Counting Women's Unremunerated Work (Hansard, 11 April 1989)

§ Ms. Mildred Gordon (Bow and Poplar)
I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require Government departments and other public bodies to include in the production of statistics relating to the gross domestic product and other accounts a calculation of the unremunerated contribution of women; and to include this calculation in the gross national product.
The Bill requires the Government to quantify the unremunerated work of women and to include that quantification in the gross national product. In order to explain the need for the Bill and the gross injustices that it will redress, I shall put before the House facts about the economy that women—particularly the poorest women —have been wanting to give right hon. and hon. Members for many a day.
When I was 16 my parents sent me to secretarial college to learn shorthand, typewriting, bookkeeping and business studies. All over the walls of that building, in large letters, was the slogan "Time is money". Although that time is money is an accepted and obvious economic fact, everywhere in society women's time is squandered as if it were worthless. Today few shops will even say whether goods will be delivered in the morning or the afternoon. The same is true when equipment needs repairing and of meter readings and gas, electric and telephone connections or disconnections. Women's waiting time is expected to be at everyone's disposal.
The daily queues at supermarket checkouts grow on Saturday when women, many of whom have been out to waged work all week, have to plough through their housework on their so-called day off. Of course, those time-wasting queues lower staff costs. Clearly time is money—but it seems that it is women's time that ensures that other people, especially the captains of commerce and industry, make money.
Much of the work that women do is unremunerated and never enters the GNP, as that quantifies only goods and services exchanged for money. However, that unremunerated work, while it is not counted, is certainly counted on. The Government, in closing hospitals and many institutions that provided health care and other services, claim that they will be replaced by community care. However, it is not the community in general that does the caring but women who shoulder the extra burden of time-consuming, back-breaking and emotionally exhausting work for which the Government are refusing to pay. That shift from waged to unwaged caring is not quantified in official statistics, so no one knows just how much money women are saving the Government by picking up the pieces of the shattered welfare state. Again, women's unpaid work is counted upon but not counted.
Most women in waged jobs find themselves at the bottom of the pyramid. They are particularly exploited when they take on part-time work in order to have time for family responsibilities. Even those few women who secure well-paid jobs find that, once they become mothers, their lives too are shaped by the task of bringing up their children—the future labour force—and of caring for others whose work is considered more important than almost everything that women do, whether the women are professionals, cardboard box makers, or are fully occupied at home.
748 The work of women that is included in the GNP is based on a pedestal of unremunerated, uncounted work. Imagine how much work and responsibility falls on the women in the families of British Rail employees who in a recent accident inquiry revealed that they work a 12-hour day, seven days a week. There is not much chance of those men helping with the housework; all the burden falls on their wives.
It is almost always women who care for those who are ill or who have disabilities. As so-called farmers' wives, they tend kitchen gardens and livestock. They are market traders, shop attendants and bookkeepers in family businesses. They are often secretaries, typists and hostesses, as well as being wives and a status symbol for their professional husbands. It is women who ensure that the flowers are on the church altar and that schools have parent-teacher associations as well as volunteers to make up for education cuts by running jumble sales, mixing paints and coaching young readers.
Women visit ailing relatives and neighbours, especially when meals-on-wheels no longer roll up. Women work overtime to shield families and whole communities from the effects of racism and racist immigration controls, class prejudice, polluted food, water and air, and the economic, physical and emotional devastation of unemployment. None of this skilled, time-consuming life-giving but unwaged work of women is counted in the GNP.
The fact that women are statistically invisible as producers and service providers means that some economists have the cheek to label as marginal these workers without whose vital work society would grind to a halt. The failure to count women's unremunerated work in the gross national product results in a distorted picture of the economy and leads to faulty economic planning, which does not meet the needs of working people. The very same work enters national statistics when performed by those who are paid for their work, such as nannies, nurses, bookkeepers, housekeepers, agricultural workers, physiotherapists, chauffeurs, chefs, interior decorators—the list is almost endless. Endless too are the damaging effects of the monetary and statistical invisibility of the work of housewives. The fact that this work is unwaged and uncounted devalues women's waged work, too.
The many organisational, technical and other practical skills that women develop as housewives gain them little in the waged labour market. One exception to that involves the National Union of Teachers, which was my union for many years. The NUT gained one year's increment for every three years that women spent at home with their own children. This was recognition for some of the work of mothers who return to teaching. However, most of the time the housework women do either full or part-time—before they go to work work in the morning, after they return home at night and at weekends—is not considered work. Only when this unwaged work of women is officially quantified by widening the compass of the GNP will we even begin to know how much time and skill goes into the economy and the production of specific commodities.
I therefore present this Bill, which requires Government Departments and other public bodies to include in the statistics relating to the gross domestic product and other accounts the quantification of the unremunerated work of women—in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy—and to include that calculation in the gross national product.
749 There is growing international awareness of the need for recognition of the totality of women's contribution to the economy. According to the United Nations, women carry out two thirds of the world's work for 10 per cent. of the income, and own only 1 per cent. of the assets. In July 1985, the United Kingdom Government were represented at the United Nations world conference in Nairobi, Kenya and agreed "Forward Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women", the final document of the Decade for Women. Paragraph 120—amended by delegates from Sierra Leone, Jordan and Uganda, along the lines put forward by the international wages for housework campaign—committed Governments to include women's unremunerated work in the GNP. The following November, paragraph 120 was singled out as one of the most important decisions of the Decade for Women and ratified by the United Nations General Assembly. My Bill would implement that decision.
Despite their enormous contribution, women are undervalued because so much of their work is unvalued and economically invisible. That has enabled the Government to get away with cutting maternity grants and freezing child benefit—the only money which many women can call their own. Adding up this work makes the unanswerable case that these benefits are rights for work done, not charities.
Economic invisibility keeps older women dependent on their husband's goodwill because, despite a lifetime of serving family and community, there are no pension contributions for unwaged housework. Many a divorced wife lives to see her ex-husband retire from the position which she helped him to obtain on a good pension, while her income is reduced to a bare minimum. The economic invisibility of most women's work has allowed the Government to inch nearer to workfare—the American version of the workhouse—which forces claimants into dead-end jobs to earn their entitlement to income support.

§ Mr. Speaker
Order. The hon. Lady has now been speaking for 10 minutes and should begin to draw her remarks to a close.

§ Ms. Gordon
Counting women's work would prove that every mother is a working mother and that some of them have two or even three jobs. Counting women's work would make women count by making clear that every woman, whether or not she does waged work, is nevertheless a working woman.
Perhaps the most unjust policy that economic invisibility has permitted is the poll tax, which is levelled at women who have no income. Despite women's enormous contribution, the Government are demanding more. These women will become institutionalised and further dependent on the goodwill of the wage earner. They will be institutionalised into an inferior, vulnerable and archaic position which will invite domestic violence. Women on income support, including mothers, will have 20 per cent. of the poll tax deducted from the household's survival money.
When all the work that women do is finally made visible in the GNP and other official statistics, no one will be able to continue to ignore the extent of dependence of the mighty institutions of the state, industry, commerce and every social organisation throughout the United Kingdom on women's voluntary and involuntary unwaged work.