Regimes of unpaid labour over the Covid-19 pandemic

School closures during the Covid pandemic have placed an added burden on parents to perform at home what is ordinarily a paid role within the school—teachers’ aide. The expectation from the government appears to be that what parents will give what is otherwise paid work for free within the home as an emergency support to the system; that it should and will be given for free is taken for granted.

The operating assumption seems to be that, while perhaps onerous, this is just a temporary expediency, and can be safely filed away under ‘all the inconveniences and added pressures of daily life under a pandemic.’ Is this, however, a fair assumption to make? This question seems worth asking as the pandemic drags out as a result of new variants—all the more so if, as some envisage, COVID never entirely goes away (Colijn & Tupper 2021).

The fact is that homeschooling is a job, and adds a third unpaid gig to home duties on top of providing and parenting. Where this is foisted on them as societal expectation, the prospects for parents in terms of added stress, and over the longer term trauma, are not insignificant. An Australian Institute for Family Studies report from the first lockdowns of 2020 notes significant added burdens:

Two-fifths (40%) of parents who worked from home during the pandemic reported always or often ‘actively’ caring for children while working. Of the remainder, 28% reported always or often ‘passively’ caring for children, 21% reported sometimes ‘actively’ or ‘passively’ caring for children, and 11% said someone else looked after the children while they worked (typically the other parent) (Hand et al, 2020).

Following the pattern of domestic duties generally, the homeschooling burden is falling disproportionately on women (Hoff 2021). Evidencing this, one parent, a ‘40 year old female who lives in a major city,’ reports that,

Working from home and home schooling two children has been a huge burden, very difficult for us all. I struggle to complete activities sent by the school while working and feel guilty and worried that my children aren’t keeping up (Hand et al, 2020).

The problem of too much work is compounded then by the problem that the amount of work degrades the quality. Unpaid teachers aides can’t even enjoy job satisfaction.

The burden of home schooling also begs then the obvious question: if wage labour, parenting and being a home education aide are all jobs, and if education aides are paid, and emergency workers like paramedics and fire fighters are paid, why are emergency education aides also not paid?

As it stands, the expectation is clearly that, as soon as socially necessary work crosses the domestic threshold,  it will be performed for free. Surely this is telling in terms of the underlying cultural attitudes that devalue domestic care labour to the point where it is felt not to merit remuneration.

The fact is that parents are keeping the education system from falling apart entirely by spontaneously performing a job that needs doing, but in spite of the normative assumption that everyone should reap their just rewards, this work is not paid.

As Delaney et al (2018, 37) point out, this invisibilisation of work carried out in the home is not an accident. It is, they argue, rather a distinct social and political construction borne of capitalist patriarchal social relations, one that exploits gender hierarchies and class divisions of labour to rob domestic labourers of ‘agency, representation and social and political power.’

Reflecting these facts, a 1994 study from the Australian Institute for Family Studies notes that

. . . the three largest industries in the economy are not in the market sector but are in the everyday household activities of (1) preparing meals, (2) cleaning and laundry and (3) shopping. Each of these activities absorbs about 70 mhw of labour time; the three largest market industries require rather less labour: wholesale and retail trade 55 mhw, community services (health and education) 47 mhw and manufacturing 42 mhw (Ironmonger 1994).

The visibility of domestic care labour exists then in inverse proportion to its economic value, apparently by virtue of the need for domestic care labourers to internalise their lack of remuneration as a statement of their own lack of value (Federici 2020). Inevitably, all the arguments associated with this state of affairs extend to home schooling—that if care is its own reward it shouldn’t need monetary payment, or that if parents care about their children they will just do what needs to be done.

If this is the case, then we should only expect to be paid for work when our jobs make us miserable. Landlords and banks who expect rent, mortgages and loans to be paid should be happy to settle for knowing that people who might otherwise give them money love what they do for a living.

The plain fact is that the addition of a third domestic job of homeschooling on top of providing and parenting thanks to the Covid pandemic exposes a serious systemic fault line, as well as underlying injustices associated with unpaid domestic care labour, the single greatest contributor to Australian GDP the last time anyone checked. That the fallback for a system being enveloped in crisis is established patterns of invisibility in the domestic sphere, demanding otherwise paid work for free the moment it crosses the domestic threshold, arguably tells us something about both.

2022

References

Colijn, Caroline, Paul Tupper (2021). ‘COVID-19 may never go away, but practical herd immunity is within reach.’ The Conversation, via https://theconversation.com/covid-19-may-never-go-away-but-practical-herd-immunity-is-within-reach-162406

Delaney, A., Burchielli, R., Marshall, S., & Tate, J. (2018). Homeworking women: A gender justice perspective. Routledge.

Federici, S. (2020). Revolution at point zero: Housework, reproduction, and feminist struggle. PM press.

Hand, Kelly, Jennifer Baxter, Megan Carroll, Mikayla Budinski (2020). Families in Australia Survey: Life during COVID-19: Report no. 1: Early findings. Australian Institute for Family Studies, via https://aifs.gov.au/publications/families-australia-survey-life-during-covid-19, accessed 16 August 2021.

Hoff, Madison (2021). ‘The unpaid teacher crisis no one is talking about: Women did more homeschooling than men in 2020,’ Business Insider, Jul. 29, 2021, via https://www.businessinsider.com.au/women-did-more-homeschooling-and-childcare-than-men-in-2020-2021-7?r=US&IR=T, accessed 18 August 2021

Ironmonger Duncan (1994). The Value of Care and Nurture Provided by Unpaid Household Work, Family Matters, The Australian Institute for Family Studies, via https://aifs.gov.au/publications/family-matters/issue-37/value-care-and-nurture-provided-unpaid-household-work, accessed 16 August 2021.