conceptual guide to the unpaid work module
Prepared by Abetha Mahalingam, Nancy Zukewich, and Krista Scott-Dixon
introduction
This module explores how particular forms of unpaid work - like caregiving, housework and volunteering - are defined, socially valued, organized, and gendered. Its purpose is twofold: to provide statistical data and library resources on the measurement of unpaid work in Canada; and, to illustrate how unpaid work is shaped by gender relations as they intersect with 'race,' ethnicity, (dis)ability, age, and sexuality.
It is widely recognized that women - in Canada and beyond - perform the bulk of unpaid work in households and the paid labour force (see for example: Armstrong and Armstrong, 2001; Beneria, 1999; Luxton, 1980; Mies, 1986; Zukewich, 2002) and this work is often socially, politically, and economically devalued. The classification and measurement of unpaid work has very real social and economic consequences for women who perform the bulk of unpaid work activities. The problem is that "work" has come to be defined in conventional statistics as paid activities linked to the market (Beneria, 1999). Despite the efforts of several generations of feminist scholars to make unpaid work visible, it remains marginalized in most methods of measuring economic activity. That there are so many different types of unpaid work makes describing and analyzing its dynamics even more challenging.
In recent years, many women's groups have struggled to have unpaid work taken more seriously in national statistical surveys. As a result, some national statistical agencies have begun to devise guidelines for identifying and classifying various types of unpaid work. For example, in the 1990s, there was a sustained attempt by Canadian women's groups to challenge statisticians on the notion that markets are the sole sites of production. This push led to the inclusion of an in-depth question about the amount of time individuals spent on unpaid work in the 1996 Census.
Statistics Canada's surveys have limits. However, there are a number of ways that researchers can use these surveys to study unpaid work. The wealth of information that surveys, such as the Census and the General Social Survey, generate about unpaid work and sex/gender divisions, as well as the absences and gaps they reveal, are useful in critiquing existing Canadian public policies and imagining new ones that take better account of the total work performed in an economy (Picchio, 1998).
Several useful subcategories help define unpaid work and demarcate the boundaries between this heterogeneous form of work and paid work. These subcategories include: unpaid informal caregiving; volunteering; unpaid domestic work; unpaid subsistence activities; unpaid family work; shadow work; and unpaid work in paid workplaces. The contents of this module touch on each of these types of unpaid work.
Unpaid Informal CaregivingUnpaid informal caregiving encompasses care and assistance provided by individuals to other individuals outside of civic or voluntary organizations (Zukewich, 2002). This work is often similar in character to paid caregiving occupations, such as occupations related to childcare provision, nursing, and home care, which are among the lowest paid occupations in the labour force.
Unpaid informal caregivers, the majority of whom are women, are often family members, relatives, friends and volunteers (Luxton, 1997; Zukewich, 2002). The recipients of care are usually children, elders, individuals who are ill or people with disabilities, as well as individuals within the paid workforce like supervisors, co-workers, and friends.
Caregiving accounts for a large proportion of unpaid work performed by individuals. As Zukewich (2003) points out, unpaid informal caregiving has value to society as well as to caregivers and care recipients. Yet it still lacks social recognition. For some scholars conducting research in the area of gender and work, a central concern involves measuring and assigning value to unpaid informal caregiving, and highlighting the sex/gender divisions that exist when it comes to who performs such types of work. Some analysts, such as Zukewich (2003), argue that only when adequate tools are created to measure and value unpaid informal caregiving will we have a better understanding of how the social and economic costs of sustaining ourselves and dependents relate to individuals' capacity to engage in the labour force.
VolunteeringVolunteering represents another subset of unpaid work. Beneria (1999) defines volunteer work as unpaid work performed for recipients who are not members of the immediate family and for which there is no direct payment. Volunteer work includes both work done for formal non-profit organizations as well as help and care provided in an informal manner by individuals for other individuals.
Like unpaid work generally, volunteer work is heterogeneous. Some types of formal organizational volunteer work that individuals perform are documented in the 2000 National Survey of Giving, Volunteering, and Participating (NSGVP). These include: governance, campaigning, or education for an organization; education or coaching for an organization; caregiving for an organization; and other forms of volunteer work, such as informal voluntary activities. Types of informal volunteer activities documented in this survey include: assistance with household chores or business operations; informal caregiving, such as child care; informal education or coaching services; and other forms of informal help and support. Data from the 2000 NSGVP reveal profoundly gendered asymmetries, including in the performance of particular types of both formal and informal volunteer work activities (see Table UPW NSGVP C-1 in the data tables section [link]). Unpaid work extends beyond one's own household into the households of others, and social institutions more broadly. These activities are integral to maintaining the labour force, though they are rarely recognized as such.
Unpaid Domestic WorkAn analysis of the types of unpaid domestic work reveals sharp sex/gender divisions of labour in households. Marshall's (1993) study on housework illustrates that by far the largest share of housework in Canada is performed by women, and the outcomes of the 2000 Census, when considered in historical perspective, indicate little change in this pattern. Although a majority of women engage in paid work, women remain disproportionately responsible for daily housework responsibilities in dual-earner families. Thus, women carry the double burden of paid and unpaid work. Furthermore, the more children there are in a household, the greater the amount of housework that women perform (Marshall, 1993).
The list of unpaid domestic activities in the Canadian Census illustrates the diversity and indispensability of these activities. Tasks include meal preparation and clean-up; clothing care; cleaning; plant and garden care; home maintenance/management; care for children and adults; unpaid help to other households; shopping or obtaining services; travel as part of care or obtaining services; and unpaid work in family businesses. Each category of unpaid work also includes a subset of tasks. For example, care to children includes attending to their health needs, supervising their education, transporting them to school and other activities, "babysitting", and so forth.
Unpaid Subsistence ActivitiesSubsistence and/or survival-based activities form yet another type of unpaid work performed predominantly by women and socially undervalued and under-recognized economically. These activities are especially vital to industrializing countries' economies, and they are important to record in national account systems. Subsistence labour can include activities such as cultivation of vegetables, fetching wood and water, and the care of livestock animals, all of which are necessary for the agrarian households' subsistence economy (Beneria, 1999). However, there is a propensity to underestimate women's work in subsistence production, especially where it is classified as unpaid domestic work. Since the statistical component of this module focuses on Canada, unpaid subsistence activities are not a central theme; however, the library resources linked to the module touch on this important form of unpaid work.
Unpaid Family WorkLike unpaid subsistence activities, unpaid family work is a form of unpaid labour that supports production for the market. In Canada, it is prevalent in households where small business-owners are present. Unpaid family work is particularly common among immigrant women, particularly women in households where other household members engage in self-employment, running a family business (for further discussion, see migration module), and in on-farm households.
Shadow WorkIn the late twentieth century, with the rise of precarious employment and the contraction of public supports for social reproduction, households in Canada faced a range of new insecurities (Bezanson and Luxton, forthcoming; Fudge and Cossman, 2002; Vosko, 2002). Philipps (2002) argues that in order to adjust to these new challenges, household members increasingly resort to two strategies. First, individuals in households take on more hours of paid employment in order to cope financially. Second, many households rely more heavily on goods and services produced, or partially produced, at home or in the community. This second strategy blurs the lines between goods and services produced within the public and private spheres. This form of privatization is known as shadow work.
Ivan Illich (1981) coined the term shadow work [thesaurus link] to connote work that used to be performed for remuneration that has shifted to individuals in households. Some familiar examples of shadow work include self-checkout, self-serve gas, and automated banking (Menzies, 1997). The increase in shadow work is enabled by the development of new technologies. As a result of the reduction of certain types of jobs, such as banking clerks, the number of unpaid work activities individuals now take on in order to participate in the market has grown (Illich, 1981; Menzies, 1997). In her work on the relationship between shadow work and technology, Menzies (1997) documents further how certain activities once considered part of labour force activity, like on-the-job training or reading a user's manual on how to use a piece of software, are now deemed to be unpaid work.
Shadow work remains largely invisible. Yet it serves an increasingly vital function in the nexus between the household and the labour force, a function akin to how women's unpaid domestic labour sustains social reproduction, and simultaneously perpetuates dependency on the market.
Unpaid Work in Paid WorkplacesVarious types of unpaid work are also performed by individuals in the workplace itself. As with other forms of unpaid work, the bulk of this work is undertaken by women. Forrest (1998) documents how women not only perform many hours of unpaid work within the household but also hours of unpaid work on-the-job that lies outside their formal job requirements. These activities include cleaning, informal caregiving, serving other individuals, and maintaining interpersonal relations. Despite the obvious benefits and value of such activities to employers, co-workers, and workplaces more broadly, they still remain largely invisible. There is a tendency among policy makers, employers, and analysts to define paid work as time and effort spent directly in the production of goods and services for the market. Yet the definition of time and effort spent directly in production is both inadequate and vague (Forrest, 1998).
