16.4 billion hours per day are spent performing unpaid care labour, as per data from the International Labour Organisation which is based on two-thirds of the world’s working age population.
This statistic can be understood as 2 billion individuals working 8 hours every day without pay.
In fact, if these services were to be monetised, it would contribute to 9% of the world’s GDP or US $11 trillion (purchasing power parity in 2011).
What is the economic history of housework?
Whilst the economy of unpaid care work has remained largely invisible for hundreds of years, the demand for its recognition has roots in the 19th Century, when the first wave of women’s rights movements took place across the US, Britain, and Europe.
The main issue at the time — which is still prevalent today — was that the burden of housework completely restricted women to the household. There was also a ‘second shift’ problem, whereby working women had to manage both labour inside and outside the household.
In the second wave movement, the focus was not so much on the restrictions or burdens that came with housework, but the fact that it was unpaid and thereby weaponised as a tool of oppression.
As Silvia Federici argues in Wages Against Housework, the unpaid element that is intrinsic to housework is a ‘powerful weapon’ in reinforcing the notion that such work is not ‘actual work’.