PRESS RELEASE

Women, Volunteers, GPI Call on Stats Canada to Count Unpaid Work Annually

March 8, 2000, Halifax, Nova Scotia Voluntary work declined by 8.7% in the 1990s, resulting in a $4.7 billion loss of services to the country. But it will be 2006 before Canadians know whether this disturbing trend has been arrested or is continuing. That's because Statistics Canada currently administers time use surveys tracking unpaid work hours only once every six years.

The latest Statistics Canada time use survey, administered in 1998, also shows that time stress levels have been rising dramatically in the 1990s, with 38% of working mothers now classified as “severely” time-stressed in a ten-question questionnaire. Working mothers now put in 74 hours a week of paid and unpaid work. Among youth, time stress has increased markedly, with five times as many female students registering severe time stress as their male counterparts.

A separate Statistics Canada survey, released at the end of 1999 showed adverse health effects from long work hours, including markedly increased rates of depression, smoking, weight gain and alcohol consumption, and decreased levels of physical activity among women working long hours. Long work hours have been shown to carry increased risks of cancer, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other serious illnesses.

Despite their important implications for population health and health care costs, Canadians will also have to wait six years to find out if these trends are continuing.

“Imagine waiting six years to find out whether the Gross Domestic Product is up or down,” says Dr. Ronald Colman, director of GPI Atlantic, a non-profit research group that wants the value of unpaid work included in measures of progress. “While we carefully track GDP trends on a monthly basis, we pay almost no attention to unpaid work trends that directly impact our quality of life.”

Colman points out that if we pay for child care or house-cleaning “it makes the economy grow and is valued. But if we look after our own children and clean our own houses, it counts for nothing in our current measures of progress based on the GDP.”

“Volunteers contribute to our standard of living and well-being at least as much as lawyers, brokers and advertising executives,” says Linda Roberts, community services director at the Captain William Spry Community Centre . “But all those paid hours are meticulously tracked on a monthly basis, while volunteer hours are counted only once every six years.”

Patricia Doyle-Bedwell, chair of the Nova Scotia Advisory Council for the Status of Women, notes that “work done 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 economy. But because it’s unpaid, this work remains uncounted and unvalued in our measures of progress. Most of that work is still done by women. And because it’s traditionally been regarded as ‘free’ labour, it still fetches the lowest rates of pay in the market economy, resulting in serious gender pay inequities.”

Statistics Canada time use surveys have found that two-thirds of unpaid household work is still done by women, almost unchanged from 40 years ago. Because it has traditionally been regarded as "free," it still fetches the lowest rates of pay in the market economy, resulting in persistent pay inequities and higher rates of women living in poverty.

The Council, along with GPI Atlantic, the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health, the Captain William Spry Community Centre, and the Metro Community Services Network, representing 50 non-profit community agencies and volunteer organizations, called on Statistics Canada this week to administer time use surveys annually as part of its General Social Survey. The call for Statistics Canada to track unpaid work hours on an annual basis comes on International Women's Day

“The health impacts of women’s overwork are too acute and urgent for us to wait six years to determine whether stress levels are up or down,” says Dr. Carol Amaratunga, executive director of the Maritime Centre of Excellence for Women’s Health. “We need to track these trends far more regularly, particularly with the dramatic shift to home care increasing women's unpaid work burden even more.”

Patricia Doyle-Bedwell argues that counting women’s unpaid work will give it value in the eyes of policy-makers and lead to policy initiatives for family-friendly work arrangements and adequate supports for single mothers who are dependent on the household economy. “The unacceptably high poverty rates of single mothers and their children in Nova Scotia – more than 70% – is directly related to the lack of value assigned to their household work and the inadequacy of supports to these women.”

The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Child Care in Nova Scotia (summary 22 pages) 104K PDF

The Economic Value of Unpaid Housework and Child Care in Nova Scotia (full report 123 pages) 844K PDF