Its MayDay for Unpaid Labourers

The month of May is chimed in with labour day, a day that’s meant to celebrate the working class across the world. Now, the concept of labour day was introduced way back in 1884, with labour unions demanding an eight-hour work day, prior to which, dangerous working conditions, which led to injuries and also deaths were common among the global working class. Within this backdrop, there is also the issue of unpaid labour. In my previous article, I spoke about the importance of inter-sectional theory in economic analysis. The theory of intersection also finds its way into unpaid labour- which may simultaneously be gendered, affected by age, caste, class, and religion.

Unpaid work refers to the production of goods and services that are consumed, but not paid for, what separates it from leisure is the simple fact that it could be paid for. The reality in India is that women perform the major chunk of unpaid labour, whether it is in the form of care giving (the burden of which disproportionately falls on women), unpaid work in paid workplaces, or domestic work.

This grind of unpaid labour is represented aptly in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Sea of Poppies’, in which he speaks of Deeti, a woman who lived in a village on the outskirts of Benaras. He illustrates her daily routine, to wake up before her husband and her daughter, to lay out clothes for her husband’s work day, then preparing food that he would eat at midday, she would tend to her poppy fields, sweep her house, sweep the petals of the poppies into a heap, then prepare food for her and her daughter. This routine, to some extent describes that of a large chunk of India’s women, layered with unpaid work.

According to the National Time Use Survey conducted between 1998-99 (Using a survey this old because it is the one that is readily available on the Ministry of Statistics and PI website), the weekly average time spent by men and women on total work, which includes both paid and unpaid work in India is 48 hours for men, and 62 hours for women. There is of course no doubt that most of these hours were spent unpaid. An OECD study from 2014 says that out of these, women spend 5.6 hours per day on unpaid work, whereas men spend 56 minutes. The root cause of this is undercurrent of patriarchal norms that perpetuate that the women are to take over care taking, cooking, and cleaning activities, these norms are prevalent in both rural and urban areas. This unpaid labour presents itself also in the form of missed opportunity, in terms of education, but also in terms of participation in paid work opportunities. What is apparent from this is that this unpaid work in turn reiterates sexual division of labour. And furthers gender inequalities to create a cycle of “unpaid work” for girls and women.

At this point, we know that unpaid labour is essentially work that may have been counted in the GDP, but is not remunerated. So what does that mean for the Indian GDP that all of us seem to be so obsessed with? Unpaid care work amounts to 35% of India’s GDP! (via Oxfam). A very famous case study of unpaid care work in Switzerland reveals that if one were to account for this work in their GDP, it would be almost as big as the banking and the insurance industry. (Let that sink in!)

To understand why these numbers should make enough sense for us to want to move beyond status quo, it is important to also acknowledge that unpaid labour does in fact form the foundation upon which other systems operate upon. Our current economic model focuses mostly on growth in GDP, neglecting unpaid labour in its entirety.

For a lot of women, the problem is childcare, and an active roe of the State in providing good quality services, and childcare would ease their transition into the mainstream paid labour force. There is also the question of societal norms, where the burden comfortably rests upon women to perform most of the unpaid labour, agency and accountability may help here. For a society to not dismiss this uneven distribution of burden as an internal matter. There seems to be a long way to go, but I do believe good policy can get us there.