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Class and Culture debate

Poverty, Work and Care

Valerie Bryson

© Valerie Bryson 2008

There are many routes into poverty in the UK. A particularly effective one is to spend time looking after other people, a route that is most often taken by women, who are twice as likely as men to be poor (TUC 2008a). Conversely, most wealthy individuals delegate care to others. We all need to be cared for at some stage in our lives, and we have a collective interest in living in a society in which the next generation of citizens will be well brought up. Any discussion of class and inequality therefore needs to address the ways in which care is distributed and rewarded, as a matter of enlightened self-interest as well as justice.

The problems

When we talk about child poverty in Britain, we are disproportionately talking about poverty in lone, female headed families. When we talk about pensioner poverty, we are talking mainly about women. And when we talk about low pay, we are including many forms of paid care work, mainly done by women. These aspects of poverty are interconnected, and reflect the values of a society that prioritises individual rather than collective needs and responsibilities, reifies paid employment as the primary way that citizens contribute to society, and forgets about the necessary caring and domestic work that has traditionally been done by women.

Despite some positive changes since 1997, levels of affordable childcare and conditions of employment in the UK still make it difficult to combine caring responsibilities with reasonably paid work. Many women drop out of paid employment or work part-time when they become mothers, while even full-time workers face a clear ‘motherhood penalty’ in terms of pay, as their careers are often held back by discrimination in a long-hours culture that sidelines those who take parental leave or seek flexible working arrangements (EOC, 2007; TUC 2008a; Fawcett, 2008). For lone mothers the result is often the kind of poverty that is recognised in official statistics, while many other mothers experience a personal poverty that is hidden within the family.

When parents are in paid work, someone else has to look after their children. Rather than being valued and rewarded as a skilled profession, childcare is often badly paid and seen as an occupation for low-aspiring girls who lack the skills or motivation to follow a career. The undervaluing of childcare is dramatically clear in apprenticeship pay rates: while the average weekly pay of apprentices in 2005 was £137, nearly half of childcare apprentices (nearly all of whom were female) received less than £80 (EOC 2006; TUC, 2008b). Many equal opportunities commentators argue that girls need to be encouraged to choose better paying careers, and the Education and Skills Bill promises that careers advice will challenge gender stereotypes for both boys and girls. However, it is unlikely that boys will be attracted to care work while it is so badly paid, and the key problem is surely not that some girls persist in wanting to look after children but that this crucially important work should be badly rewarded and seen as a negative choice.

The ‘motherhood penalty’ persists into old age. Today, many elderly women who left paid employment to look after their family (often thereby enabling their husband to earn a family wage) have no independent pension. Although caring for a child or another family member can now count towards a state pension, women remain much less likely than men to build up pension provision. Many also find it difficult to combine full-time work with supporting or caring for elderly parents and are therefore unable to compensate for earlier interruptions to employment by working into their sixties. The overall result is that many women face poverty at various stages in their lives, not because they have failed to contribute to society, but because their important contributions have not been valued.

Like childcare, adult care is poorly paid, and it is often an entry-level job for migrant workers, displacing the UK’s ‘care deficit’ onto their country of origin as they leave their own children and parents behind (Ehrenreich and Hochschild, 2003; Datta et al, 2006). Despite being badly paid, it is clear that many care workers are deeply committed to their work, but that it is difficult for them to provide the kind of nurturing care they would like as provision is increasingly rationed and subject to rigid expectations of cost efficiency. As the population ages, pressures on care workers are likely to increase and the needs of frail and elderly people are increasingly unlikely to be met.

Potential solutions


We need a greater sense of shared responsibility for care provision if women are not to be penalised. Some important, although far too small, steps in this direction have been taken since 1997, particularly the introduction of a national childcare strategy, parental and paternity leave and the right to request flexible working; paid carers have also disproportionately benefited from the introduction of the minimum wage. What we need now is a robust package of measures building on these gains, including much more generous parental and family leave provision, positive steps to encourage men to take on family responsibilities and a minimum wage that is also a living wage. We also need to reject market-driven reforms that fail to understand that good quality care provided by well-paid professional workers can never be both profitable and affordable, and that the imposition of profit-driven rationality destroys the nurturing relationships that good care involves. In brief, we can only break the link between poverty, gender and care in the context of a much more equal and collectively oriented society oriented to meeting human needs rather than simply maximising profit and growth. Conversely, a more equal society will only be possible if gender and care are treated as central issues rather than as optional extras.

References

Equal Opportunities Commission (2006) Free to Choose. Tackling Gender Barriers to Better Jobs

Equal Opportunities Commission (2007) Completing the Revolution

Fawcett Society (2008) Sexism and the City

TUC (2008a) Closing the Gender Gap

TUC (2008b) Still More (Better Paid) Jobs for the Boys. Apprenticeships and Gender Segregation

Valerie Bryson is Professor of Politics at the University of Huddersfield. She expands on the ideas in this article in Gender and the Politics of Time. Feminist theory and contemporary debates (The Policy Press, 2007).


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