Creating a care economy

Private polling of women, by women, for women, commissioned by EMILY's List Australia in the lead up to the Federal Election last year, of Australian women in six marginal seats, revealed a troubling consistent theme – the daily challenge of juggling paid employment with considerable care responsibilities at home.

"I mind grandchildren one day a week and support four elderly parents aged between 81 & 84 years old when they need us" said one woman in the marginal seat of Latrobe in Melbourne's outer-east."I spend about three days a week on that at the moment. I have a nephew who is dying of leukaemia so there's a support role for the family too."

Women in Australia are under extraordinary pressure. Pressure to maintain a work life, a family life and to contribute to the communities around them. At the centre of the challenge in women's daily lives, is time to care.

Care is work perceived to be feminised labour and hence without value. The historic trivialisation of caring for the young, old, ill and disabled is a continuing market failure. The creation of a care economy is unfinished business of the women's revolution.

Despite increased participation of women in the workforce, women continue to perform the majority of care work, whether formal care work for a wage, or unpaid caring in the home. This is not feminist propaganda, but statistical fact.

90% of Australian workers in nursing, therapies, pre-primary school teaching and childcare are female and 88.4% of workers in the community sector providing care through counselling, family violence support and case management are also women. Care at home is also heavily gendered, with Access Economics finding 71.3% of all primary caregivers in the domestic realm are also women.

In both the public and private spheres, the undervaluing of care work has led to inequities in pay, employment and wellbeing between women and men.

The provision of care, whether for children, the elderly, the ill or the infirm, involves similar tasks, particularly assistance with the activities of daily living for another, dependent person. Feeding, dressing, toileting, bathing and communicating are essential components of care work. To these responsibilities, Carers Australia also adds constant vigilance, supervision, encouragement and nurturing.

Although there are intrinsic problems with attempting to assess the value of care, something that transplants traditional characteristics of labour with love, valuing care in economic terms is important work. Without this valuation, the cost of care to the community remains hidden, allowing the market place to benefit without contributing to the cost.

Security4 Women, a national women's group committed to the lifelong economic security of Australian women, makes women's work visible so it can be valued, exposing the tension between unpaid work in the home, voluntary work in the community, and paid work in the market.

In the ground breaking report, Scoping the Care Economy, care provides both a macro and micro economic basis for the entire economy, while also reforming economics closer to home, from the perspective of households.

Report writer, Valerie Harper observes that "by challenging the assumption that economic actors are non-relational, detached individuals who make decisions based on individual choice, feminist discourse on the care economy asserts the interdependence of people across the life course, from birth to old age. The care economy focuses on providing for human need, rather than the production of goods and services."

Feminist discourse, far from being a radical rump of economic thought through envisioning a care economy, provides inspiration for re-visioning the market. The ongoing task of feminists, is a reorganisation of the economy that puts human need at the centre of the debate, not at the margin.

The creation of a care economy is not just women's work. Valuing care in economic terms provides an opportunity for all Australian workers, exhausted by demands made on time for family and community by profit obsessed employers, to benefit from a more humane marketplace. Where Maxism and Socialism failed, feminism provides the last hope for humanising global capital.

The first step in this re-visioning of the market is better economic data on when, where and how often women and men care. Security4Women recommends that the Australian Bureau of Statistics undertake regular Time Use Surveys in the same year as the Census of Population and Housing to inform decisions regarding support for unpaid care work.

Further, they call for "satellite accounts in line with the international System of National Accounts so that estimates of the value of unpaid care services are available for comparison with the value of Gross Domestic Product." These are recommendations that EMILY's List Australia endorses.

Other recommendations, including those made by the Work and Family Policy Roundtable, establish the foundation for a care economy by promoting and achieving work-life balance for Australians.

The introduction of paid parental leave, an economic reform elevating the importance of post-birth childcare as important to the wellbeing of young Australians and their parents, is the first of these foundations, but many more reforms that must be made.

There needs to be an increase in the minimum entitlements to paid and unpaid personal or carer's leave, from the paltry 10 days a year currently protected as a National Employment Standard.

Other urgent reforms include, ensuringpaid and unpaid leave covers family, friend and community care and extending the right torequest flexible working arrangements to include caring for children, aging parents and the ill, in line with international best practise.

But perhaps the most significant reform heralding the care economy is the achievement of gender pay equity in caring professions occupied predominantly by women. The Australian Services Union equal pay case, currently before Fair Work Australia, will lead to both micro and macro-economic reform in the interests of women.

The question is whether a Labor government, led by a woman and a feminist, can see the benefits in reorganising the economy in this way. EMILY's List Australia hopes so. Not just because it is the right thing to do for women, but because the creation of a care economy makes good electoral sense for Labor.

In each of the six, marginal seats EMILY's List Australia polled prior to the last federal election, the percentage of people employed in caring professions was higher than the national average. Knowing that women make up the majority of these workers, transforms winning the women's vote through financing the equal pay case, must sensibly be part of a targeted marginal seat strategy for Labor.

Last time, Labor won only 1 of the 6 seats EMILY's List polled. It will need them all if it is to win government at the next election, in its own right.