(This is a slightly edited version of a presentation at a panel on ‘Herstories of Wages for Housework’ on Day 1 of the Symposium on Wages for Housework, 4–6 March, 2021, organised by the Laws of Social Reproduction Project (Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London); Initiative for What Works to Advance Women and Girls in the Economy (IWWAGE); and the Feminist Economics Saturday Discussion Group (FESDIG), New Delhi.)
From what I’ve read of the writings of Selma James, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici, I feel they have made a really important contribution to Marxist theory with their insight that the unwaged domestic labour of working-class housewives produces labour-power, which is the most crucial commodity in a capitalist society, the foundation on which the rest of the economy is built. Only in the 1980s did I come across their 1972 argument that housework and caring work done in the home actually produce value, but in 1977 I independently came to the same conclusion by subjecting all of Marx’s writings on the production of labour-power to a rigorous critique. I showed that whenever he left out domestic labour from a calculation of the value of labour-power, which is hired out to capitalists in return for a wage, his arguments were inconsistent and contradicted his theory of value. As I found when I revisited the domestic labour debate more recently, this is still not a widely accepted position despite the fact that it is undoubtedly correct, so the Wages for Housework campaigners were way ahead of their time.
Their contention that domestic labour also produces surplus value needs to be fine-tuned a little. Obviously, if surplus value is defined, as Marx does, as being produced by wage-labour performed directly for capital, then it is not produced by housework. However, domestic labour can definitely enable the capitalist to extract more surplus value from workers by subsidising the production of labour-power. The Bolivian miner’s wife and activist Domitila Barrios de Chungara demonstrated this by calculating how much it would cost a miner to buy on the market the services performed by his wife, and found that it came to more than what he earned! We have also found in India that when real wages fall due to rising prices, housewives, including women who perform wage-labour outside the home, have to spend more time and effort on unwaged domestic labour.
This suggests that labour-power is produced by entire working-class households, not just by wage-earners. The pay earned by the latter may buy the raw materials for meals, but these need to be cooked in the home, which also needs to be maintained by cleaning it, and so on and so forth. This underlines the fact that the price of labour-power can be pushed down not only by reducing wages but also by extending working hours not just in the workplace but also in the home. In the Indian context, where many working-class women spend inordinate amounts of time queuing up at public water-taps or wells and carrying water home, in some cases collecting firewood for cooking, and so on, domestic labour helps employers to push wages down below the value of labour-power. This underscores the political importance of the wages for housework campaign, because those who deny that unwaged domestic labour contributes to the value of labour-power are unintentionally helping employers to underpay their workers.
However there are many practical problems if we take the demand literally. For those who are doing full-time caring for small children or a disabled family member, it wouldn’t be difficult to argue that they should get paid for it. But how do you measure other tasks? And if the state is going to pay, will they come and inspect you to see that you are doing the work properly, keeping your home clean, etc.? What if the housework is shared? Will the wage be shared too? Other demands of the wages for housework campaign, like the right to choose whether and when to have children, accessible childcare, decent affordable housing, leisure time and green spaces, can be fought for without encountering such complications.
A major weakness of the campaign, I feel, is its failure to challenge the gender division of labour, despite the fact that apart from childbearing and breast-feeding, all the other tasks done in the home can be done by people of any gender. Perhaps the campaigners fear that raising this issue might cause unpleasant conflict in the family; but in my opinion, unless it is confronted, domestic labour will never be properly recognised or compensated. So long as some work is categorised as ‘women’s work’ in a society that devalues women, that work will be either underpaid or unwaged. Of course the battle against the devaluation of women and girls, especially in a highly patriarchal and misogynist setting like India, has to be fought on many fronts, but one front is the elimination of the category of ‘women’s work’. Only when everyone performs housework and caring work will it be recognised as essential for reproducing labour-power from one day to the next and one generation to the next, and therefore an essential part of the working day. The logical conclusion is that in order to allow for domestic labour, hours spent in waged work need to be reduced without any reduction in pay. That would not only lighten the workload of women working punishingly long hours, but also create desperately-needed employment.
In the 1980s, we had various discussions touching on unwaged domestic labour in Bombay. In one basti (shantytown), the women made an exhibition asking why it was that when a male tailor stitched or mended clothes outside the home, he was paid, whereas a woman who did the same work at home was not; why male cooks and waitors in a restaurant were paid while women doing the same work at home were not; and so on and so forth. This made the important point that despite employing the same skills and performing the same work, women engaged in domestic labour were unwaged while men working outside the home were waged. One idea they discussed was to take some of the work outside the home by forming cooperatives to set up neighbourhood laundries, community kitchens, and so on.
In another basti where we carried out a survey of women’s waged and unwaged work, at the end of it the women said, ‘Now that we’ve answered all your questions, what are you going to do for us?’ Their demand was that we help them set up an income-generating project. Since our meagre research grant had run out and we had no money, the first thing we suggested was making patchwork baby-quilts and stuffed toys out of the bits of cloth thrown away by tailors and garment units. So the women collected the tukde, cut out the toys from patterns in a children’s book, stitched the quilts and toys, and stuffed the toys. We had the difficult task of marketing them. When all our friends and contacts and their friends and contacts had bought quilts and toys, we moved on to producing a weaning food for small children made from local grains and having the same nutritional value as the much more expensive manufactured baby foods. This had the advantage of being consumed, so that we could sell again to the same customers, but we still couldn’t jack up sales to a level where the women got a reasonable income.
It’s important to note that in addition to doing fairly heavy unwaged labour (often with help from daughters and other family members), most of these women were also doing waged labour, mostly domestic work in nearby apartments, and still they were so desperately in need of money that they wanted more work. They were willing to use the skills they had to earn it, but didn’t want to take on the task of marketing their products, even within their own basti. The huge problem of unemployment and underemployment of the men in their families has only got worse under the present government.
By contrast, women workers in large-scale pharmaceutical, food and personal products factories were earning much higher wages. One of the biggest problems, especially for women in factories where they were still working a 48-hour week, was time. Almost all of them had to go home after a hard day’s work and do another stint of domestic labour, and their only day off was also swallowed up by housework. They had no leisure, no time to themselves, not even enough time for rest and sleep except during holidays. This is where it would have made a big difference if men too were doing a shift at home, because then they would never have accepted such long working hours, and many more trade unions would have had to take up shorter working hours as a demand.
We also had some fascinating conversations with these women about the gender division of labour. Back in the 1960s, women in the pharmaceutical factories had fought against the marriage bar and for equal wages. Later they fought for maternity benefits and workplace nurseries for their pre-school children. Since both were provided by the employer, it became more expensive to employ women. Employers retaliated by ceasing to recruit women, whose numbers were shrinking rapidly by the time we spoke to them. Another reason why their numbers were declining is that they were concentrated in so-called semi-skilled jobs, which were the most likely to disappear with automation, so there was a gender division of labour in the workplace too. Most of them felt that women had a right to have a decent job, try their hand at more skilled jobs, and have provision for having a family too. Asked whether men should also be able to bring their small children to the nursery and should get paternity leave on the birth of a child, there were some differences of opinion, but most women thought they should.
It was our interactions with these working-class women in Bombay that inspired my novel To Do Something Beautiful, a tribute to their resilience, generosity, and ability to retain a sense of humour while confronting the many enormous problems besetting them.
Sadly, in the decade after we did this emancipatory action research, almost all the factories where we had met the women shut down and shifted production to smaller units or units in greenfield sites where they didn’t have to grant the same rights to workers. Bombay was shattered by anti-Muslim pogroms, leading to ghettoisation. Informalisation has increased, and the labour codes rammed through during the Covid pandemic take away most of the rights won by formal workers. The problems faced by working-class women have, if anything, become more urgent, and still cry out for solutions.