structured payments to low-income individual per adult recipient. This obviously ignores the extra needs of families that caring for those who can’t care for themselves.At the other extreme, the success of the expanded Child Tax Credit in 2021 in reducing child poverty has prompted some policy-makers to call for what is essentially a UBI for children—a universal child allowance that could go to their parents but would not benefit non-parents or those caring for a disabled or dependent adult. I see a need to reconcile these two approaches and think harder about the form that a UBI should take. This is an issue I’ve just begun to work on.
I will just add that a UBI for children, while a big improvement over current US policies, would not in itself resolve the care crisis facing parents. It would need to be combined with access to free universal high-quality childcare services and paid family and medical leave from work. I am currently collaborating with colleagues to develop a better picture of such a “care package.”
C. J. Polychroniou: Care work is disproportionately carried out by working-class women, but it is also heavily racialized. Wouldn’t this ultimately mean that a transformative politics of care must necessarily address the very structural oppressions that shape it?
Nancy Folbre: Yes, a transformative politics of care needs to provide a very clear analysis of structural oppressions and ways of eliminating them. Contrary to liberal feminist approaches that focus almost entirely on gender, socialist feminists seek cross-race, cross-class, international coalitions—because care needs are genuinely universal. In practice, “structural" reform requires policies such as campaign finance reform, higher taxes on income from capital, workplace democracy, targeted investment in communities of color, and immigration reform.
I don’t have magic potion that can speed such reform along, but my book tries to provide an antidote to the toxins that have infected political debate in the US — the loss of confidence in democratic governance, the every-man-for-himself cynicism, and the sneering dismissal of public commitment to the common good. I think many people are willing to challenge traditional measures of economic success in order to prioritize policies that put people first.