Cooking up change
in the global kitchen
Also available in French
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“Caring
for others is accomplished by a dazzling array of skills in an endless
variety of circumstances. As well as cooking, shopping, cleaning and
laundering, planting, tending and harvesting for others, women comfort
and guide, nurse and teach, arrange and advise, discipline and
encourage, fight for and pacify. Taxing and exhausting under any
circumstances, this service work, this emotional housework, is done both
outside and inside the home.
“And we are the first to defend and protect those in our care. It is usually women – mothers, wives, partners, sisters, daughters, grannies and aunties – who are the driving force of justice campaigns, whether or not we are prominent or even visible in them.” Selma James |
 From left: Grace Loumo, Margaret Prescod, Danny Glover, Selma James, Nina Lopez, Andaiye |
The Global Women’s Strike (the Strike) was formed to win economic and social recognition for unwaged caring work and to demand the return of military budgets.
Unwaged work entered the international agenda in 1975, at the UN Decade for Women conference in Mexico City. In 1980, the International Labour Office estimated that women do 2/3 of the world’s work, yet receive only 5% of its income. In 1985, the UN agreed to include the work women do in the home, on the land and in the community in national statistics. In most of the world, caring work includes agricultural work and protecting the environment. Women produce 80% of the food consumed in Africa and the Caribbean, in Asia up to 90% of workers in the rice fields are women, and in Latin America women provide 50% of the income in rural areas and are most active on farms that produce foods for home consumption.
Finally in 1995 in Beijing, we won that national accounts would measure and value unwaged work. It was a turning point globally. Trinidad & Tobago put it into law in 1996. Spain in 1998. Catalunya in 2005. But Venezuela set a new world standard in 1999. Article 88 of its constitution says: The State guarantees equality and equity between men and women in the exercise of their right to work. The State recognizes work in the home as an economic activity that creates added value and produces social welfare and wealth. Housewives are entitled to social security.
Article 14 of the Land Act later prioritized woman-headed households for land distribution, and entitled new mothers and pregnant women to food subsidies.
The triple day, pay equity and men’s support
Economic necessity forces many women to work the double or triple day – paid jobs on top of caring work at home. In most jobs women get paid less than male colleagues even when we both do the same work. And we are often segregated in service work much like the caring work we do at home. While many of these jobs are highly skilled, these skills are not recognized financially, and the status of the work is dragged down by the low status of unwaged caring work at home.
To end the sexist pay gap between women and men, we campaign for equal pay for work of equal value globally. “Equal remuneration for men and women workers for work of equal value” is alraedy the international standard (Article 2.1, ILO Convention 1951). But it is not implemented.
Feminists
have often prioritized the issue of abortion over workload, poverty and pay
equity. Yet to enshrine in law that caring work has social and economic
value, would
ensure that women, starting with mothers, are not penalized with the lowest
pay when we go out to work or discriminated against in pensions, health
care, childcare, and
social welfare. It would raise all women’s status and entitlements.
Most men are aware of their dependence on caring work, starting with their mothers’. Many also agree that not counting it maintains the traditional division of labour between the sexes.
Raising the status of the carer would put women in a stronger position to demand that men take their full share of responsibility and become carers too!