After more than 50 years of campaigning,wages for housework is becoming a reality – in India and elsewhere.

After more than 50 years of campaigning,
wages for housework is becoming a reality – in India and elsewhere.

By the International Wages for Housework Campaign, 15 December 2025

For more information contact: gws@globalwomenstrike.net or 020 7482 2496

We women are owed a debt and the first payments have come – more is expected as the invisible work of making and caring for all the people on the planet is finally being acknowledged.

The BBC and other media outlets have reported that 118 million women in a number of states in India are getting some payment for our work within the family. Some state governments directly acknowledge that the unconditional cash transfers are a financial acknowledgement of this work. The amounts are small but regular – between $15 and $30 a month – and are making a difference to women’s financial independence and confidence in relation to husbands, family members and the State. The media is astonished at this shift in women’s power.

We boldly demanded wages for housework 54 years ago. When Selma James first raised it at the third women’s liberation conference in Manchester in March 1972, many women were excited but many prominent feminists were furious. They thought it would “institutionalise women in the home”.

James remembers it well.

I was accused of wanting to keep women stuck at home. But what we wanted was for women to have financial independence in recognition of the work we were already doing – giving birth, breastfeeding, caring for children and everyone else, cleaning, cooking, and for those of us in the countryside growing the food our families ate. We didn’t want to be financially dependent on a man or to be forced by poverty to take another job, any job, often more caring this time low waged.

For decades the International Wages for Housework Campaign made the case for women’s entitlement. We built on the work of Eleanor Rathbone, the independent MP who won Family Allowances (now Child Benefit) in the UK and of Johnnie Tillmon, the leader of the Welfare Rights Movement in the US – both had said that mothers deserved money for the work we were already doing.

In the US, Black Women for Wages for Housework (BWWFH) campaigned with welfare mothers to get the 1977 Women’s Conference in Houston to agree that the welfare payments mothers had fought for should be called a “wage”, but it was never implemented.

During the UN Decade for Women and follow up conference (1975-1995) we mobilised internationally and lobbied for women’s unwaged work – in the home, in the fields and in the community – to be measured and its value included in national accounts. We won. The pathbreaking language governments agreed in Nairobi 1985 and Beijing 1995 put women’s unwaged contributions on the map and are considered some of the most important achievements of the UN Women’s Decade. They were followed by an explosion of time-use surveys, evaluations and even legislation and constitutional articles in a number of countries. Trinidad & Tobago was the first with its Counting Unremunerated Work Act (1996). BWWFH got The Unremunerated Work Act introduced into the US Congress in 1993 – it was not voted on but it led to the Bureau of Labor Statistics starting The American Time Use Survey used widely by academics and policy makers.

On 8 March 2000, following a suggestion from Margaretta D’Arcy, our dearest friend and colleague in Ireland who recently passed away, we called for a Global Women’s Strike. Its first demand was: payment for all caring work. Women in over 60 countries took part.

In 2022, together with the Green New Deal for Europe, we put forward the demand for a care income, extending caring not only for people but for all life on the planet – even more crucial given the climate emergency. Domestic worker unions in Peru, women human rights defenders in Thailand, Tribal and Dalit women in rural India are pursuing a care income as a fundamental way to eliminate women’s poverty and overwork. In Ireland, an attempt to delete the only recognition of caring work in the constitution was roundly defeated as mothers, carers and people with disabilities demanded more, not less, state support.

In the US, we are campaigning for Child Tax Credits (expanded during the pandemic they pulled 50% of children out of poverty) to be paid to all mothers and other primary caregivers, and for Congresswoman Gwen Moore’s Worker Relief and Credit Reform Act – it redefines work to include caregiving in the family as well as the work of students. (Watch launch here.) A Guaranteed Care Income pilot in San Francisco, led by our sister organisation the US PROStitutes Collective, for mothers at risk of criminalisation or having their children taken by social services, has again shown the value of unconditional cash payments. (See here.)

India has opened Pandora’s box. Women are now determined more than ever to get what we are owed all over the world: paid maternity leave, counting of caring work towards pensions, paid time off for caring, payments to single mothers, land rights for women…

The time for wages for housework, that is for a care income, is now.

Selma James, now 95, continues to campaign and is based, with the Wages for Housework Campaign/Global Women’s Strike network she founded with others, at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in London. Our archives, 1972-2022 are at the Bishopsgate Institute & Crossroads Women’s Centre.

For more information visit: https://globalwomenstrike.net/