Wages for housework

Wages for housework was one of the six demands in Women, the Unions and Work or What Is Not to Be Done,[2] which James presented as a paper to the third National Women's Liberation Conference. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which James co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, which opened the “domestic labour debate” and became a women’s movement classic, was published soon after Women, the Unions and Work. The first edition of Power of Women did not come out for wages for housework; its third edition, in 1975, did.  

After the Manchester conference, James with three or four other women formed the Power of Women Collective in London and Bristol to campaign for wages for housework. It was reconstituted as the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1975, based in London, Bristol, Cambridge and later Manchester.

In 1974 and 75, three autonomous organizations formed within the Wages for Housework Campaign in the UK, US and Canada: Wages Due Lesbians (now Queer Strike), the English Collective of Prostitutes and Black Women for Wages for Housework, founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown (now Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike). Black Women for Wages for Housework focused on specific issues of Black and third world women, including calling for reparations for "slavery, imperialism and neo-colonialism."[3][4][5][6]Wages Due Lesbians called for wages for housework along with extra wages for lesbians for "the additional physical and emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society, recognized as work and paid for so all women have the economic power to afford sexual choices."[3][7] Wages Due Lesbians also worked alongside The Lesbian Mothers' National Defense Fund, founded in 1974 and based in Seattle, which aimed to help lesbian mothers who had to fight custody cases after coming out.[8][9]

In 1984 Winvisible: women with visible and invisible disabilities was founded in the UK as an autonomous organisation within the IWFHC.

Men who agree with the WFH perspective formed their own organisation in the mid-70s. It is called Payday men's network and works closely with IWFHC and the Global Women's Strike (see below) and is active in a number of countries.

In 1973, James and Mario Rosa Dalla Costa went on a speaking tour in Canada and the US where they put forward wages for housework, which is now regarded as a turning point for the development of the IWFHC. Silvia Federici helped start Wages for Housework groups in the US and in 1975, the Wages for Housework opened an office in Brooklyn, New York at 288 B. 8th St. The New York group was called the "Wages for Housework Committee."[10] Flyers handed out in support of the New York Wages for Housework Committee called for all women to join regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual orientation, number of children, or employment.[11] In 1975 Federici published Wages Against Housework. [10]

Branches of the Wages for Housework Committee appeared in other cities across America. They were organized in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Tulsa, and Cleveland.[12] Along with these committees, other autonomous organizations that fall within the Wages for Housework campaign began to organize within the United States.[3]

San Francisco was also home to the U.S. PROStitutes Collective (US PROS). US PROS formed in 1982 to campaign for decriminalization of sex work and for resources so women, children and men are not forced into prostitution.[7] Likewise, Tulsa housed the No Bad Women, Just Bad Laws Coalitions. It was founded by Ruth Todasco in 1981 and also focused on the decriminalization of sex work.[13][14]

In 1974, the Wages for Housework Campaign started in Italy. A number of groups calling themselves Salario al Lavoro Domestico (Wages for Housework) formed in various Italian cities. To celebrate, one of the founding members Mariarosa Dalla Costa gave a speech entitled "A General Strike" in Mestre, Italy. In this speech she talks about how no strike before has ever been a general strike before, but instead, only a strike for male workers.[15]

In Padua, Italy, a group called Lotta Feminista, formed by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici, adopted Wages for Housework as their organising strategy.

The demands for the Wages for Housework used Marxist frameworks to think through the reliance of capitalist economies on exploitative labor practices against certain populations.[16] Mariarosa Dalla Costa and some participants in the Wages for Housework campaign were enmeshed in the intellectual movement operaismo, which developed around factory strikes in Northern Italy in the 1970s. The Wages for Housework Campaign shared with operaismo the idea that fair working conditions including wages are key to the social recognition of labor. Operaismo encouraged workers to act in their direct interests, and engage in factory strikes to demand better conditions. The Wages for Housework campaign applied also shared discussions about the social factory with operaismo; whereby "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society".[17] The campaign activities included student protests, community workshops, and direct action protest.

Wages for Housework published a Marxist autonomist journal, Matériaux pour l’intervention. Several publications grew out of its ideas, which expanded on the claims of the original group and of more general topics in labor and exploitation. In Italy, Quaderni rossi, published by Raniero Panzieri and Mario Tronti, dealt with a variety of topics relating to the class struggle.

Wages for Housework is part of more general social wage campaigns in the 1970s interested in late capitalism. These campaigns used analysis of Fordist compromises during the twentieth century to argue that family wages or social security payments had amounted to wages paid for housework in the advanced capitalist West.[18][19]

A number of early feminists focused women's economic independence along with the role of housewife in relation to women's oppression. In 1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman published Women and Economics. This book argued for paid housework 74 years before the International Wages for Housework Campaign was founded as well as arguing to expand the definition of women in the home.[20] She asserts that "wives, as earners through domestic service, are entitled to the wages of cooks, housemaids, nursemaids, seamstresses, or housekeepers" and that providing women economic independence is key to their liberation. Alva Myrdal, a Swedish feminist, focused on state sponsored child care and housing, in order to ease the burden of parenting off mothers.[21] In Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, in which de Beauvoir asserts that women cannot find transcendence through unpaid house work.[21] This idea is echoed in The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan when she discusses how women are unable to feel fulfilled in the home. The Feminine Mystique defined many second wave feminist goals, and the connection between the Wages for Housework Campaign and this work cannot be overlooked.[21]

In 1965 Alison Ravetz published "Modern Technology and an Ancient Occupation: Housework in Present-Day Society"[22] which critiques housework being a womanly duty post industrial revolution. The idea here is that since housework has become less labor intensive since then, it is even less fulfilling than ever before. This echos a similar argument made by Alva Myrdal.

Perhaps the most important early influence for the modern Wages for Housework Campaign is the work of Eleanor Rathbone, the Independent feminist MP[23] who campaigned for decades for mothers to have an independent income in recognition of their work bringing up children [24]. She saw this as essential to end mothers’ and children’s poverty and their dependency on a male wage. She laid out her case in her 1924 publication, The Disinherited Family, (republished by Falling Wall Press in 1986). Her 25-year-campaign in and out of Parliament won Family Allowance for all mothers in the UK, and was the first measure of the 1945 Welfare State.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the IWFHC representing a number of countries of the Global South and Global North, lobbied the United Nations Conferences on Women on unwaged work. They succeeded in getting the UN to pass pathbreaking resolutions that recognized the unwaged caring work that women do in the home, on the land and in the community. They also highlighted the environmental racism that fell on communities of colour and low-income communities generally, bringing together women from the Global South and the Global North who were leading movements against pollution and destruction caused by the military and multinationals.

Men who agree with the WFH perspective formed their own organization in the mid-70s. It is called Payday men’s network, works closely with the WFH Campaign and the Global Women’s Strike (see below), and is active in a number of countries.

In 1999 the IWFHC called a global women’s strike after Irish women asked for support for a national strike in Ireland to mark the first International Women’s Day of the new millennium. Since 8 March 2000, the IWFHC has become more widely known as the Global Women’s Strike (GWS), which it co-ordinates from the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London, England. There are GWS co-ordinations in India, Ireland, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, and close collaboration with Haiti and other countries.

Silvia Federici and several others from the early campaign have continued to publish books and articles related to the demands of Wages for Housework including: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (2012), Wages for Housework: The New York Committee 1972–1977, History, Theory, and Documents (2017).

The Wages for Housework Campaign called for a Global Women’s Strike (GWS) on March 8, 2000, demanding among other things, “Payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land and other resources.”[25] Women from over 60 countries around the world participated in the protest.[26] Since 2000 the GWS network has continued the call for a living wage for women and other caregivers, and they have led or joined campaigns focused on pay equity, violence against women, and the rights of sex workers, among other issues.

In 2019 the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) network and Wages for Housework Campaign joined a coalition of organizations calling for a Green New Deal for Europe (GNDE).[27] Wages for Housework Campaign co-founder, Selma James (with other GWS members), contributed to the GNDE platform report which includes a policy recommendation to "fund a care income to compensate unpaid activities like care for people, the urban environment, and the natural world.”[28] The idea of a “care income” expands the original demand for wages for housework to include all indispensable yet unpaid (or underpaid) work that involves caring for people and the planet, or caring for life.

On April 9, 2020, in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the climate emergency, the Global Women’s Strike and Women of Colour GWS networks released an open letter to governments amplifying their call for a “care income.”[29]

Critics have argued that providing wages for housework could further reinforce or institutionalize specific gendered roles vis-à-vis housework, and care work more broadly. Rather than providing wages for housework, they argue, the goal should be liberation from it and the demeaning and subordinating role of "housewife." Instead feminists should focus on increasing women’s opportunities in the paid workforce with pay equity, while promoting a more equal distribution of unpaid work in the household. Proponents of Wages for Housework also support equal opportunity and pay equity, however, they argue that entering the workforce does not sufficiently challenge the social role of women in the household nor result in a more equitable distribution of unpaid care work. In fact, more often than not, women who have entered the paid workforce often face a “double shift” of work, the first paid work in the labor market and the second unpaid housework.[30] According to one global estimate, women spend 4.5 hours of unpaid work per day, twice as many hours as men do on average.[31]

Other criticisms include the concern that providing wages for housework would commodify intimate human relationships of love and care and would subsume them into capitalist relations. However, proponents of wages for housework contest this “reductive view” of their proposal. For instance, according to Silvia Federici the demand for wages for housework is not just about remuneration for unpaid work or women’s financial empowerment and independence. Rather, it is also a political perspective and a revolutionary strategy to make invisible work more visible, to demystify and disrupt the structural reliance of capitalism on the unpaid work of (mostly) women, and to subvert the supposed natural social role of “housewife” that capital has invented for women.[32]

What’s more, the payment of wages for housework would mean that capital would have to pay for the immense amount of unpaid care work (undertaken largely by women) that currently reproduces the labor force. According to a report by Oxfam and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the monetary value of unpaid care work is estimated at nearly $11 trillion a year.[33][34] This amounts to an enormous subsidy to the capitalist economy, and paying for it would likely render the current system uneconomic, subverting the social relations in the process.

Monetary estimates of this kind are used to demonstrate the scale of unpaid work in relation to more visible waged work. However, proponents of wages for housework do not advocate for the marketization and commodification of unpaid care work. Instead they have promoted public funding for these schemes as part of a larger project of recognizing and revaluing the indispensable role of unpaid care work for society and the economy. Some feminist scholars have also called for the creation of new commons-based systems of care and basic provisioning that operate outside of the market and state, and for the defense of existing commons, especially in communities of the Global South.[35]

• Selma James, foreword by Marcus Rediker, introduction by Nina Lopez. Sex, Race and Class – The Perspective of Winning a Selection of Writings 1952–2011. Chicago: PM Press. 2012 https://www.pmpress.org/blog/authors-artists-comrades/selma-james/
• Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press Ltd. 1975.
• Louise Toupin. Le salaire au travail ménager. Chronique d'une lutte féministe internationale (1972–1977) Éditions du Remue-Ménage, 2014.
• Silvia Federici. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press, 2012.
• Silvia Federici. Wages Against Housework. Published jointly by the Power of Women Collective and Falling Wall Press, 1975. Link goes to full text of the book.
• Cox, Nicole, and Silvia Federici. Counter-planning from the kitchen: wages for housework : a perspective on capital and the Left. New York: New York Wages for Housework Committee. 1976.

• Microwork
• Post-Fordism
• Knowledge economy
• Knowledge market
• Marxist feminism

• Selma James and the Wages for Housework Campaign - article by Shemon Salam in New Beginnings, a journal of independent labour
• "Women in the Workforce" collections. Barnard Archive.
• Global Women's Strike/ Wages For Housework/ Selma James website
• Green New Deal for Europe campaign website