Working for nothing: the future of unpaid work
Have you ever considered how much time you have spent doing your banking from your phone? Cleaning the house? Driving around for chores or to take your kids to their activities? Or caring for other family members? These are all examples of activities that all of us do daily, they are essential for our lives and our well-being, but we are not getting paid to do them and they do not even count as economic output of the country.
Unpaid work, which is defined as all the work we do without any compensation or any other payment, such as housework or caring for people, is part of our everyday life and for some of us we spend the majority of our time on it, but none of this is included in traditional measures of economic output. Actually all this time and effort you are putting into mopping, vacuuming, cooking, or for me writing this blog, has been considered as “leisure” for many years by economists.
Undeniably it is an omission of economics and the architects of economic statistics have mentioned that, but we didn’t listen at the time! The change in economics started happening when the Nobelist Joseph Stiglitz in his book ‘Beyond GDP’ aimed to start a public debate about how we measure the economic output in our countries and how that relates to our well-being. There he mentioned about the importance of unpaid work to be measured and included in the economic statistics, but also about the impact that unpaid work has on gender disparities.
But how much is that work worth? “Just” £1.24 trillion in the UK as it was estimated in 2016. That is equivalent to 63.1% of all the economic production of the UK, which is much higher than the manufacturing and agriculture sectors combined. So we are speaking about a lot of activities that are worth a lot of money, yet we don’t take them into account in our official statistics and, as a consequence, also economic decisions based on these statistics.
Unpaid transport services, such as driving yourself and others to work, accounted for the largest proportion of the value of unpaid work around 29%, while childcare services contributed the second-largest proportion around 28% during 2016. To give some monetary value the childcare services that count as unpaid work were equivalent to £5,358 per person in 2016.
Who is doing all that unpaid work?
As mentioned in a previous blog, women face inequalities in the labour market, with women getting a hit into their career after having their first child. As a result these inequalities exist in unpaid work as well.
Women spent an average of 3 hours and 37 minutes per day doing unpaid work activities including housework, caring for others and volunteering between 23 September and 1 October 2023; this was 54 minutes more than the average among men at 2 hours and 43 minutes.
And that is not only happening in the UK; according to OECD women spend two to ten times more time on unpaid care work than men. That inequality is rooted in discriminatory social institutions and stereotypes of gender roles. The research on unpaid work helps us to have a more comprehensive picture and further understand the reasons why women are struggling in the labour market and face wage inequalities till today.
Unpaid work and automation
But despite the mopping, cleaning and care, there is another element of unpaid work that is taking more and more of our time. As I mentioned in my last blog, new technology is sometimes considered as a way to replace humans, such as automated self checkout machines. Another example is banking services; a few years ago in order for you to do your banking you had to visit a branch where someone would help you with the service. Today we rarely do that because we are doing most of our banking services online and mainly from our phone. The person who was working in the bank was getting paid a salary to support you, but does anyone pay you for doing your own banking?
This is another way that automation has affected our daily activities and the amount of time we spend on unpaid work. In the book ‘Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day’, Craig Lambert mentions a range of jobs that used to be done by other people as part of their employment, but these days we actually do them ourselves, often with the help of our computer or phone. This includes a variety of activities like ordering food, booking holidays, doing shopping and so on.
But have we thought about the consequences of that automation? Makes life easier of course, but as Lambert mentions it may actually reduce the opportunity for young people and minorities to find accessible jobs.
Unpaid work of that kind is a growing activity that we are doing, taking up a substantial proportion of our daily lives, and is projected to take more and more of our time in the future. It may make our lives more convenient but it is still debatable as to how much more productive we become or how much cheaper the products we consume are because of automation. And there is the big question of how it will change existing inequalities in both paid and unpaid work.