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Unpaid work: Women and the burden of unpaid labour
Woman in India carry a disproportionate burden of unpaid work, namely, unpaid domestic services as well as unpaid care of children, the old, and the disabled for their respective households.
Statistics on Women’s Unpaid Work
Importance of recognizing unpaid work
- India is a country with women putting in 352 minutes a day into domestic work while men put in only 51.8 minutes.
- Nearly 49 per cent of women in a country of 1.3 billion people don’t have their work accounted for in the annual GDP.
- Globally, the proportion of unpaid work per day is far higher for women than menwhile in case of India on average 66 per cent of women's work is unpaid.
- According to the Census in 2011, people engaged in household duties have been treated as non-workers, even when 159.9 million women stated that “household work” was their main occupation.
- Economies welfare is calculated on GDP and employment figures: In most mainstream understanding of an economy’s welfare, the central figures of discussion are a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as well as employment figures.
- The GDP of a country is a “monetary measure of the market value of all the final goods and services produced within a country for a particular period of time”.
- The employment figures try to calculate the number of citizens engaged in some form of employment for a particular number of days within a year.
- Invisibilisation of women’s work: The traditional Indian imagination of a household almost takes it for granted that certain jobs within the household are to be performed only by women.
- Domestic work considered as chaos: The work is often dismissed as a set of daily chores and not accounted for in either the GDP or the employment metrics regardless of the hours of the day women put in to domestic labour.
- Ignorance towards unpaid domestic work: The economists often ignore it in their calculations and the result is that a massive portion of the work done by women in India goes unrecognised as labour and is treated as a duty.
- Unpaid work keeps women out of jobs, disempowered: The immense burden of unpaid work that will remain at the end of a working day is another “major deterrent” for women to participate in, or rejoin the workforce.
Importance of recognizing unpaid work
- Women’s unpaid work could aid India’s growth: The International Monetary Fund suggested that if women’s participation in the economy was raised to that of men, then India could grow its GDP by 27 per cent.
- The global value of unpaid domestic labour by women hovers around 13 per cent but in India, the number is almost 40 per cent of its current GDP.
- Recognizing unpaid work is central to women empowerment: The recognition of their primary occupation as genuine work that contributes not only to the family but to the welfare of the nation state as a whole is such that it gives them a claim to equality within the patriarchal Indian household.
- Holistic understanding of labour: The recognition moves us towards a more holistic understanding of labour that isn’t purely tied to the exchange value of a service on the market.
- It recognises an extremely intimate form of labour that has proved essential to keeping the unit of the family intact and functional.
- Women can demand some degree of parity in terms of the time: Without the recognition of unpaid women’s labour as genuine work, the building block of this argument goes missing and recognition becomes fundamental to this call for gender justice.
- Against the imputation of unpaid work in national accounts: The experts say that unpaid activities as such fall outside the relevant production boundary, because they cannot be separately identified as activities in an economic sense.
- The imputed income does not have the same significance as monetary income, because it does not give the consumer freedom to choose on what goods or services he or she can spend it now or late.
- Difficulty in measuring unpaid work: The incorporation of unpaid work in the System of National Accounts would damage its usefulness as an indicator for the development of the market economy.
- The time-series analysis of data on the business cycle, inflation, unemployment etc. would become impossible because of the changed definitions of incomes and expenditures in the SNA.
- Specific or direct policies explicitly aimed at unpaid work: It would influence the quantity of unpaid work done in society or changing the distribution of unpaid work among different groups in society.
- Making unpaid work visible: Boosting the recognition of unpaid work has always been cited as the first aim of any policymaking in this field.
- The second step in making visible the importance of unpaid work for society as a whole is imputing its value in monetary terms.
- Unpaid work and gender equality policy: The modern gender equality policy-making in the field of work and employment is based on the assumption that women's empowerment requires their economic independence and relief of domestic drudgery.
- Promotion of equal sharing: The direct state interventions to persuade men to accept an equal share of unpaid work are relatively rare.
- Commercialization of unpaid work: It is a component of gender equality policy which is aimed at relieving women's domestic drudgery which would be encouraging private businesses producing goods and services which are good substitutes for unpaid work, or reduce the time necessary to spend in it.
- Wage and income policy: It implicitly touches unpaid work mainly in two respects:
- Wage setting policies may suppose a certain division of paid and unpaid work in the household, as is the case with the family wage; and
- Income policies may differ in the extent to which they require that the receivers of income are willing to accept an offered job in return.
- It is necessary to remember that empowerment cannot be found by simply rejecting the unpaid domestic work women have been shouldering for decades in favour of working outside the homes.
- The concept of unpaid work should, be put between square brackets and attention focused on the different sorts of unpaid work.
- Unraveling the economics of voluntary work could essentially contribute to a broader recognition and understanding of work and employment.
- It is required to place education and awareness about skewed gender attitudes at the core of a multi-pronged approach to tackle unequal labour division.
POSTED ON 30-03-2021 BY ADMIN
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