4.4 Care or reproductive work

Care or reproductive work

Text by Eekku Aromaa & Fatim Diarra

Care is often labelled as unproductive work. This is the sort of statement that should be dismissed on the spot. Care is absolutely necessary if we are to produce anything at all.

If this sounds untrue, you can think back on your own childhood, for example. Were you a completely independent individual taking care of your own business from the day you were born? Or did someone care for you, both as a child and sometimes even in your adult life, just like everyone else? Do you wish to receive care when you need it in your current life, or if you are a nondisabled working-age adult, in your old age? For most of us, adulthood consists of longer or shorter periods during which we either need to be cared for, or we can offer care to others or otherwise function on our own.

Now that the premise is clear, we can move on to consider situations where care is productive. The products consist of people, health, and wellbeing, and without these, there would not be very much else. We need care not only to support our own wellbeing, but also to ensure that those of us with underage, elderly or disabled loved ones – the majority of society – can go to work. And to enable children, the elderly and the disabled to live their life to the fullest, of course.

Furthermore, care is also productive in the economic sense when the person providing it is paid for their work. This increases the size of the national economy, as taxes are paid on the income and the earnings are used to consume different services and products. All this consumption puts more money in circulation, which leads to the next group of people getting paid and being able to use their earnings for their wants and needs.

In societies where little to no publicly funded care is available, women of a working age typically stay at home to care for their children or other loved ones. If children’s day care services or the care services needed by the elderly or disabled are not available at reasonable cost, having a family member care for them is often the only alternative. This care is almost exclusively borne by women. The situation is not limited to children young enough to need day care, either. School-age children also need plenty of care.

For example in Finland, the state has taken some of the burden of childcare off parents of school-age children by offering all children a daily warm meal at school. Municipalities are also legally obligated to arrange afternoon activities for small schoolchildren. Participants in afternoon activities are offered a snack, so the children are cared for all the way to the early evening. This enables both parents or the only parent of a single-parent household to work, at least in theory. The need for childcare when the parent’s working schedule is not limited to business hours on weekdays is less adequately met. This results in care poverty, but also to economic poverty, which is significantly more common in single-parent families than other types of families. There are reasonable solutions available, but in the name of a more equal society, these could and should be improved further.