Paid Care Work: A Case Study

Defining the Issue

1. Wage Penalties in Paid Care Work

Workers in an occupation associated with care are presumed to earn less compared to their counterparts in a non-caring occupation. Previous relevant studies reveals a relative less pay of workers doing interactive service work (Leidner 1993), by using 1980 Census data (England 1992) and 1990 Census data (England, Thompson and Aman 2001). England, Budig and Folbre (2002) are the first ones to provide empirical evidence to show the relative low pay of care work, which is considered as a subdivision of the boarder notion of interactive service work (Leidner 1993). In order to test the hypothesis that there is a wage penalty in care work net of other individual or occupational factors, a

However, unpaid care work indeed constitutes a very important part of today’s society. In fact, OFFICE OF NATIONAL STATISTICS (2013) reveals that the monetary value of unpaid care work such as childcare in the UK is as high as £343 billion, which accounts for 23% of the GDP. In addition, the opportunity cost of informal carers, which means the amount they could earn if they were involved in the job market instead of doing care work at home, is substantial, even without calculating the amount of money they save for replacing themselves by hiring paid care workers (Heitmueller and Inglis

In most societies, women are expected to be the chief responsible for most of the unpaid care work in a family, as they are generally considered as a “natural caregiver”. In a family, men are generally considered as breadwinners, while women are considered as caregivers. Even though it seems that there is little direct link to the question of this article, in order to help us find the answer, it is essential to understand that unpaid care work is a major contributing reason that cause women inequality and poverty (Manzini 22002). Social construction of patriarchy may be the reason that causes the current situation (Antonopoulos 2009). More importantly, she states that the characteristic of heavily-gendered care work done at home may transfer the same impact on the market. This point of view corresponds to the opinion of devaluation framework, which claims that the undervaluation of both paid and unpaid care work is because of its association with women and race. This argument will be discussed in detail in the following