ABSTRACT

The Economic Value of Housework and Child Care

Work performed in households is more essential to basic survival and quality of life than much of the work done in offices, factories and stores, and is a fundamental precondition for a healthy market sector. If children are not reared with attention and care, and if household members are not provided with nutritious sustenance, workplace productivity will decline and social costs will rise. Physical maintenance of the housing stock, including cleaning and repairs, is also essential economic activity.

Yet this huge unpaid contribution registers nowhere in our standard economic accounts. When we pay for child care and house cleaning, and when we eat out, this adds to the GDP and counts as economic growth and "progress". When we cook our own meals, clean our own house and look after our own children, this unpaid work has no value in our current measures of progress. The GPI finds that if that work were replaced for pay it would be worth $275 billion to the Canadian economy, and $9 billion in Nova Scotia.

The GDP inaccurately registers shifts from the household economy to the market economy as growth, even though no additional production may be taking place. It is estimated that such shifts from unpaid to paid work overstate GDP growth by up to 0.8 percentage points a year.

Women still do nearly twice as much unpaid housework as men, a ratio almost unchanged from 40 years ago, even though women have doubled their share of participation in the labour force. This double work burden has led to increasing time stress and a loss of free time, especially for working mothers who routinely put in an average 73-hour work week.

The lack of value currently assigned to unpaid work has significant policy implications:

Pay Inequities: Work that has shifted from the household to the market economy, like child care and domestic services, and traditionally regarded as "free," is still mostly done by women and fetches the lowest rates of pay in the market economy.

Child Poverty: Non-employed single mothers put in more than 50 hours of productive work a week, worth $24,000 a year at current market rates. Because their work is not measured or valued, there are insufficient supports for household production, and most single mothers live in children. Half of Nova Scotia's poor children are in single-mother families. Employed single mothers put in 75 hours of work a week, spend three times as much of their income on child care as married mothers, and have only an hour a day to devote exclusively to their own children.

Work arrangements have not adjusted to the new reality of women's labour force participation. Valuing unpaid work focuses on the need to balance family and work responsibilities and to promote family-friendly work arrangements.

Trends in unpaid work, economic values, and policy issues are examined in two GPI reports, November 1998 (121 pages), and a March 2000 update. 48 charts and tables. Includes complete methodology for your own calculations.