AN INTRODUCTORY ANALYSIS ON UNPAID WORK OF WOMEN
Article published in the HUMAN RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ---VOL-4,ISSUE-1, 2016, 115-121
Article published in the HUMAN RIGHTS INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL ---VOL-4,ISSUE-1, 2016, 115-121
AN INTRODUCTORY ANALYSIS ON UNPAID WORK
Dr.Debesh Bhowmik(Retired Principal)
Key Words.Unpaid work, care work,
JEL-E01,E24,J22,
What
is unpaid work
Unpaid work includes all non-remunerated
work activities and it is safe to say that it lacks social
recognition.According to the United Nations System of National Accounts of
1993,some unpaid work activities are deemed “Economic Work” and other unpaid
work activities are classified as
“Non-Economic”.Economic work can be stated as,[i] production of fixed assets
for household use,such as building a house,[ii] subsistence production
work,such as crop production,annual husbandry,forestry,and fishery for own
use,[iii] collection of raw materials for income generating activities like crafts
and other manufacturing and [iv] activities such as unpaid family work for crop
production that reaches the market , as well as animal grazing ,agro processing
for sale.The Non-Economic work is defined as ,[i] household maintenance[ii]cleaning[iii]
washing [iii] cooking [iv]shopping [v] providing care for infants and children
[vi] care for permanently ill or temporarily sick and [vii] all volunteer works
for community services.
In Marxian economies, unpaid work, especially
women’s housework, is levelled as ‘reproduction’. Neo-classical economics looks
at unpaid work essentially as a form of consumption-but still treated as a form
of leisure (in case of married women).Economists interested in unpaid work have
mostly concentrated on microanalysis of household work. At the macro level, ‘an
iceberg view of the economy’ prevails: what is visible is actually only a very
small part of what goes on in economy.
The burden of unpaid work and paid work
respectively are distributed unequally between men and women. As a result men
receive the lion’s share of income and recognition for their economic
contribution-while most of women’s work remains unpaid, unrecognised and
undervalued. The unequal distribution of unpaid work between women and men is
substantially linked to the sex-segregated labour market and the prevailing sex
discrimination and domination of men’s values in society at large.(Swiebel,1999).
Measurement
of unpaid work.
The value of the unpaid labour can be
calculated as ,[i] Output method, [ii] Input method.
Output method tries to measure the
results of unpaid production by assigning a price to the quantities of goods
and services produced. This method involves the measurement of output by
observation of prices and requires data on the quantities of services produced.
Input method is divided into , [a] The
opportunity cost method,[b] The market replacement cost method.
Input or Indirect method involve valuing
output in terms of cost of inputs and require information about the time spent
on household work. The input approaches value household production as the sum
of all of its inputs which include labor inputs(time use) and the use of
physical capital (the land, dwellings and equipment owned by
households).However,the time use survey only provide information on time use
and so on, in practice, the valuation method do not take account of value of
physical capital used by households in non market production.
The opportunity cost method searches
what is the cost of the cost paid work opportunities unavailable to the unwaged
worker became of her responsibilities plus the cost of her unwaged work.Or in
other words, each hour devoted to domestic activities could have been sold in
the labour market in stead.On the other hand, the replacement cost method finds
out what would it cost to pay a third person or a replacement to do the work
being completed by the unwaged workers. It means that household save money by
performing family care work themselves instead of buying similar services on
the market or hiring someone to provide them for household. The opportunity
cost method has two wings,[i] Specialist approach,[ii] Generalist approach .
Each approach has certain limitations, ie
the replacement cost typically assigned to women’s work reflect current market
value ,not real value, and so, are quite low. These calculations are a
beginning step to understanding the economic value of women’s work with much
more work to be done.
The Time use data is used for
measurement of valuation of work to estimate the work performed by women also
where data have been collected from household survey on a national scale. The
total value of unpaid family care work at national level depends on ,[i] the
amount of time that each person devotes to this activity,[ii] the number of
people who perform it and [iii] the value attributed to each unit of time of
this work.
The difficulties of measuring and
valuing unpaid work are most widely cited. Conceptually, at least, the battle
against the invisibility of women’s work seem largely to have been won .Women’s
domestic work is still uncounted.
Presently, Canada is using Nova Scotia
GPI (Genuine Progress Index) to measure unpaid work which has 20 components of
indices. But GPI is not intended to replace the GDP rather GPI in effect adopts
a qualitatively different approach. The GPI assesses the economic value of
social and environmental assets by imputing market value to the services
provided by the stock of human , social and environmental capital .But this imputation of market values
is not an end in itself. It is a temporary measure, necessary only as long as
financial structures such as prices , taxes and monetary incentives continue to
provide the primary ones for the actual behaviour of businesses, consumers and
governments.
GPI can provide a useful tool for
communication between the market and nonmarket sectors. It can provide a means
to move beyond monetary assessments towards a more inclusive and integrated
policy and planning framework.GPI itself should give way to multi dimensional
policy analysis across a number of data bases.
Some
empirical findings
Human Development Report-1995 asserted
that if these unpaid activities were treated as market transaction at the
prevailing wages, they would yield huge monetary valuation-a staggering $ 16
trillion or about 70% more than the officially estimated $23 trillion of global
output. Of these $16 trillion,$ 11 trillion is the non-monetised, invisible
contribution of women. Its study pointed out that a sample of 31 countries
study indicated not only that men (53% in developing countries and 51% in
industrial countries) but also that of women’s total work time – both in
developing and in industrial countries, roughly two third is spent in unpaid
work and one third in paid work. For men in industrial countries these shares
are reversed .Men in developing countries spend even less of their total work
time in unpaid work roughly one fourth. Women continue to do more than half of
the unpaid household in most industrialised countries and between two and four times
more unpaid childcare than men. Between 1980-2000,across the developed world
women doubled their share of paid work with respect to men ,going from 22 to 44
percent of total paid work. However, the share of women’s time in unpaid labour
hardly changed during the time period. It is estimated that if women’s unpaid
work were assigned a monetary value it would constitute between 10% and 39% of
GDP. Other studies show that reducing the household time burdens on women could
increase agricultural labour productivity by as much as 44% in some countries.
The total yearly value of unpaid family
care work equals to 8.29 and 67.06 billion Euros which corresponds to 4.3% and
4.5% of GDP in Poland and Italy respectively. In Poland 9.5% of the estimated
total value of care may be attributed to child care, whereas in Italy it is
72%. The value of child care is mostly the results of women’s activity, with
5.42 over 7.92 and 35.3 over 52.2 billion Euros in Poland and Italy
respectively. According to market replacement cost, the total yearly value of
unpaid family care work equals 6.79 and 61.77 billion Euros which corresponds
to 3.7% and 4.1% of GDP in Poland and Italy respectively. The total yearly
value of unpaid family care work estimated with the specialist market
replacement cost equals 8.53 and 75.08 billion Euros, which corresponds to 4.5%
and 5% of GDP in Poland and Italy respectively. On the other hand, according to
the social cost of unpaid family care work, the value of child care in Poland
ranges from a minimum of 3.5% of GDP to a maximum of 4.2% of GDP. The value of
child care in Italy ranges from a maximum of 3.2% of GDP to a maximum of 3.8%
of GDP. The value of adult care is lower in Poland than in Italy. In Poland, the
loss in value of childcare amounts to 0.6% of GDP ( a loss of 17%), whereas in
Italy the loss amounts to 0.3% ( a loss of 9%). (Framcacilla, Giannelli, Grotkososka
and Socha,2011)
In Spain, the Bank of Spain studied that
the majority of women (99.15%) undertaken some household activity versus only
77.63% of the men. The women spend almost 3 times more time in household works
than the men, spending 214.95 minutes per day versus only 111.72 minutes per
day for men. Women contributing to more than 50% of the household income engage
in more than 50% of household production. The share of total house work time
for a women is 76% when she earns than that of her husband,71% when she earns
the same , and 68% when she earns more. Women devoted less time to household
activities as their relative income increases: 229 minutes when they earn less,
204 when they earn the same and 189 when
they earn more. However, the men’s household work time increases from 82 to 92
minutes as women’s earnings increases, but
decreases again to 87 minutes when women’s earnings increase beyond men’s. On
average , women spend around 128 minutes and 143 minutes on household and childcare,
whereas men devote 72-82 minutes per day to these activities. Women spend 365
minutes per day with children under 10, whereas men spend , on average,252
minutes per day. Higher income households might be able to outsource more, and
thus reduce a wife’s house work burden. Higher the spouces education level, the
lower a wife’s share of total housework. The outsourcing of household maintainance
service has appositive and statistically significant increasing wife’s share of
housework by 8.7%.A husband devotes 28.5 more minutes per day to routine
childcare if his wife earns the same amount he does, in relation to husband who
earns more than their wives but this positive effect only exists up to the
point where a wife earns the same amount as her husband and remains constant
beyond that. The U shaped relationship between housework and childcare and
relative earnings is also robust to a continuous rather than discrete
alternative definition to also robust to a continuous rather than discrete alternative definition
of relative earnings. (Sevilla-Sanz,Nadal, and Fernandez,2010)
In
Canada, the study examines the profile and time spent on paid and unpaid work
for young adults from 3 generations-late baby boomers (born from 1957-1966)
when they were age 20-29 in 1986, GenerationX (1969-1978) which was in that age
group in 1998 and Generation Y(1981-1990) which reached within 2010.It was
found that young adults from generation Y were more likely to be single(67%)
,living at home (51%) and going to school(19%) compared with their counterpart
in the two previous generations. Time spent on employment and housework was
also most alike for young men and women of generation Y. At ages 20-29,late
baby boom men did ,on average , 1.4 hours more paid work per day than women. In
generation Y, this difference narrowed to 1.1 hours. When late baby boomers
women were age 20-29, they did 1.2 hours more housework per day than men. By
the time generation Y was the same age ,the difference had narrowed to
0.4hours.Average daily, time spent on paid work and housework by men and women
in young dual-earner couples in more alike for those without children and
particularly so for generation Y. (Katherine,2011)
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