Wages for Housework

Wages for housework is a proposal to compensate for work done in the private or domestic sphere. Such work includes, but is not limited to, providing household services that facilitate the laborer's entry into the public workplace (cooking, cleaning, etc.), reproductive activities such as bearing and rearing children, and caring for elderly parents and other dependent persons. The wages-for-housework campaign is usually rooted in the Marxist critique of capitalism; it was advanced by numerous social activists, anticapitalists, and feminists dating back at least as far as the mid-1800s.

Prior to the age of industrialism, the domestic sphere was not sharply split from the productive sphere. Textiles and agricultural products were created within domestic units. With the rise of industrialism, the public workplace replaced the private home for the creation of products. Disproportionately, women were excluded from industry. Those tasks left to women to perform in the home such as child care, laundry, and meal preparation were viewed as nonproductive because they did not earn a wage.

In the late 1800s, Friedrich Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State and August Bebel's Women and Socialism brought into stark relief the historical development of woman's social confinement within the home as well as the circumstances accounting for the devaluation of domestic labor under capitalism. Their arguments set the foundation for subsequent developments in the campaign to obtain wages for housework.

With the influx of women into the workforce in the 1970s and 1980s, the argument in favor of compensation for domestic labor shifted slightly to acknowledge the hazards of the double workweek on women: Women who entered the labor market were often expected to continue to fulfill all the household duties once they returned home. Middle- and upper-class women could employ domestic labor but, more often than not, poor and minority women were recruited to fill the space left in the home when women joined the public workforce. Usually, those hired to perform domestic duties were paid at wages far below what might be expected in the public sphere.

Proponents of the wages-for-housework campaign are not in agreement over the justification or means of a wages-for-housework program, but in general they argue that women's domestic work creates use-value(a Marxist term that means the value of products for immediate consumption that satisfy human desires). The work to care for a family and home provides the conditions for all other labor not only because capitalism needs women to produce excess labor power in the form of children but also because the work women do in private provides the necessary conditions for paid laborers to work in the productive sphere.

An alternative to paying wages for housework is to convert work performed in the home to public economy work through the socialization of domestic labor. That is, the implementation of state-supported services could replace much of the cooking, child care, and even cleaning that constitutes housework. Margaret Benston noted that unless the women were freed from the traditional work they performed in the home, their participation in the nondomestic workforce would be a step back. She argued that the socialization of housework was the single most important factor to end the oppression of women as a group and to give individual women their due respect.

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