1
This is an electronic version of a working paper later published in Feminist Economics 5(3), 1999, pp. 43-59. Feminist Economics is available online at: http://journalsonline.tandf.co.uk/ and the article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/135457099337806
Of Markets and Martyrs:
Is it OK to Pay Well for Care?
Julie A. Nelson
ABSTRACT
If caring work were well paid, would it lose some of the special, emotional, interpersonal aspects we want in “real” care relationships? Some fear that the introduction of “market values” would lead to such an outcome. This article seeks to bring to light some logical fallacies and insufficiently expunged gender dualisms that may lie, unexamined, under such concerns. Examining how we think and talk about markets, meanings, and motivations, it argues that the foci of feminist concern should instead be the concrete structures of caregiving and the problem of under-demand.
KEYWORDS: Caring, labor, wages, dualism, markets, commodification
1
Introduction
The question posed in the title, " Is it OK to Pay Well for Care?" might seem an odd one. To some feminists, higher pay for caring work, like personal care of the young, the elderly and the ill, seems an obvious economic and political goal. Caring work has increasingly moved out of women's traditional realm of the home and into the public realms of market and governmental provision, in many industrialized countries. Caregivers, however, remain predominately female, and their paychecks tend to remain small in comparison to those for other occupations with comparable requirements and working conditions. On grounds of both labor market equity and of "revaluing" women's traditional contributions, the desired outcome may seem clear. How to get to higher wages, not whether to get them, would seem to be the pressing question.
When feminists get down to discussing the issue, however, more nuanced and conflicted views can appear. Is it appropriate to apply "market values" to caring work? Does demanding higher money payment just buy into masculinist norms of markets and commodification? Aren't we somehow assured of a higher level of "real" caring, if the workers chose this work, when they could have made more money elsewhere? Isn't it somehow insulting, at a human and relational level, to pay someone, like a foster parent, for providing love and affection? Would higher pay somehow foment a draining away of the emotional and interpersonal elements, which we suppose to be in that work currently, that make a recipient feel truly "cared for"? Or might higher pay create an influx of pseudo-carers into such jobs "just for the money"? Meanwhile, what about the Neoclassical economic argument that, according to the theory of compensating wage differentials, low-paid care workers are fully compensated, but just taking part of their pay in warm feelings instead of cash? No one, of course, explicitly advocates that care should be low paying…but somehow these worries lurk just below the surface.
While such questions reflect genuine and justifiable concern, I argue, in what follows, that such a focus on the perceived drawbacks of higher payment may cause us to worry about the wrong things, and thus misdirect our analysis and our policy advocacy. I argue that much of our fear of “market values” is due to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, that much of our romanticization of altruistic behavior carries overtones of old sexist ideologies, and that the "acceptance of low pay indicates high quality" story is far from the only story to be told. The purpose is not to advocate for a laissez faire approach to caring work, but rather to expand and clarify the analysis of care, money, quality, meaning, and markets.
This article does not, alas, address the complementary issue of how, in fact, wages could be raised, and who would foot the bill, nor does it give a review of the wide-ranging and rich feminist social science literature on caring labor.[1] The focus is largely limited to the debates as they have developed in North America and Europe, and I will not, here, address the important issues of men's involvement in caring labor, the crowding of women into caring occupations, women’s advancement in other fields, unwaged care, or the merits of non-profit or state vs. for-profit organization.
How Emphasizing "The Market" Leads Us Astray
Market Jitters
One source of nervousness about higher pay may have to do with fears of commodification. That is, one may fear that if an activity were, in some sense, fully paid for, then it would come to obey the laws of anonymous, objectified, self-interested exchange. People providing care may come to change the way they feel about what they do, with negative consequences. Keeping caring labor only quasi-paid, however, might be thought to offer some protection from it becoming so drained of personal and social meaning.
An article in this journal in 1996 reported on a heated debate on related issues which took place over the FEMECON-L list (Weisskopf and Folbre, eds., 1996). Worry about market notions of self-interested exchange coming to "corrode ties of affection and obligation" was expressed by Nancy Folbre (1996, 83). Peter Dorman, in the same exchange, warned about how the "greased chute" of the spread of market ideals leads to the "marketization of just about everything" (1996, 75). The Marxist notion of alienation, which implies that the production of something for exchange in the service of profit-seeking capital commodifies it, perverting it by draining it of personal and social meaning, seems to be behind this reasoning. One often sees this same fear of markets in writings by sociologists and anthropologists about "gift" vs. "commodity" exchange (e.g., Carruthers and Espeland, 1998). Very negative views of monetization, however, come not only from the political left, or from non-economists. Dierdre McCloskey, an economist whose sentiments are more libertarian, wrote at one point that if childcare, friendly listening, etc. "were paid labor the love would disappear. Love is in this regard the opposite of market exchange" (1996, 138).
Actual Markets vs. The Idealized Market
What has been lost in these discussions, however, is the crucial realization that commodification is a matter of meaning, that is, a matter of social understanding, rather than something that is essential to a good or activity out there "in reality." We often talk of The Market (capital "M"), as if it were something different and apart from Society, when in fact actual markets are just one more place where social interactions take place (Nelson, 1998). Money, for example, is often idealized, and thought of as an homogenizing agent that automatically flattens social relationships. Yet, as Viviana Zelizer (1995) has pointed out, the social meaning of money is revealed in the variety of ways we think about taxes, transfers, ransoms, reparations, bonuses, tips, bribes, etc. Even money itself has no meaning apart from social relations--the use of currency, for example, is based quite entirely on trust, and not on ingots in Fort Knox (Heillener, 1998).
The Market, with its Neoclassical trappings of self-interest, optimization, competition, and laissez faire interactions, is a complex metaphor which we can use as one lens for examining social interactions; it is not to be confused with a concrete reality. We fall into what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness," if we regard the concept of The Market as truly real, and actual markets as simply somewhat corrupted "appearances" reflecting imperfectly such an underlying ideal. What is real, is what we see. And what we see, if we look, are that most actual markets (small "m") are domains of rich and complex social relationships. Child care markets, in my own experience, tend to be examples of "rich" markets in which the movement of money is only one dimension in a complex relationship of child, caregivers, and parents including elements of (when it is going well) trust, affection, and appreciation. A market relation between people who don't know each other, who are each acting in their "own interests" in a transaction of pure commodity exchange, is only one of many possibilities.
The Importance of Language
To speak of “pay” tends to immediately call forth images of The Market, and hence the language we use when describing issues of care and money contains hidden pitfalls. Nancy Folbre in her important work on "the paradox of caring labor" (1995) quoted me as saying that "if support for parenting is considered 'payment' for children it implies that children are commodities; if it is considered 'compensation' for children, it implies that children are burdens" (87). Similarly, if we think about caregiving work being "paid," or given "in an exchange," or provided "on the market," we all too easily bring in images of arms-length, self-interested behavior. The line which follows my point in Folbre (1995), however, might be misinterpreted: "In other words, the only way to preserve the true value of this work is not to pay for it--another example of the paradox of caring labor" (87). My intended point was to show how the rhetoric of "pay" limits our vision of how money functions in social relationships, not to argue that low (or no) wages somehow offers protection. Perhaps a better rhetorical approach is to note, simply, that some social relationships involve the "movement" of money--a deliberately neutral term--before discussing the meaning of such movement to the parties involved.
Money and Motivations
There is evidence that what can "drive out" caring feelings is not the movement of money itself, but rather the social meaning given to this movement. Bruno Frey (1996, 1997) is one scholar who has worked at the borders of economics and psychology, comparing extrinsic motivation (like pay) to intrinsic motivation ("when [people] undertake an activity for its own sake," 1996, 5).[2] One of his conclusions is that "External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if they are perceived to be controlling and they crowd-in intrinsic motivation if they are perceived to be acknowledging" (1996, 11, emphasis in original). Applied to the case at hand, this suggests that too direct a pay-for-specific-services approach to compensating caring activities could shift the perceived locus of control to the outside of the worker. In that case, the activity is no longer meaningful in the sense of expressing her or his own will and agency, and building his or her own relational network, but is merely done for exchange. On the other hand, if the movement of money is understood as an acknowledgement and appreciation of the worker's own intrinsic motivations, it can actually strengthen such motivations. Just why it is that money is perceived to be "moving," then, is important.
Clare Ungerson (1995) discusses how terms like "honorarium," "paid volunteers," "quasi-wages payments", or "allowances" are sometimes used strategically to distinguish European systems of support for informal care from formal "paid" care. She writes that such distinctions
…represent an upholding of the public/private dichotomy…The expectation is that there is already…a pool of labour within the private domain which is subject to the pressures of affect, kinship obligation and duty, reciprocity, biography, altruism and habit… The point of symbolic payments is to reinforce these pressures at an ideological level by implicitly suggesting that informal carers undertake care work for 'love'--the common shorthand term for the pressures listed above--and not for money. (1995, 44)
The fact that "[s]ymbolic payments will be represented as 'recognition'…of the special and desireable qualities of those who care" (45) would seem to put them on the side of Frey's intrinsic motivation-enhancing rewards. So far, so good. The levels, however, of such money movements are nearly always below the legal minimum wage, so that they may also trap the carers in poverty (Ungerson, 48).
The Question of Levels
Here we get back to the crux of the matter. Why are the levels of such “quasi-wages” low? Is it because the recipients perceive the low level of such payments as being particularly affirming of their work--that they would feel insulted by higher receipts? According to Ungerson, there is evidence suggesting the opposite. A survey of "allowance" recipients reveals they "want more money--not less, or none at all" (1995, 47). This should not be too surprising. Does one ever, to suggest a parallel, hear the argument that the substantial cash attached to a Nobel Prize insults those recipients? Certainly a more plausible explanation for the low cash value attached to "recognition" of caring labor is the desire on the part of administrative bodies to keep costs down.
This analysis suggests that instead of focusing on abstract Markets and the fact of money movement, effort would be better expended on the study of concrete markets and the structures, social meanings, and working conditions of the real places where caring labor is done (e.g. Strober et al., 1995). While the deliberately bland rhetoric of the “movement” of money may help to move us past the baggage that comes with the vocabulary of “pay,” the next step is to clarify what, in fact, the movements mean. Do they serve to further relationships of respect and reciprocity? Or do they further relationships of oppression and exploitation, by race, class, gender, and/or immigration status?
Why "For the Money" Isn't Necessarily So Bad
Materialism and selfishness?
The rhetoric that individuals are motivated "by money" and driven by their "own interests" when engaging in relationships of exchange also needs unpacking. The connotations of these phrases tend to be of morally suspect materialism and selfishness (at least from some leftist, religious, or cultural feminist points of view). One is seen as working for love or money; that is, out of spiritual values, affection, and altruism, or out of crass materialism, self-interest, and greed. Such a dichotomy implicitly assumes, however (along with Neoclassical economics), first, that market agents' actions spring from their unquenchable (nonsatiable) wants, and second, that they are autonomous monads.