What is the difference between the work I do for pay and the “unwaged work” I do as a mother and a wife? The term “unwaged work” implies that someone is getting away with something.
For Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek, the authors of “After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time,” the question is how to avoid exploitation when familial relationships are both messier and more meaningful than the one between boss and worker. The book offers an incomplete framework, however; the family needs to be defended as a good in itself to hold its own against market logic.
A worker and a boss are presumed to have a somewhat adversarial relationship. The worker wants to sell her labor for the highest price the market will bear; the boss wants to buy labor as cheaply as possible. Ideally, they negotiate so that each feels they’re getting a bargain. The working mom values leaving early for school pickup much more highly than the boss values the marginal hour; the boss really wants someone with a life outside of work, who doesn’t expect meals and games at the office. But a woman and her husband shouldn’t be trying to buy each other cheaply.
Both parties pressure mothers of small children to “get a real job” rather than care for an infant — the Democrats through preferring to pay for child care subsidies rather than stipend parents directly; the GOP through work requirements and income thresholds to qualify for benefits.
Caring for children and maintaining a household is often cast in labor language because work — and waged work in particular — is the way we recognize the value of the tasks we take on. Both political parties pressure mothers of small children to “get a real job” rather than care for an infant — the Democrats by preferring to pay for child care subsidies rather than provide stipends to parents directly; the GOP through work requirements and income thresholds to qualify for benefits.
Work outside the home is widely presumed to offer a kind of “dignity” that isn’t attainable in the home, over and above the paycheck.
I share Hester and Srnicek’s skepticism that the same task becomes ennobled when it’s done for strangers for money versus for loved ones at home. Care work can be isolating when the family isn’t knit into a lively local community. But many jobs are atomizing as well. Work outside the home is subject to the pressures of automation, outsourcing and widgetification. A factory that slashes the number of human workers by half is considered a profitable triumph. A family that does the same pays a heavy cost.
The best question Hester and Srnicek ask is this: Where does efficiency serve human ends, both at home and at work?
“It might be clear that the mining of natural resources should take a minimum of human activity, for instance, but the same does not hold for the labour involved in raising a child,” they write. Care work is part of what we want free time for, especially so we can approach it in an unhurried, present way.
When parents are overtaxed, they drop whichever part of their work can be most easily and cheaply automated or outsourced. Often, that means parents giving up some of the best parts of their child’s day. When darkness falls early in winter, it feels unfair that school gets all the bright parts of the day while I have the cold and dreary part. Hester and Srnicek note that many parents outsource a joyful part of parenting — play — to tablets and apps, while they retain the more dull maintenance tasks of laundry, drop-offs, scheduling and so forth.
As I see it, labor-saving innovations don’t make as much sense when the work process is valuable, not just the output. When work is evaluated for the formation it gives us, it’s easier to differentiate drudgery from laborious but humane work. As Jon Askonas notes in “Why Conservatism Failed,” his essay on technology and tradition for Compact magazine, technology is the most corrosive when it breaks the chain of apprenticeship to mastery. It’s easy (and usually cheap) to outsource entry-level work to computers or off-shore workers, but, as Askonas observes, “these technologies knock out the bottom rungs of skilled practice that allow for the development of mastery in the first place.”
Parenting is one of these kinds of work. Caring for a child obviously means shepherding a child along his or her own progression toward mastery — of the body, of emotions, of conscience. But the parent often goes on a parallel journey. For Matthew Loftus’ father, parenthood meant he saw himself clearly for the first time. “My father has told me more than once that I was instrumental in helping him understand how selfish he was,” Loftus wrote, “because I was the first person he’d met that didn’t try to accommodate myself to his needs at least a little bit.”
Thinking of parenting work primarily through the lens of wages prompts me to constantly question if I’m getting my money’s worth. When I forego a higher paying job or more hours, how can I be sure I’m producing enough value at home to justify the cost? Was my sixth reading of “Strega Nona” sufficiently animated? Could I have tempted my toddler to eat a more adventurous lunch if I’d made her rice into a little bento panda?
In the framework of Hester and Srnicek, the goal is to do a better job delegating care. Formula and breast pumps allowed the mother to split up and reassign tasks that fell naturally to her (but being able to split the task sometimes removed from her the moral force of her case to be allowed leisure to do them). Hester and Srnicek would like to see more collectivization of care, so the tasks that matter less can be batched. They admire socialist attempts to establish collective kitchens and canteens and see them as more necessary in a world of increasingly small families, writing, “If it was absurd that individual families should each cook their own food and run their own washing machines, what are we to make of solitary individuals each doing this work?”
I like the idea of leaning on a village, but I don’t share their skepticism of the natural family or their faith that parenting is easily fragmented. Making the case for care work isn’t a matter of converting it into hourly, skilled tasks, but of thinking holistically about the connection between care and character.
For Charlotte Mason, a philosopher of education, the case for the dignity of the work of parenting didn’t come through weighing it against wage-work but by framing it as cooperation with God’s work as Creator. She wrote in “Parents and Children,” “God uses men and women, parents above all others, as vehicles for the transmission of his gifts.” Parenting is, in Mason’s description, “this great work of character-making, the single effectual labor possible to human beings.” Its worth is proven by what I pass on and from whom, not by contrasting my hours to the going rate of a life coach.
Leah Libresco Sargeant is the author of “Arriving at Amen” and “Building the Benedict Option.” She runs the substack Other Feminisms, focused on the dignity of interdependence.