“The Unpaid Work Discourse from a Feminist Lens:

Reflections on Power, Politics and Policy from the Global South”

Subhalakshmi Nandi & Ajita VidyarthiSeptember 2014

Structure of the Presentation

1. Locating ourselves2. Tracing the discourse, tensions, and

policy responses for addressing women’s unpaid work

3. Some suggestions for the way forward

Location…

• Not economists• Practitioners’ perspective • Multi-disciplinary approach• Focus is on women’s rights and the politics of

their work, labour and bodies• Discursive paper grounded in feminist analysis• Opportunity for reflecting on the tensions

Unpaid Work Discussions • Unpaid care work: – Labour/workers’ rights linked to advocacy on:• Maternity and paternity rights• Child rights emphasis – early childhood care and

development• Rights of emerging categories of ‘care workers’ – domestic

workers, health and care programme workers– Feminist analysis –

• Care as a public good• Beyond care women’s right to livelihoods, decent work and

universal social protection

• Unpaid work in SNA, non-SNA framework • Unpaid work as a barrier to participation in

productive labour markets• Unpaid work as a patriarchal macroeconomic

construct• Feminist analysis of work, labour and bodies,

and the institutions of patriarchy that operate to control and oppress them

Key Features of Unpaid Work as a Patriarchal Macroeconomic Construct• Growing informalisation and invisibilisation of women’s

work; privilege self-employment versus paid employment • Reliance on their unpaid work in capitalist modes of

production – home, market, government • Confine women to the ‘domestic’ and ‘private’ domains,

focus on centrality of:– The ‘public-private’ divide – Of ‘marriage’ and the heteronormative family unit

• Increase in vulnerable forms of employment for women• Focus on commodification, ‘valuation’ and consumption• Penalise all those who do not comply with furthering the

dominant work norms and labour relations

Unpaid Work as we have understood it, is therefore about…

–The ‘private’ and the ‘public’–Active labour markets as well as

households– ‘Productive’, ‘reproductive’ and

‘community’ work–Remunerated and non-remunerated work– Linked to the political economy of violence

POLITICS guiding the POLICY and DISCOURSE on women’s unpaid work has given rise to several

points of contestation and debate…

Sites of Contestation (1): Definition• Definitions of work and worker– Particular problems in identifying, recognising

and ascribing value to the work done by women within homes, farms, livelihoods, etc. lack of women’s economic identity as workers, farmers, producers, and unpaid work therein

– Default emphasis on ‘care’ and ‘housework’, and not other forms of unpaid work

– Blurred lines between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ (e.g. domestic work)

– Complex issue of sex work and surrogacy – sexual and reproductive labour as ‘work’ within informal labour markets?

• Definition of the ‘family’ and ‘community’ with related labour relations:–Family as a heteronormative unit– ‘Marriage equality’ versus ‘economic

equality’ (queer politics)–Caste system in India

Sites of Contestation (2): Location

• Standpoint debates emerging from locational differences in:– Disciplinary orientation to research and practice– Cultures (e.g. housework as resistance)– North-south divide, characterised mainly by work

and employment systems that are primarily formal versus informal, respectively

– Political ideology: labour rights versus child rights versus women’s rights (e.g. maternity discourse)

Sites of Contestation (3): Practical and Strategic Gender Interests in Policy

Responses • ‘Valuation’ the most effective response or

struggle for universal social protection, essential services and infrastructure?

• Unit of analysis and policy: individual/collective identity based or family/household mediated?

• Class struggle for food, work and child-care support, or added feminist struggle for structural transformation (e.g. of child-care leave; microcredit groups and self-employment – instrumentalising women’s labour??)

• Labour rights more important or ending gender-based violence?

Reflections from a Feminist Lens

• Work, labour and bodily integrity are closely linked to each other

• The only resource that women have, particularly poor women, is their time, labour and bodies, which: – Shapes ‘choices’ for work and employment, and – Lends itself to ‘instrumentalisation’ within the neo-liberal

paradigm • Political ideologies, their language and concepts create

hierarchies and tensions:– Impacts organising– Affects solidarity – Helps institutions of patriarchy get stronger

Possible Future Directions• Understand the complex links between work,

labour and bodies, and how it plays out in paid and unpaid work; liked to political economy of violence

• Strengthen scholarship on unpaid work as a macroeconomic construct that upholds patriarchy and the neo-liberal agenda

• Labour, feminist and queer theories and movements to come more closely together in understanding and addressing women’s unpaid work

• Resist instrumentalist policy responses for women’s unpaid work (e.g. through mapping opportunity cost)

• Resist binaries in theorising, as well as in on-ground organising on work, labour and bodily integrity

• Be strategic yet wary in using the market language of ‘paid’ and ‘unpaid’ subversion

• Move the unpaid work discourse beyond the domain of care alone

“What is required for a feminist politics is not a situated identity politics, whether of gender and/or race and/or class, but an affinity politics based on alliances and coalitions…”

(Haraway 1985)