Press round-up: International Women’s Day, 2021
The Senate Just Took a Baby Step Toward the Feminist Goal of a Universal Child Benefit
It is extraordinary that those who reproduce the human race are still unsupported and impoverished for this fundamental biological and societal work. Unwaged, in a world dominated by money. Selma James, founder of the socialist feminist Wages for Housework campaign in 1970s Britain and one of the organizers of the Global Women’s Strike, which helps coordinate annual protests and walkouts on International Women’s Day, wrote these words in the Independent this time last year, just before the global COVID-19 lockdown would make the reality she described more visible and less tenable.
The Jacobin Magazine (USA)
Liza Featherstone, 8 March 2021
What your care work is worth (and why no one pays you)
Google translation: The economy only works because someone is constantly cleaning, cooking and raising children. Is it really utopian that this care work is paid?
The exploitation of unpaid care work is similar to the exploitation of nature. The belief that these resources are available indefinitely is wrong in both cases, and both resources are currently at their limits. The pandemic made this particularly clear in the case of care work. That’s why Selma James is also advocating a recent campaign, “Green New Deal for Europe”. This calls for a “care income” to ensure all forms of care work, both for other people and for the environment.
Der Spiegel (Germany)
Lou Zucker 8 March 2021
Care work extends into the paid sphere tasks that are performed in the private sphere without pay, usually by women. Rather than underwriting the argument that domestic work also deserves pay (as put forward by the International Wages for Housework campaign, founded by Selma James in the 1970s), this fact unfortunately means that care work is undervalued both in terms of status and remuneration, on the spurious grounds that anyone can do it and it’s often done for free.
London Review of Books
Arianne Shahvisi 8 March 2021
Should housework have a salary? 5 women calculate their ‘unpaid’ income
Ever wondered how much you’d earn if those hours of domestic labour came with a wage? We asked three women to submit their invoices
The Daily Telegraph
Rebecca Reid 4 March 2021
See also:
Caring for People and Planet against Poverty and Dictatorship
Global Women’s Strike press release, 8 March 2021
On International Women’s Day we will be Honouring Mothers as Caregivers
Global Women’s Strike, letter to Camden New Journal, 4 March 2021