Selma James is a feminist, socialist, and anti-racist activist, best known for her work in advocating for the recognition and value of unwaged work.
In 1972, James founded the International Wages for Housework Campaign, highlighting the economic value of domestic labor. She has written extensively on issues of gender, race, and class, emphasizing the intersections of these oppressions.
For issue #112 of The Internationalist, we draw from James’ 1991 essay ‘Women’s Unwaged Work: The Heart of The Informal Sector’ (Sex, Race and Class, 2012, PM Press) where she explains how the exclusion of women’s unwaged work from economic statistics devalues their contributions and forces many into informal or precarious jobs, often with poor conditions and low pay.
The line between the unwaged sector and the informal sector is often blurred and sometimes cannot be traced at all. If a rural woman’s subsistence crop is good, she may sell the surplus. She may do two or three hours of laundry or other domestic work for those better off, fitting this around her own housework. When it is suggested that some of this work be counted, women ask: why not all? Each division of her labor rests on the others; each segment of the day, and of the year, is integral to her survival and to the survival of those dependent on her work. To single out any part as worthier than any other is to misinterpret and misrepresent the living reality that statistics should aim to profile.
Women would welcome help with any of it and deserve help with all of it. But in order to command help, and shift the prevailing standards by which women’s lives and work are valued—or more often undervalued, even unvalued—all of it must be recognized. It is impossible to achieve the objectives of this consultative meeting, namely to identify and analyze the patterns, problems, and constraints of women’s work in the informal sector, and prepare guidelines for policy measures, without quantifying the cost to the woman—in time and energy—of her entire working day.
The Past
It may be useful to recall that the informal sector and even the question of development, as international questions, arose in the second half of the twentieth century. In 1947, India, the jewel in the British Crown, became independent. A decade later, the Gold Coast became Ghana, the first Black African country to break from colonial rule. It was at first assumed that once political independence had been achieved, the aspirations of the population had been met. But then what was called “the revolution in rising expectations” made clear that political independence aimed at more than a flag, a national anthem, and local personnel inheriting positions of power and prestige vacated by the imperialists. The formerly colonized people wanted to enter what appeared to be a wonderland of consumer goods, which the transistor radio— not dependent on electrification, and therefore able to leap wide expanses at a single bound—was anxious to advertise to them. The pressure from this explosion of hopes was used to propel the economies of newly independent countries further into the money economy. When exchange value became the measure of wealth, power moved from the farmer in the countryside—often a woman—to the city, and women found themselves deprived of their economic power base. There is evidence that women fought such diminution of power with all their might. Esther Boserup’s pioneering work already indicated in the 1960s how women defended themselves against the erosion of their traditional power. African women, market traders for centuries, demanded money.
There are many reports from Africa about husbands whose wives refuse to help them in the production of cash crops, or to perform household chores, unless they are paid for their work.
Boserup also indicates women’s resistance to the formal sector, which trades cash crops for food, putting money (at least for a while) in men’s hands but not necessarily food in the family’s mouths.
Other reports concern women who refuse to help their husbands in the cultivation of cash crops because they want to grow only their own food crops. This is considered an obstacle to the progress from subsistence agriculture to commercial production for the market. In the Bwamba region of Uganda, for instance, women’s preference for growing subsistence crops is held to be an important factor restraining the cultivation of cash crops.
The statistics that exclude the unwaged woman as a worker reflect the dominant market view that the work she does, on which her social power and her very survival depend, is standing in the way of “progress.” “Progress” has won, among other consequences, depriving many rural women of a living from the land (but not freeing such women from agricultural work). Women have therefore tried in every possible way to enter the waged sector. In Third World and metropolitan world, this thirst by women for the economic and social independence of waged work has been misread, as if it were the work, rather than the independence, which was the goal. Women may be delighted to gain waged employment, especially on payday, but they’re less thrilled on Monday morning after a weekend of housework. Despite great efforts to get to the work in order to get to the wages, including by becoming “economic refugees”— immigrants—hundreds or even thousands of miles from home, for millions of women (and men), the informal sector is as far up as they go, even in metropolitan countries. One occupation that many must turn to yet again is housework.
Clotil Walcott of the National Union of Domestic Employees (NUDE) of Trinidad and Tobago reports that because women’s housework and childcare are not counted as work, paid domestic workers are not considered to be workers. The results are catastrophic: protective labor legislation excludes them; recognition as a trade union and bargaining rights are denied; women are at the mercy of employers; wages are kept low; state pensions and benefits don’t exist or are minimized; the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women is violated.
This devaluation of domestic workers is replicated internationally. As a consequence, women must take on additional informal work, such as prostitution, with its burden of criminalization, that is, further devaluation. In 1987 the ILO decided not to list prostitution as a job in the International Standard of Classification of Occupations. Yet this (primarily) “women’s work” keeps many families alive, and in some Asian economies is a high earner of foreign currency, in Thailand the largest single foreign currency earner.
NUDE in Trinidad brings together waged with unwaged house workers and both with unrepresented fast food workers, making the connections that strengthen each while retaining the uniqueness of each. Similarly, the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India has been enormously effective in wielding the collective bargaining power of forty thousand self-employed women in the informal sector—street traders, porters. Ela Bhatt, its founder, described this sector in Nairobi in 1985 to an audience of academics: “Experts call them ‘unorganized sectors,’ but I wouldn’t.”
While women crawl their way up into the informal sector, capital-intensive enterprises develop by moving down to rest on it. The industrial miracle of Japan, the economy most famous for developing in the twentieth century, is a classic example. Subcontractors employ casual labor, mainly women, whose low wages and poor working conditions are a subsidy to the industrial giants for which they make components. Thus unseen women in precarious employment are the miracle workers who bestow permanent employment on men. This “dual industrial structure,” the formal resting directly on the informal, is spreading with Japanese investment, carrying this aspect of planned underdevelopment to metropolitan countries.
And how to distinguish work in the informal sector from the work of women employed by multinationals operating in Free Trade Zones? Women, often treated as casual workers and working without labor protection codes, form up to 95 percent of this work force.
The Future
To sum up. The housewife producing the labor force is considered marginal. The informal sector is considered marginal. Subsistence farming is considered marginal. We now know that this work is not marginal to the economy. But the people who do it have less social power to insist that their needs be met and are therefore called “marginal.” What can statistics do to help?
Statistics shape and reflect a hierarchy of social values by the categories into which people, their activities and their products are placed, and by what is being measured— and not measured. Statistics on women can only reflect their needs by counting their entire working day and what they gain from it.
When we say that women’s unwaged work should be counted, we mean that the actual number of hours women work should be quantified, and that the output of this work should be valued and included in the GNP. And since a woman’s working day is often, especially in Third World countries, supplemented by children’s work, this work too must be quantified and valued. The gulf widens between expenditure of time and energy on the one hand, and output and return on the other, the further we get from metropolitan centers, but is always wider for women than for men within the same social sector or class.
This dual counting would allow a redefinition of the term “worker” to include and name those who do the most work, and it would prioritize confronting the disparities between effort and output or return (where these are different) on the other. These disparities make women and children the poorest everywhere.
The level of Northern military technology is dazzling; yet in the South there are scant resources for piped water, solar cookers and nonpolluting technology which would both relieve the burden of labor and protect the environment. Counting women’s unwaged work would value a woman’s time by valuing the cost to her in hours of her life that she spends in trying to ensure everyone’s survival. This cost is borne by women not only where starvation is imminent but where life is less threatened but still a grim struggle. This encompasses most of the world’s population, Third World and metropolitan, including Third World in the metropolis and metropolis in the Third World.
Such a cost accounting would make clear that communities need not justify their claim to survival by proving their productiveness. The disparity between labor and productivity reflects not on them but on social and economic priorities that counting and renaming women’s work would help transform.
Excerpted from Sex, Race, and Class—The Perspective of Winning: A Selection of Writings 1952-2011 by Selma James, published by Common Notions and PM Press (2012). Used with permission. All rights reserved.
