5government labor policy is criticized for inequalities

In many countries women were now asking for longer and paid maternity benefits. Child health experts had researched benefits of breastfeeding for 12 years and of parent child bonding for emotional attachment of the child to an adult. The case for maternity leave won many advocates and eventually most governments were providing longer maternity leaves. If a relative was dying, workers also were demanding personal leave, time off to provide care of the dying, and policies of palliative care leave were also set in place.

These humane policies trying to blend recognition of the paid role and of the caregiving role were welcomed by those who rushed to use them. But it was noticed by others that the door to qualify for these benefits was a very narrow door.

The time off was viewed in male paradigm terms from the traditional economy, so care of a newborn or someone dying was not work time but leave – like a sailors vacation. It was time off with all the connotations of holiday, leisure and self indulgence that had always tagged along unfairly with the perception of the care role.

And now women who had education and high level skills to clue in to inequalities noticed the oddity and expressed their anger over it.

To qualify for benefits in Canada for instance for maternity, parental leave or palliative care leave, you had to meet criteria established for an unemployed person – you had to have put in enough time earning that you now deserved some time off. You had to have won the right to this holiday and it was administered in the same way to those who were laid off from a job, downsized, subject to medical distress or other jobinterruptions beyond their own control.

The qualifiers excluded most caregivers, ironically. To have set some arbitrary number of paid hours the preceding year 600 in Canada meant that those whose paid work history was outside those strict limits were out of luck. Maternity benefits in Canada were denied to mothers whose paid work last year was 599 hour,. to those whose paid work was 700 hours but at two jobs each 350 hours, and to mothers who were home with difficult pregnancies or whose paid work the preceding 10 years had been massively contributing to the employment insurance plan but who last year did not happen to put in the 600 hours. Maternity benefits were also denied new mothers who were home with another baby, who were selfemployed or who were employers. The fact maternity benefits were paid at a basic level dependent on earned income also created inequalities so that wealthier women got more money than did the poor, a policy rather the reverse of recognition of financial need. To add to the inequality, some companies topped up the government benefits to nearly full or full salary while other employers did not. creating along the way therefore several tiers of wealth and poverty among new mothers. And many women objected to this as unequal benefit under the law and to the unequal funding of children.

Palliative care programs were equally criticized not because they provided money, which was welcome, but because the criteria were deemed illogical.. You qualified for this money by earning last year and this meant that if you were home much of last year to care for someone seriously ill, that would disqualify you from the help. A past record of providing care of the dying was a main disqualifier for getting help to care for the dying.

Activists complained that the benefits set up for care roles were based on not being a caregiver. Even though a working engineer was defined by engineering work, to be called a working mother you had to be doing anything but mothering, To qualify for funding for care of the child, you must not be providing care of a child yourself, and you must prove with a receipt that you hired someone else to do it.

In Canada funding for the care role also was tied to household income, a criterion many also felt unfair. A female doctor does not have her salary reduced because her spouse is a highly paid accountant. Yet a caregiver spouse was expected to get less child tax benefit, less pension, less deduction for childrens costs, based entirely on how much her spouse earned.

What recognition there was for caregiving seemed a lot like getting benefits for apples based on proof you were an orange.
.
6 medical costs of ignoring the caregiving role

A person who owns a boat can park it and ignore it for weeks or months but not so the owner of a horse. The horse needs daily care and if the person cannot provide it directly he is obliged to pay someone else to do it. However the state may not have any particular benefit from the care of the boat or the horse.

The same could not be said of care of children however. The care needs of children or the frail elderly are 247 and children cannot be neglected without risk of serious harm. Most nations have made child neglect and elder abuse criminal offenses.So if you were punished for not doing it, would it not be fair to value doing it? In some nations the laws seemed like a loselose. This impasse in peoples personal lives was linked to considerable stress.

Anxiety and depression levels among women skyrocketed.

The receivers of these care shifts were also upset. Depression among the elderly surfaced in more and more medical research.

Children were being treated for high levels of anxiety, depression and behavior disorders. Some doctors were prescribing mood drugs for the very young to calm them. Labels for new kinds of disorders abounded, from attention deficit to hyperactivity, to oppositionaldefiant.As kids became teens, doctors were also noticing a detachment from adults, a mistrust and an attachment to peers instead, sometimes associated with gangs.

2003 Canada Marshall Korenblum of the Hincks Dellcrest Centre in Toronto observed that over the past five years of his 20 year child psychiatry practice, more and more families are seeking help for children with clinical depression. He notes that depression is even increasing among preschoolers. Depression in children aged 12 and under is estimated at 13% of the population
2003 Canada GPC Research on behalf of Health Canada has released Dec 17 2003, results of its study of 1253 teens aged 12 –19 finding that 34% said they had tried marijuana more than once, one in four smoked it at least once a week and 8% smoked it daily. The study also found that 14 % said they drank alcohol regularly and 19% smoked cigarettes regularly..
2004 UK Liz Attenborough of the National Literary Trust in the UK has published a study called Talk to Your Baby finding that in earlier times it was rare to have a grade one child who had language development problems but that nowadays such problems are common. Some blame the busy lives of parents, the high use of TV and radio to substitute for actual conversation and the parental attitude that expensive toys may replace time. Attenborough has said Parents dont realize that children would rather have their time than something flashy
2005 Canada Dr. Angelo Simone of the Trillium Health Centre in Mississauga expressed alarm at the growing incidence of hypertension n children. It is unusual to even suspect a child may have high blood pressure but Simone is now finding children with the problem even as young as age 8.
2007 UK The institute of Child Health at University College in London released results of a study of over 13,00 children finding that childhood obesity is not linked to poverty as much as it is to presence or absence of the parent.

Though each of these troubling conditions among children and young people was treated as a particular disorder with its own pill. counseling or diet, the common thread of feeling neglected was becoming evident. Teens were turning to each other for comfort with early sexual activity, were turning to shopping for amusement, much to the delight of commercial operations, or were turning to drugs and alcohol for easy escapes from their sadness.

Though an individual household may experience shock, embarrassment and distress to see a child experiencing such dilemmas, the community itself was starting to notice the costs it bore too – with vandalism, theft, drugrelated crime, violence escalating on the streets.

The idea that children and teens need more attention was easy to endorse.
The question of what type of attention was however pivotal. Those who argued that daycare should extend past age 12, that teens should also be supervised more in group camps and activities might seem to address the problems and keep them busy and off the streets. But teens and children being human, it was also evident that they needed much more than supervision by paid watchers. Many felt that what they needed all along had been and still was, care by someone who loved them. It was something governments did not have a category or column for – not yet.

1980 Canada A Senate committee finds that two factors reduce the risk of a child entering the criminal justice system and these are that before age 3 the child is cared for by the same person not a series of changing caregivers and second, that the caregiver be someone with an emotional attachment to the child Child at Risk

7 .childcare as a profession

Another way in which a crisis point was reached was in the definition of good care of a child. Originally childcare facilities had been set up so women could earn and it was not necessary to have them be anything more than safe locations where the child would play and suffer no harm. The idea that care of a child also should involve skill development, language stimulation, and attention to the mind had occurred many times in history but now was also taking hold as an obligation of society. Children should be cared for yes, but parents entrusting their young to the state funded care facility also wanted to make sure the care was high quality though the terms were rarely defined clearly.

It turned out that many people liked to work with children and nurture babies but day after day exposure to many large groups of crying toddlers and preschoolers made a lot rethink the career choice. Those who stayed wanted recognition of how hard the role was, how demanding, how important to society – and they wanted good pay for doing it.

They also wanted standards for what to teach, some identification of what this early education should be that they were to provide, and for that they wanted training – and funding for the training.

With only low wages for daycare workers, there was a constant staff turnover, leading to not only high retraining costs for daycare owners, but also and more troubling, huge unpredictability and instability for young children. Research that had shown that children can thrive with a nonparental caregiver also had noted that this should be the same person for 3 consecutive years not a changing sea of faces. If daycare facilities frequently changed staff, the childs sense of stability was at risk and he or she may not attach to any adult, with troubling emotional consequences for life. It served everyones interest to ensure that daycare staff were well enough paid that they stayed at the job, and that they were competent.

But this demand for job stability, for job recognition as a profession, and for high pay with pension and medical dental benefits, created two new dilemmas. First, government was caught in a catch 22. If it paid daycare staff enough to keep them happy, its costs would go even higher and it would have to raise taxes even more, incurring the wrath of voters.

2004 Canada Paul Moist in the Financial Post writes The only way to deliver quality care is to hire highly trained, caring workers. You have to pay them well to keep them
2004 Canada The Child Care Human Resrouces Sector Council says funding must be increased for daycare to improve the skills and qualifications of the workforce, make child care an attractive and viable career choice
2005 Canada.Economists argue in The Benefits and Costs of High
Quality Childcare that the jobs must be both pleasant and permanent ones and adds that The licensed child care sector can be a significant source of good and reasonably permanent jobs in our country

The second problem was both logical and practical. If care of a child was now deemed to be a useful role in society and the caregiver a working professional, then by job description this title would actually then apply to caregivers wherever they were – at the daycare or not. Recognition for the role of caregiver would raise the social status and possibly the income potential of babysitters, nannies, and by implication even mothers or fathers at home who gave up other income to provide care of a child. Most professions are defined not by who does the roles but by the roles themselves in a job description. If it is work to change and feed a baby when a daycare workers does it, it is no less work when mom or dad does it.

This implication however deeply troubled government –for to recognize caregiving roles in the home was a revolutionary concept in redefining working mother , working couple, and work itself. Most governments balked at the idea but kept being reminded of the movement..

8. new paid work technologies and the blending of care and earning roles

The Internet and broad based communication networks had massively changed how paid work was done anyway. Many employers were finding that it cost them less time in office space, commute time and overhead if they permitted some employees to do their paid work from home. Many adults found that customers did not know or care where an email was sent from and it was not hard to run a business from home and make money, all the while tending your own children.
2005 Canada Statistics Canada reveals that the number
of Canadians who are selfemployed is 15.6% of
the paid labor force.

Old assumptions were falling by the wayside. No longer was it accurate that women who earned worked 9 to 5 and needed daycare only weekdays during those hours. In fact many women earned but did not use daycare at all. They may be selfemployed or work from home or telecommute. Many women did earn and outside the home, but they did so evenings, weekends or in tagteam with the spouse or another family member, so no daycare was needed. Some parents earned only during school hours so no disruption of the childs life was made. So even in an economy biased towards favoring only paid labor, the old idea that the workday was 9 to 5 was severely out of date .

For a time daycares tried to adjust to this new situation. Maybe they should be open around the clock for those parents who earned evenings. Maybe they should be open in rural areas for those who operate farms in the early morning. But problems arose out of sheer practicality. To drive a child a long distance to a small town daycare may cost more than the woman would earn while away from the child. To set up available daycares on every street corner, to reduce the commute costs of time and gas, would be prohibitively expensive for government to establish. It was becoming evident that funding the daycare might simply be less efficient than funding the child, wherever the child was.

9. polls

With growing awareness of human rights and rights of choice in general, many people born in the 1970s were demanding freedom to follow their own lifestyle preference. By polls they admitted a preference not just to earn but also to spend time with family, and for some the desire to spend time with children was so important the state should value it. Since polls represent voters, governments were pressured to listen.

1997 Canada Ontario Compas poll – 92% of Ontarians believe that parents themselves are the best childcare providers for infants and preschoolers
1999 Canadian Policy Research Network – a majority of parents want economic supports for parents during the first 3 years of life so a parent can have the option of being home with the kids
2000 Canada Angus Reid 77% of Canadians want parents not the state to provide care of the children.
2002 Canada Macleans magazine survey – 97% of parents said raising children is a satisfying experience. 63% of fathers and 73% of mothers said that if they could afford it they would prefer to have a parent home with the children rather than at paid work.
2002 Canada Strategic Counsel finds that ¾ of Canadians would raise their children themselves at home if they could and almost 90% of parents asked would prefer to have one parent at home with the children but could not afford that option.
2007 Australia Care for Kids surveys 1600 parents finding that nearly 67% of women asked returned to paid work due to financial necessity not by preference.

Votes often confirmed the strong will of people to have time with family and to value caregiving not just paid work. Canadas Liberal government in fact lost an election in 2006 when the opposition party promised that instead of funding only daycare it would fund all children, wherever they were. Newfoundlands premier Danny Williams in 2007 won an election\promising a baby bonus for every new child born in his province.
The ADQ party in Quebec surged to being a powerful force when it promised to value care of a child wherever the child was.

But some politicians refused to change their policy. MP Ken Dryden when told about poll results, hinted that of course women would prefer not to have to earn but earning was the new reality and anything else was like wanting to eat ice cream every day unreasonable to ask.
2005 Canada When a survey showed that many mothers in paid
labor would prefer to be home with their children, MP Ken Dryden
reacted If we asked them if they would like ice cream once a week
and chocolate twice a day , about the same percentage would say the
same::

10. rise of mothers movements

There have been many mothers movements in history, some using mothers as a network to get votes or political rights, others asking for recognition of mothering itself.

However the new movement was different in that it was not just saying mothers are nice people or selfless saints but it was also now saying they were liberated gutsy groundbreaking women, doing essential and vital work in the economy.
1970 Sweden a Family Campaign petition of 70,000 names protests
government policy of favoring daycare use over family childrearing
The petition is ignored.
1977 US National Organization for Women picks as president Eleanor Cutri, a fulltime homemaker. A pro homemakers movement called the Martha Movement begins in the US arguing for wages for housework
1978 Canada Margaret Eichler in The Unpaid work of Homemakers argues that mothers be paid a salary whether they work in or outside of the home. She says society has a responsibility to help with costs of rearing children so women can decide whether to participate or not in paid labor.
1983 US International Moms Clubs form to support the work of
taking care of children
1984 Canada Mothers are Women MAW forms in Ottawa to advocate for mothers at home taking care of children and to increase government and public support for motherwork
1984 US Family & Home Network starts to support mothers who
do caregiving work at home
1985 The International Women Count Network forms linking 22
countries and uniting 2000 nongovernment organizations to measure
and value unwaged work
1985 The UN holds its third World Conference on Women in Nairobi
asking that unwaged work in agriculture, food production,
reproduction and household activities be included in the GDP of every
nation
1986 Canada The head of Advisory Council on the Status of Women, Sylvia Gold says womens contribution to society should be recognized whether their work is in the paid labor force or at home
1987 Ireland A pirate radio station run by Margarettea DArcy calls
for a womens strike to recognize womens unpaid contribution to
society
1992 Quebec group AFEAS presents a petition to government asking for funding for all children in or out of daycare. They also ask that
athome caregivers be included in the provincial pension plan
1993 Canada womens groups unite to conduct a Work is work is
work campaign to have unpaid work included in the national census
1993 US Theresa Funicella forms Caregiver Credit and in a book Tyrannyof Kindness urges cash support for mothers.
1997 US Mocha Moms forms to support women who spend time
at home taking care of children
2002 Ireland the Women in the Home organization has over a million members

In Canada a homemaker, Carol Lees, was offended when a government census form said If you have been a homemaker all your life, indicate never worked. She refused to sign such a form, risked a jail sentence for noncompliance and pressured her government through humiliating it, to hold a conference about unpaid labor.

Though some womens groups of the seventies equated having babies with the problem, and preferred to focus only babies on career, feminist writers were now often saying that mothering was an important role many women did want –and feminist rhetoric must include valuing it.

The first push to say women could have it all and be both mothers and fulltime paid CEOS simultaneously was proving for most women not very realistic, unless there was a very supportive and often athome spouse. But the second option became much more a new mantra that women could have it all, but not all at once.

To say this however was itself revolutionary because it was not asking women to take a back seat for a few years while the children were young. It was asking government instead to value the roles women had, at home or in paid work, fully, at all points of a womens life.

Governments were not ready for such a movement but the message was not to be silenced.

Feminism has also shifted. Daughters of the 70s feminists were not quite the businesssuit aficionados some had assumed they should be. Some wanted to be sexually alluring anyway and some even wanted to be domestic.

There has also been a rising interest in what roles still happened in the home. A homemade cookie became practically unheard of and by its rarity was cherished. Where cooks at home for a time tried to imitate gourmet restaurant chefs, there was a movement now for restaurants to try to make meals like homemade with real ingredients, fresh food, freshly baked. This new interest in domesticity extended not only to restaurants offering beans, macaroni and milkshakes served in oldfashioned dispensers but also to an new interest in domesticity itself. The desire to have a comfortable cozy home with Martha Stewart attention to detail of entertaining, decorating and valuing the home has surprised some observers. In 2007 there was a new interest not in returning home but in being able to be home or at paid work as the mood strikes, with equal respect.

11. economists recognize unpaid work

Though historically there had been occasional token admission that women also did some work at home, consistent theories about it were few.

1842 Britain William Beveridge observed that women in the
home are doing vital service by caring for children or the elderly
1881 US Susan B. Anthony observes that women have been the greatest unpaid laborers in the world
1898 Charlotte Perkins Gilman argues in Women and Economics thatthe labor of women in the home enables men to produce more wealth and such work therefore is an economic factor in society.
1915 US Theodore Youmans of the Womans Suffrage Association argues that all property laws that assume women are supported by their husbands are abominable and insists that womens own intense work deserves its own recognition
1916 Canada Marjory MacMurchy in The Woman Bless Her argues that housework has economic as well as social value.
1920 Canada Dr. Augusta Stowe Gullen in Should Husbands Pay Their Wives argues that a mans earning capacity already depends on the work of the homemaker as a business partner and this work helps him produce wealth.
1960 Canada The Carter Royal Commission on Taxation recommends that the work of the unpaid spouse caregiver at home be recognized through a household based tax but it is not enacted
1969 Margaret Benston in The Political Economy of Womens Liberation says that the unpaid work of women at home must be recognized and when a man is paid his wage, the salary buys the labor of two people.
1970 Canada The Royal Commission on the Status of Women recommends that the family be the basis of taxation to recognize the unpaid work of a caregiver spouse. It is not enacted.
1970 US Daniel Patrick Moynihan in The Politics of Guaranteed Income argues that money be paid to mothers of small children at home not as welfare with the stigma of welfare but as a mothers pension payment for services performed. It is not implemented
1971 Canada Statistics Canada estimates that household work represents 41% of the Gross domestic Product, were it actually counted
1978 US John Kenneth Galbraith in Almost Everyones Guide to
Economics writes Economists would get a very sudden increase
in the GNP by discovering and including the unpaid labor of women
1980 UN calculations show that women do 2/3 of the worlds
work, albeit for 510% of the income and 1% of the assets.
1988 New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring in If Women Countedargues that unpaid contributions of women in housework, caregiving and volunteer work should be included in economic tallies
1995 The UN holds a Conference on Women at Beijing China and
181 member nations sign the Platform for Action to begin to tally
unpaid work.
1995 UN Human Development Report announces its survey that womens unpaid work is worth $11 trillion annually and Dr. Mahbub ul Huq observes There is an unwritten conspiracy on a global scale to undervalue womenswork and contributions to society

Traditional economics was still not budging in how it defined work but more and more economists were breaking from the pack. Feminist economists made strong cases for the inclusion of unpaid labor as part of national economies. Marilyn Waring in New Zealand argued for a redefinition of work and for inclusion of caregiving labor in national accounts, even at the UN. Dr. Mary Mellor in the UK, Dr. Herman Daly in the US, Dr. Isabella Bakker in Canada joined other economists in redefining what is normally counted as productivity, as good for a country. Many noticed flaws of traditional economics that if only money production and flow are counted, having an oil spill or crime wave were then called good, because they generatedmore jobs to combat them. New views of economies notice what was originally taken for granted, like clean air, pristine forests, clean water, and happy healthy children – all technically of no monetary value – but of vital value to a nations future and wellbeing.

New indices were now suggested instead of GDP
2006 Canada Dr. Mark Anielski recommends measures of economic progress that include not just money but also social capital of health of children, natural capital of a clean environment and human capital as human relationships.
2007 – Canada GPI Atlantic makes a social survey measuring the Genuine Progress Index to include what GDP often omits health care access, democratic rights, mental and physical health., the value of unpaid labor.


In 2007 there has also been a call for a slowdown in the rush to produce and make money. The slow down movement found aficionados of slow cooking, meditation, spas, and even of economic thought such as the book Workers of the World Relax. The idea that there is more to life than that male paradigm of earning income was noted on many fronts now, legal, feminist, medical, and even economic.

2007 Timothy Ferriss writes The 4 Hour Workweek urging people to do paid work more intensely and efficiently but also more briefly.
Paid work hours per week, on average are too high he believes at
42.8 hours in the US, 41.7 hours in Japan and 39.5 hours in Britain.

In some ways the recognition of unpaid labor in an economy posed the most difficult hurdle of all because it was actually the start of the problem. Unpaid labor had never not existed – it has been there all along, just unnoticed. And so to open the eyes of economists to it, to take off the blinders and give them full sight made a shocking glare of light. It was not discovering a new source of income for government. It was discovering what has always been there.

Women doing care roles at home saved the state billions because it did not have to pay them and it still got new children each generation, healthy children tended through development, healthy adult workers tended through illness, and elderly former workers, nurtured though aging. It got all this service free, and what some have noticed is that women who did the work, not only were ignored as doing something of value, but had to pay tax as if they were burdens. These womens tax rate was more like 100% were one to realize they gave everything they had to society.

It was a hard thing to admit, partly for fear of a huge class action readjustment suit. But some governments in small ways now were taking this action through pensions for homemakers or for allowance of pension increase or tax reduction based on the caregiving work.
2006 Canada passed a law to permit household based tax
for those on pensions. A key reason cited at a public pension
conference by activists was to recognize the caregiving of
the lower earning or unpaid spouse for much of her life.