I have a confession to make: sometimes, I dream of the return of the 'family wage'. I know, I know: it's hideously unfair. Pay equality is a matter of basic fairness. It's worth fighting for. And it's not that I think the idea of the family wage is the best option.
But as I drop my daughter at daycare at 6:30am three days a week, to be looked after by someone else who I then have to pay, to go to work to earn enough money to pay our rent and daycare (and not much more), I am almost daily struck by how much our system is failing families. It was a failure of my own empathy that I only truly came to understand this after I experienced it personally.
In the 17 months since my daughter was born, I have worked harder than I ever have before. My days are long and exhausting. While I work in a paid role three days a week, the vast majority of the work I do is the unpaid work of raising a child. I have gone from having enough disposable income to be comfortable, to counting my pennies and choosing between bread and milk at the end of the month, and ignoring the pain in my tooth.
It is an obvious problem: much of the work done in our modern economy falls outside contributing directly to our economy, so it is unpaid. But such work is essential, not only for our economy to function but for our society more broadly.
Unsurprisingly, this work — domestic work and caring work — is still disproportionately done by women. Even in a male/female couple with both partners working full time, the average amount of domestic work done by the female partner far outweighs that of the man.
But in our focus on the distribution of domestic work, we often overlook the fact that the amount of work we're doing overall in order to maintain a similar standard of living has increased. Instead of work being distributed between the unpaid carer at home and the paid worker, whose income was enough for a family to live on, we now require both partners to have paid roles outside the home. While we are able to shift some of the work onto paid child carers, the capacity to do that is limited by both the cost and the natural limitations of group care.
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