Valuing care work: A conversation with Alyssa Battistoni
First published at RS21.
Magdalene and Timor spoke to Alyssa Battistoni about her recent article “Ideology at Work? Rethinking Reproduction”, which engages with social reproduction theory and the Wages for Housework campaign to develop a new theory of the value of what is often called reproductive labour and the role of gender in the sector.
Magdalene: Some Marxist feminists have explained the low wages or absence of wages for reproductive labour as an ideological product of gender or patriarchy. Your work offers an incisive critique of social reproduction theory, arguing that capital’s disinterest in these jobs stems from their low or absent profitability rather than from the fact that women perform them. Given this framework, how should we understand and fight gender oppression? Why is it that so often women, especially racialised women, are working in these jobs, and how does this relate more broadly to oppression?
Alyssa Battistoni: The ways that labour is distributed — who does what kinds of work — are shaped by gender and race. I don’t question that. Many prominent theories explain the role of gender, particularly the ideology of gender, as the force that makes these jobs low-waged. I’m questioning that. Reproductive labour and care have largely shifted from unwaged housework to a low-wage service sector model. It is often racialised migrant women doing these jobs — but also, in some instances, racialised men and migrant men. In other words, this work remains heavily gendered, but many of these low-wage jobs are done by men who have low bargaining power in the labour market as a result of everything from overt racism and discrimination to historical legacies of colonialism or slavery. They have to take the jobs they can get, which leads to these shifting labour patterns.
In the US, for instance, if a Black man is a care worker in a hospital on a low wage, we can’t primarily explain the low wage as being the function of gender. But we can explain the predominance of women in these jobs in relation to a range of factors, from gender socialisation to household structures. We should think about how differently people experience gender, and how people of different genders learn to do different things.
So, for instance, the expectation that women will be nurturing and caring is a form of skill development and job training that the Wages for Housework movement addressed very directly. Selma James talks about women not being born as housewives, but becoming housewives: Women learn to do these jobs by being trained in them. I like to think about gender as a form of labour training (though not only that). That, I think, can help us understand why such work remains so heavily gendered. But I’m trying to push back on the idea that gender is the primary explanatory category for why this work is not valued highly or why we are in a crisis of care.
Gender oppression has a lot of dimensions within the context of capitalism, but the connection between the two does not have to be so direct as to say your job produces your gender or vice versa. We need to think in more complex ways than simply declaring that the status of women in capitalist society is that of the housewife, which is a stylised position that many of these groups took up in the 1970s.
Timor: You explain that wages are low in the care sector because the physical qualities of the work make automation and technological progression largely impossible. We also hold care work to such a high standard that we don’t want its quality to decrease through mechanisation. In the sectors that can’t be outsourced but are necessary to keep our societies alive, migrant labour becomes increasingly important. This often has high costs because social reproduction is performed elsewhere or because precarious contracts and racism make workers more vulnerable. Does this fit into your analysis?
This brings us to the paradox at the heart of the care crisis: why are wages so low while costs are so high? And I do argue that this is fundamentally about the labour process of care itself, and the ways that it resists efficiency and what Marx calls real subsumption. But then a key question concerns how that low-wage, labour-intensive care work is assigned, organised, and distributed. While historical analyses focused on what has been called ‘the woman question’ or gender dynamics can be helpful, they can also be limiting. As I’ve suggested, gender is certainly a factor in why people are more likely to accept poor working conditions, low pay, and other exploitative practices: gender plays a significant role when women are dependent on other family members or have dependents themselves, such as children they need to provide for, which can force people to accept low wages, long hours, and minimal protections. But it’s not the only factor. And of course, the question of migrant labour is crucial here.
When we think about migrant labour, we of course have to think about the state and its relationship to capital. While capital is often seen as the primary employer in discussions of labour, the state plays a significant role in shaping these dynamics.
The state facilitates conditions that create a labour force that is highly exploitable and precarious. The state plays a dual role here: it can threaten migrants — especially undocumented ones — with prosecution or deportation, even as it tacitly enables their availability for certain kinds of jobs. This dynamic is crucial to understanding how these low-wage positions are filled and how capital strategises to acquire and access labour.
This vulnerability is starkly evident in sectors like domestic work. In the US, many nannies and domestic workers are migrants who labour in private homes with few rights or protections. Their work is often completely informal, leaving them in highly precarious situations. While it might be too strong to describe this as outright enslavement, there is a coercive and not entirely voluntary dimension to these arrangements.
Magdalene: There are various attempts to introduce optimisation of care through technology, like AI therapists. What do you think the limits are regarding what people are willing to accept?
One concern is that people might accept subpar solutions — like relying on AI therapists or bots — simply because they feel they have no other options: ‘Well, a therapy bot is better than nothing.’ This is an area where we need more organising and advocacy.
In particular, I think we need more collaboration between care providers and care recipients. It’s a classic situation where better working conditions for care providers directly translate to better care for recipients. As teachers’ unions often say, ‘Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions.’ This is true for care work: better conditions and more support benefits everyone.
Most people would rather have a human caregiver who has the time and capacity to provide quality care than a bot that merely monitors them. Similarly, care workers want the time and resources to deliver quality care. The pushback against wage suppression and the decline in care quality — driven by efforts to squeeze efficiency out of an inherently inefficient sector — is bad for everyone except those profiting from it, whether it’s private capital or a cost-cutting state. So the voices of both workers and care recipients are crucial in shaping policies that prioritise quality care and fair working conditions over cost-cutting measures.
Another issue concerns how people understand the reasons for high costs. William Baumol, a mainstream economist — not a Marxist — argues that costs in technologically stagnant sectors like healthcare will inevitably rise, even if services are publicly provided and run efficiently. This isn’t due to waste, corruption, or inefficiency — it’s just a structural feature of these sectors relative to ones where automation and other technological productivity gains are possible .
This feature, in turn, raises significant questions about how we allocate social surplus and prioritise collective resources. Baumol thinks that societies can afford these rising costs, but his analysis forces us to confront difficult questions about social priorities.
People often perceive rising costs in certain sectors as a sign that something is wrong within those sectors, which isn’t necessarily the case. So we also need to communicate that these sectors simply require public support and that rising costs are not inherently a problem or a sign of malfeasance. This is a hard message to convey, but it’s essential. We can’t treat different sectors in isolation from one another — they’re interconnected, and the divergence between sectors is a product of capitalism itself.
Magdalene: If ‘social reproduction’ has internal contradictions, what does that mean for social movements attempting to combine struggles against exploitation and oppression? Some might argue we should set aside struggles over reproduction to focus on the workplace. How do we best challenge the disinterest of capital in the professions that keep us alive but don’t produce enough profit?
I think struggles over social reproduction remain very important. While I have critiques of social reproduction theory, sometimes these are auto critiques. I have learned a lot from the tradition and see myself very much as a Marxist feminist interested in the problems and questions of social reproduction theory. At the same time, I want to insist that we need to go back and reevaluate our possible over-reliance on tools and concepts developed 50 years ago. That’s a long time! We are as far from the origins of social reproduction theory as the beginning of the women’s liberation movement was from the suffragists. To say that there are internal contradictions in some of the arguments doesn’t mean these are useless as a set of tools.
I also think we should be careful to distinguish between waged and unwaged reproductive labour, and more specific in the resources we bring to bear on different questions. Some struggles over social reproduction are concerned with unwaged work in families and households, but others are more traditional workplace struggles. In my article, for instance, I mention Claudia Jones’ analysis of the complex reasons why Black women tend to be over-represented in waged domestic work, and her prescriptions for worker organising. Domestic workers didn’t have labour protections in the US as a legacy of the New Deal and its racial politics, while segregation meant that Black men didn’t get union jobs and earned low wages. The housewife is a figure of white womanhood, but stereotypes about Black women as nurturing means they are expected to do domestic work. Black women are often at the bottom of the labour market and these circumstances call into question the basic premise of a demand for labour. Jones also said that the Communist Party needs to organise Black women as workers and recognise that domestic workers are a huge, ignored part of the proletariat — not seeing housewives as an “invisible” proletariat, as Wages for Housework did, but literally just pointing to this large group of waged workers who had been neglected, to people doing waged reproductive work which needed to be recognised as continuous with other waged work.
Workplace-focused analysis must be attentive to gender and race to develop effective analysis, strategy and organising but of course there are also dimensions of gender and racial oppression that might not be directly workplace-related. Protections for migrants, for instance, may not be explicitly about the workplace or about social reproduction, but have major implications for both.
More generally, we cannot disconnect workplace analysis from the broader point that everybody has an interest in reproduction at some level. We all need to be reproduced, so there is the potential for this insight to be a really powerful organising or mobilising force when it comes to the question of how to deal with the crisis of care. Neither capital nor the private sector will solve this problem. On principled and practical grounds, we must resist the idea that the existing system could solve these problems, explain why not and think about how to decide on our social priorities. We need to decide that reproductive care is something that people need and that we must provide publicly as a universal good and service for the sake of both the workers who are in these sectors and the people who need this care.
For example, pushing back against private equity in nursing homes can be motivating because people are already horrified by it. Right now, a lot of people in the US are sympathetic to Luigi Mangione, who shot the United Healthcare CEO, because they are so disgusted by the way that private companies are just preying on people’s needs. Finding a way to explain that capitalism is why this is happening and it will keep happening as long as the private sector delivers care is a crucial way of connecting that disgust and horror to thinking more systematically about the causes of the problems that people confront in such intimate ways.
Timor: In your article you discuss the demand not just for redistribution but also to question the wage and labour more generally. One frustrating example of the necessity of this double demand in the US has been the Service Employees International Union’s fight for a $15 minimum wage, which not only doesn’t question the wage at all but isn’t asking for adequate pay. Are there examples of strategies for social movements putting forward a proper double demand today? What do you think of demands focused on time, like a four-day work week or shorter hours? Do these go beyond the demand for fair wages and question the dominance of labour in the organisation of contemporary life generally?
I wanted to bring out that aspect of the Wages for Housework demand because they are so explicit that the demand of wages for housework is also a demand against the wage: it’s famously for and against housework but also for and against the wage. That second part has dropped out of many subsequent uptakes of wages for housework or ‘wages for xyz.’ We should not forget that we also want to push back against the wage as a structure of labour, and the idea of wages as a fair valuation or reflection of work.
When labour movements demand a fair wage, that’s a long-standing and rhetorically powerful claim. It can be quite effective in pointing out that people are doing socially valuable work that’s not being valued adequately. But there is also a way of talking about the true value of work that’s widespread in discussions of care work. People rightly try to reveal the gap between the very low wage for reproductive work we recognise as difficult, skilled labour that is socially valuable and necessary — but the trap comes in suggesting that other work is correctly valued and that it’s only reproductive labour that is incorrectly valued. In the context of a particular struggle, a slogan about the “true value” of work isn’t a terrible thing. But we always need to push back against this idea that wages do generally reflect what work is worth to society, or else we end up accepting the wage as a reflection of social value instead of insisting that it is a social relation structured by power and capital. There’s nothing in the wage that reflects how we want society to be.
Thinking about labour time is also important to challenge the frame in which the wage is the only important category. In struggles over care, the model of organising both recipients and care workers can be very effective on this front, because one of its focuses is limiting work hours — pointing out, for instance, that people working twelve-hour days, six days a week, cannot provide quality care. Overwork is unsafe for both nurses and their patients. Explaining that overwork and underpay are both bad for the workers and for the ‘product’ which in this case is people who need care, can be an effective way of bringing these questions to the fore. Obviously, we should all have shorter working days and weeks in all sectors. But the salience of labour time to care work can be an effective wedge into that conversation.
The fact that care and reproductive labour impact people so directly, and people often have such intimate relationships with these services and the people who provide them, can make seeing the political dimensions of this labour difficult. But it can also open up questions of the wage and the organisation of labour more broadly: once you see the gap between what capital values and what we need with respect to care work, it can lead you to ask – why wouldn’t that be true of everything else?
In other words, I think that reproduction and reproductive labour should illuminate all kinds of labour struggles. Some of the language around reproduction can make it sound like a category entirely distinct from other work, but in my view it’s a much more porous boundary. So I hope that people thinking about more traditional kinds of labour will recognise this as well and look to Marxist feminists not just for thinking about gender but for thinking about work.
