Type of employment based on affection rather than immediate pecuniary reward
Care work includes all tasks directly involving the care of others. The majority of care work is provided without any expectation of immediate pecuniary reward. Instead, it is undertaken out of affection, social norms or a sense of responsibility for others. It can also be a form of paid employment.
It refers to occupations that provide services to help people develop their capabilities, or the ability to pursue aspects of their lives that they value. Examples include child care, all levels of teaching (from preschool through university professorship), and health care (nurses, doctors, physical therapists, and psychologists). Care work also includes unpaid domestic work that is often disproportionately performed by women.
Although it is frequently focused on providing for dependents such as children, the sick, and the elderly, care work also refers to work done in the immediate service of others (regardless of dependency) and can extend to "animals and things". The study of care work, linked to the fields of feminist economics and feminist legal theory, is associated with scholars who include Marilyn Waring, Nancy Folbre, Martha Albertson Fineman, Paula England, Maria Floro, Diane Elson, Caren Grown, and Virginia Held.
Functions.
Care work is essential to well-being. Without care and nurturing, it is thought that children cannot develop into high-functioning individuals and will have difficulty as adults maintaining (or expanding) their well-being and productivity. Actively-involved child care provided in the home or by the public or private sector contributes to the development of healthy, productive children. Effective care for the sick allows them to remain productive and continue contributing to society. Care work is related to the functioning of a society and its economic development of that society; well-cared-for people can more effectively contribute social and human capital to the market.
Caring for others is often costly, and care work is associated with a "care penalty"; work caring for others is often not financially compensated. It has been suggested that individuals who do not take care of others may not be capable of reproduction; receiving care is often necessary for individuals to reach the stage of life where they can care for others.
Although a popular belief in economics is that a household distributes wealth rather than creates it, it has been said that the household sector plays an important role in wealth creation. Unlike the business sector, wealth created by the household sector is not financial; much work done there is unpaid. The resulting wealth is social; care work by parents in raising a child increases the child's ability to perform in society later. Individuals who benefit from receiving care generally perform better in academic and social settings, enabling them to create financial wealth later in life and play a part in increasing social capital. According to Sabine O'Hara, "everything needs care"; she sees care as the basis of a market economy.
History.
Family and community.
Before the Industrial Revolution, care work (such as taking care of the household and raising children) was performed by the family and often involved the contributions of a community. The core sphere was not seen as separate from daily business interactions, because the concept of the market did not yet exist.
Effects of industrialization.
With the dawn of the industrial era, the core sphere became separate from jobs and business which were performed away from the home; men left home to work in factories and at other non-domestic jobs. Women, considered better suited to nurturing, were expected to provide child care and do housework. This familial hierarchy persisted in the American family with a breadwinner father, a homemaker mother, and their children. Not all families, however, were like this. Unlike white women, Black women and women of color were expected to work; almost 80 percent of single black women, compared to 23.8 percent of single white women, worked outside the home in 1880. The labor-participation rate of white women fell after marriage; labor-force participation remained stable for Black women, and Black men and women both contributed financially to the household.
Domestic work became an important element in a stable workforce. With the abolition of slavery in the U.S., Black women were increasingly hired as domestic workers. The history of domestic work in the United States is one of gender, race, citizenship, and class hierarchies. Although domestic work was a paid job, it was not recognized as such by the law or society. Because domestic work is in the private sphere and typically performed by women, it was often depicted as an "act of love" or rewarding in itself. This has been used to justify the lack of legal protection of domestic work, such as in the exclusion of domestic workers from the National Labor Relations Act guaranteeing the right to form labor unions. "Live-in" workers, such as nannies and housekeepers, do not have overtime protection under the Fair Labor Standards Act. Whether women worked or stayed in the home, their duties were believed to be unimportant and were largely ignored.
Work performed in the home often has a considerable replacement cost, but is not factored into productivity; paying others to perform care work is often prohibitively expensive. It is more cost-effective for families to substitute their time for the replacement cost. Paid care work is considered employment, but work done by family members is not counted as productive in the market and is overlooked when determining employment status.
More women participate in the labor force (at least part-time) than they did a century ago, and many believe that the "cult of domesticity" for women of the 19th and 20th centuries is obsolete. Women dominate caring professions such as teaching, child care, nursing, and social work, and most of these professions pay considerably less than jobs more frequently held by men. Women working outside the home are frequently still also expected to do housework and raise the children. Care work is still considered economically unimportant, and women have difficulty escaping gender roles.
Care workers.
Women and unpaid work.
Studies have indicated that women provide the majority of unpaid child care, and some have shown men to be more likely to support the elderly than to care for children. The comparative willingness of women to perform unpaid care work has contributed to the poor compensation received by people in care-based professions. The expectation that women would provide these services without assurance of financial compensation has devalued care work, leading to these professions being underpaid in comparison to professions requiring similar training and work but not equivalent to domestic tasks.
Women have a heavier burden of care work in the home than men do, largely due to differences in gender socialization and historical and cultural tradition. They are taught to be more caring and affectionate than their male counterparts. This does not imply that women are biologically predisposed to perform care work. Historical and cultural traditions explain the widely-held ideology of women's role in caring for others. In Nepal, women work 21 more hours each week than men; in India, women work 12 more hours. In Kenya, 8-to-14-year-old girls spend five hours more on household chores than boys do. Most of these extra work hours for women are spent on care work. This poses a problem for women; the extra hours of domestic care work create difficulty in balancing domestic and market work.
The creation of separate spheres, public and private, in the nineteenth century contributed to the belief that caring was incompatible with the workplace and belonged to the family only. The historical push of women into care work, combined with the contemporary dominance of women in these fields, accounts for the modern conception that care work is inherently feminine work. However, care work is socialized into a feminine sphere and is also done by males. Care work has become so feminized that there is a stigma against men who engage in it. This stigma may discourage men from entering care work and propagate the belief that it is inherently women's work. The conflation of women's work and care work can ignore cultural, political, racial, and ethnic differences among women.
Differences in earnings exist between high-school and college graduates, which are especially pertinent between males and females looking for work. Women tend to find more opportunities in unpaid care work if they are unable to enter the paid workforce. Individuals without a college degree may not meet the requirements of many jobs, and much of the world population is unable to attend school due to caring for elderly or sick family members.
An increasing number of companies claim to provide care, including airlines. According to its ad, Lufthansa provides "Service as dependable as a shoulder to lean on." The accompanying picture was of a woman leaning her head on a man's shoulder, with both sound asleep. British Airways had an ad with a similar message: "New Club World cradle seat. Lullaby not included." Its image showed a woman with a baby in her arms.
Division by socio-economic class.
Most paid care work is performed by members of the working class, predominantly women. The U.S. domestic workforce is about 2.2 million people, of which an overwhelming majority (91.5 percent) are women. Half identify as Black, Hispanic, or Asian American Pacific Islander, and Black and Hispanic women are over-represented in the domestic workforce. About 35 percent of domestic workers were not born in the U.S., many of whom are women of color. Scholars have described this phenomenon as the "international division of reproductive labor" or the "care chain". In this "chain", housework is commodified; women who can afford to do so pay other women, usually immigrant women of color, to do their housework. In their home country, other women do their housework. Care work is not necessarily face-to-face; in his study of Vietnamese transnational marriages, Hung Cam Thai considers migrant remittances a form of care work.
Baumol effect.
The market prices of items required for care increase and care work continues to be non-paid in what is known as the Baumol effect, described by William Baumol and William Bowen as a relative increase in the price of services without substitutes – for example, the costs of child care and sending children to college. People are living longer, and there are fewer siblings to share elder care than there were during the mid-20th century baby boom. The rising cost of items needed for care takes a toll on people who are generous and cooperative.
The market.
An economy has four sectors: business, household, public, and non-profit. The business sector is typically considered paramount, but all four parts of an economy generate wealth and are interdependent. One reason that unpaid care work is largely ignored is because of the belief that a household does not create wealth, but the household prepares children for the other sectors of the economy.
Although care work has largely been associated with domestic unpaid work, it is more frequently paid. This shift has implications for care work and society as a whole. As care work is increasingly marketized, those who need care – the sick, the elderly, and children – will not be able to afford the care they need. The quality of care may decrease in response to the profit motive.
The marketization of care work is under public and academic scrutiny for its endemic low pay for care work, the effects of the market on the quality of care, and the implications of the market on care workers. Five theories (devaluation, public good, prisoner-of-love, commoditization of emotion, and love-and-money) have been explored by academics.
Devaluation theory.
Devaluation theory seeks to explain the low wages typical of care work by focusing on the fact that many care workers are women, and sexism persists. Decision-makers underestimate the contribution of female-dominated jobs to organizational goals (including profits), and underpay these workers.
The theory is supported by sociological studies. In 2002, sociologist Paula England conducted a study that revealed, after controlling for skill demands, educational requirements, industry, and gender, a net penalty of five to 10 percent for working in an occupation involving care; one exception was nursing, which did not seem to experience the pay penalty of other care work.
Public-good theory.
Care work has a number of indirect social benefits that are associated with public goods; goods with benefits that are impossible to deny to those who have not paid for them. Education, an example of care work, is an example of a public good. Care work is