Calling it Work:

Taking Caregiving from the Private to the Public

Prepared by Evelyn Drescher
Mothers Are Women
for the Roundtable on Confronting the Dilemmas:
social responsibility, public policy and support to families with children
Toronto, October 14th, 1998

Dilemma 1: The reluctance to call "caring" and "caregiving" WORK is perhaps one of the most critical factors in reinforcing the notion that caregiving is a private rather than public or collective social responsibility.

Leading scholarly analyses of unpaid work, especially by feminist economists, form a challenge to the caregiving paradigm that has informed the child care discourse in Canada as well as policy development and directions to this point. That challenge is the identification of the work of unpaid caregiving as a productive economic contribution and systemically integral to national and global economies. It includes a conceptual deconstruction of caregiving and the recognition of the skills, effort , responsibilities and time required - in other words recognition of the of the extent to which it is, in fact, work comparable in value to the work performed in the marketplace. One might even provocatively suggest that paid work should best be compared to unpaid work wherein the latter is considered normative and the former derivative.

Calling unpaid caregiving work is a progressive step in the reformulation of our understanding of how economies are structured. If we maintain that economies are by their nature collective, then the argument that caregiving is private within that understanding is a non-sequitur. The proposition that caregiving is economically productive work takes caregiving out of the private and into the public and renders more permeable the artificial construct of private versus public.

Rather than relegating caregiving to the private as the Right continues to do, or render it marginal or invisible by not calling it work, the measurement, valuation and integration of caregiving (understood as both unpaid and paid work) in all public policy is a strategy to bring it fully into the realm of collective responsibility.

Calling caregiving work also has profound gender equality implications for what determines women's economic autonomy in relation to the paid and unpaid work we do. Without a framework for analysis informed by an understanding of unpaid work as a structural economic issue, "caregiving" will continue to be disassociated from its role as a "hard economic variable" and will continue to be relegated to "soft" social policy discussions and welfare models. This will result in caregivers and their dependents at best being "taken care of" within public policy. Unpaid caregivers will remain "dependents" or, indeed, "social parasites" rather than stakeholders which should have access to social resources as a right of their work. This argument bears directly on our understanding of the rights of citizenship, not to mention economic rights as human rights.

Definitional distinctions of this kind are not just semantics. How we use our words and the meanings we assign to them as a society is critical particularly when we engage in advocacy and hope to influence not only the public discourse about civic and social responsibility, but how policy decisions are made. Definitional distinctions as to whether caregiving is work or private; whether it is to be integrated concretely in public policy or not will establish the parameters for the way we approach our policy analysis and solutions. It will also reflect our vision of social citizenship, gender equality and human rights. It is essential at this juncture in the discussion of how we best benefit Canada's children, especially those in poverty, that we move beyond the familiar refrains of the debate.

Dilemma 2: Confronting the counterpoint of professionalization against caregiving. How do we support the enhancement of care for children without devaluing caregiving (paid or unpaid)?

Over the past ten years, child care advocates have moved from a position of the benefits of child care services as a solution to women's access to the labour market - child care "frees" women to "work" - to one that focuses on the education and development of the child. This strategic move is in line with attempts to ensure that children are not marginalized in society and echoes a global movement to recognize the rights of children.

Within a framework of support for such an approach which focuses on children, it is important, however, to examine the underlying assumptions being made simultaneously about the caregiving work of women. It might be useful to be wary of models that take the child out of the context of those who care for her/him. The professionalization of child care to the point that caregiving is rejected in favour of those who are designated as child development specialists sends a strong message.

It implicitly devalues caregiving and the women who do it and prioritizes professionalization and the development specialist over the caregiver. Professionalization (training and skills with an accredited market value) becomes implicitly more valued and "a priori" better because of its link to the structures of state and economy that value monetarily the commodification of work in that fashion. Caregiving, especially unpaid caregiving, is marginalized as less valuable and the least appropriate means to meet the development needs of children. The notion that it is not really work is reinforced, thereby, as is the view that it is private. The effect is that those who do caregiving work (paid or unpaid) then appear to have less of a claim for a voice in the public discourse on issues related to their needs and the caring and development needs of children. The also have less of a claim on the resources allocated to those needs.

Also disturbing in the counterpoint of "child development specialist" against "caregiving" is cultural bias. It is overtly northern/western, industrial and urban-based in its assumptions about the best way to organize caregiving and meet the needs of young children. An example might make the point more clearly. Aboriginal women who want their grandmothers to care for their children and be valued for it and who do not want universal access to child development specialists if that means they are threatened with the appropriation of their children if they chose not to access that service, might have some real concerns about such a model. In a different sense, one might raise the case of women who come to Canada as caregivers/nannies, who are not "developmental specialists" and whose access to Canada might be compromised by government interpretation of child development specialist as a term of reference for paid caregiving. One thing is definite, the wages of those who are "just" caregivers will continue to be devalued in comparison.

Collective responsibility for the needs of children for care, nurture and development is a tapestry with many threads of "caring" all of which should be valued not only as socially desirable and generally useful, but as concrete productive work. Solutions that marginalize from policy discussions, national systems, and/or provincial programs any that provide care for children whether paid or unpaid are short-sighted and will fail us in the end. Collective responsibility in responding to the child care needs of children is multi-textured and should provide a framework within which families (however they are composed and where ever they live) can flourish with their work (both paid and unpaid) and needs equally respected.

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