That's a lot of different theoretical frameworks. What about just throwing out some kind of minimum guaranteed income and seeing how things come out in the wash?
I find the seven criteria conceptually muddled. They are all closely linked to gender equality/equity but most of them would still be societal concerns if we were genderless. And then it uses them as the criteria to weigh different models of welfare state of without other practical criteria like cost.
I like that it's weighing different utopias but I wonder if the two it proposes are as different as all that. Universal Breadwinner (UB) could make publicly-guaranteed daycare a highly attractive option but it couldn't force people to take that option, so it would need to make some provision for people who want to take time off, and therefore inevitably share aspects of Caregiver Parity (CP).
CP is more compatible with the slow phaseout of work overall.
We get a lot more options practically if we start organizing ourselves into 4+-parent households like Terra Ignota.
What about just throwing out some kind of minimum guaranteed income and seeing how things come out in the wash?
I remember something that college professor said -- that if a philosopher is making an argument about how people should behave (or what decisions we should make) it must contain two elements (1) a clear framework for making recommendations (2) an account of why people should be motivated by those concerns.
One legitimate reaction to the essay is, "hmmm, I'm not sure how committed I am to gender equity in the first place."
I find the seven criteria conceptually muddled. They are all closely linked to gender equality/equity but most of them would still be societal concerns if we were genderless.
I agree, and there's overlap between them. But you can still understand what Fraser is trying to do, even if it isn't the final word on gender equity.
Bleah. I'm really interested in this stuff, but haven't had time to focus on the essay or on this post.
As a vague thought, all of these concepts work very differently in a full-scale utopia than they do with any sort of half-measures. That is, a generous Caregiver Parity model is one thing. A Caregiver Parity model where women are socially expected to do caregiving labor when family members require it (minor children, elderly parents), and are compensated at a minimally adequate level for that time, but are left for the rest of their adult lives with damaged employability and no compensation for it, is going to be pretty rough on women.
That is, I've spent twenty years in a Universal Breadwinner-style marriage, which ended unexpectedly pretty close to when the kids are ready to be off on their own. Which means that I am financially absolutely fine - I've got a long work history, making me as secure as I could be for the remaining 20-25 years before retirement.
If I'd been doing caregiving labor full-time while my kids were at home, and being supported with some kind of stipend that would come to an end when they no longer needed care, I'd be looking at a very different prospect for the latter half of my life.
The whole thing struck me as kind of sloppy. As I read it, for instance, Fraser says her 7 conditions are necessary for equity and strongly implies, but avoids saying, that they're also jointly sufficient. Of course if she made that claim explicitly that opens her to the neverending "But what about $THING" rejoinders the OP alludes to. Choosing not to make the claim and to defer that shitshow to another day is fine, but then she should just come out and say that's what she's doing.
5: I don't read it that way.
She says,
"In what follows, I assume that gender equity is complex in this way. And I propose an account of it that is designed for the specific purpose of evaluating alternative pictures of a postindustrial welfare state. For issues other than
welfare, a somewhat different package of norms might be called for."
I think the whole spirit of the essay is: these are normative commitments we should expect an ideal welfare state to satisfy, and enumerating them helps (as NickS suggests) account for trade-offs in gender equity in different welfare policy designs. I don't think she's claiming an exhaustive account of gender equity or really needs one to do what she's trying to accomplish.
4.last is very true for lots of people. For example, my mom didn't work for only maybe 10 years from when she graduated college until she turned 65. But any pension she got on her own was way too small to have provided for her in retirement without a share of dad's. Granted, her field was never going to pay as much as my dad's, but breaking your career in your 30s in a very hard thing to recover from.
Right, so CP requires major changes to how workplaces function too. Ideally: more task-sharing, shorter workweeks, less careerism in general.
I was thinking of automated nurturing/learning pods for kids from conception through 16 years of age, but we could try your way while we wait for technology to catch up.
REALLY long comment spinning off LB's thoughts about her own setup. Doing quick math that may be wrong, it looks like girls' post-adoption stipends would be enough alone to keep our family just barely above the poverty line. I've definitely done the math for myself that we can get by in a frugal version of our more middle-class lives for a while on that plus child support plus unemployment. (Part of the girls' daycare/after-school care is also subsidized by the state as part of their adoption agreement, or life would be significantly less affordable, though tons better now that kindergarten starts today.)
I was being paid hourly in my job, so I was hurting myself financially every time I took time off for an appointment (we average six a week at this point, though it's not always this bad) or transportation or something at the school. I don't regret doing those things, but each unpaid hour also then factored into my total hours for the year and thus the amount I'd get paid for my days off and so on. I was not as focused on the job or as reliable as I had been as a single person when I was being called down to the school to de-escalate a crisis every day this spring or when I had a child in the hospital or having a health emergency. The stipend money does in a sense make up for that, but also didn't contribute to social security or my 401(k). Lee always made more money than I did, up to twice as much, but our relationship was complicated enough that I've always thought of my expenses in a solo context.
I know I've said that as essentially a single parent (I know you're not supposed to say that is there is another parent in the picture, but we're close enough I feel mostly okay about the phrase) working full-time and trying to take care of three small children with technical special needs, two of them in acute need, would have been really difficult even if I were healthy, which I was and am not. And I don't know how to square all of this. I took the job and took on these particular children. We know how the US healthcare system is disturbing and broken (the girls' monthly stipend would not cover even half of the charged costs from the 10-day process of figuring out what the lump in my breast was, for one unplanned instance) and so I did things like defer physical therapy I needed because I couldn't afford it in time and the money piece wouldn't have been much fun either.
So at this point I'm generously unemployed for the next little while and have met my out-of-pocket health spending maximum, meaning for the girls with their Medicaid and me with no copays anymore treatment is free for the rest of the year. I have the time during the day to shop and cook as I couldn't while working. I can get a lot of appointments and therapy and the time-consuming process of scheduling and getting new specialists up to speed and all that done. I can be on partial bed rest like I need to be. I'm basically being paid for this and it's subjectively wonderful. But it's not what our system is set up to facilitate in general. Soon I'll be healthy (right?) and the girls will be healthier and I'll be expected to find paid work to keep me occupied when I'm not doing the subsidized work of caring for them. (As I've said before, ours is a relatively generous state in how much subsidy is offered, but I have yet to find a place that would board a dog for that per diem paid, so that's the scale we're working with.)
In some Heinlein story children are put in suspended animation at birth so their parents can raise the brats later, after careers are well-established.
6: My notes are definitely sloppy, so I won't fight it. But impressed I was not. Also, my house is glass.
People who live in glass houses should expect any outdoor cats they have to get their fill of disabled or dead birds.
A version of gender equity which, for example, depends on paid care-giving (which is an obvious possibility under the Universal Breadwinner model) which is disproportionately delivered by people of color will not have succeeded (the "ain't i a woman" principle).
I want to take issue with this, as not obviously or necessarily true.
That is, I don't think paid and unpaid care-giving are the same thing, or even particularly close to it, even though one can be substituted for the other to an extent. Trying to make this concrete:
The difficulty, or a difficulty, with family-based unpaid caregiving is that it is a task which someone has to accept residual responsibility for -- whatever a kid actually needs, caregiving-wise, the parents are responsible for getting done. There's no limit (other than in a total breakdown of the relationship) on what the caregiver is expected to do; the limitation is only the real needs of the child (or, similarly, of any family member who needs care). If you are the parent of a toddler, e.g., you must be in that toddler's presence 24 hours a day, or specifically arrange for another responsible adult to take over for any period of time you are elsewhere.
Describing it that way makes parenting sound like a horrible burden, and it's mostly not, but it's an uncontrollable burden. You don't get to decide what the limits on it are, they're set by the actual needs of your child (or other needy family member). (Similarly, if you have a bedridden parent or other relative who needs feeding/bathing/medical procedures, you're on the hook for whatever's necessary without limitation, either doing it yourself or arranging for it to be done.)
Paid caregiving is entirely different -- it's the same tasks, minute-by-minute, but nothing like the same acceptance of responsibility. You work your hours, you go home at the end of the day, and you get paid for it. You're not responsible past the end of the day, you're not responsible to keep working if the paychecks stop coming. It's not fundamentally different from any other job in that regard.
Now, there are justice issues if caregiving jobs are systematically bad jobs (which they generally are -- underpaid and with bad working conditions). And there are justice issues if women and people of color are more likely to have those bad jobs (which they also generally are). But I don't think those issues are conceptually distinct from the issues around any bad jobs that are disproportionately held by women and POC, just because they're caregiving jobs. And I do think those issues are distinct (not less important than, but different from) the issues around the placement of intra-family, unpaid, care responsibility.
14 is a good point. Also, kids pretty much always seem to sleep eventually*. Elders with dementia, not so much.
* Only two pieces of baby advice are worth passing on. For those first months, when the baby goes to sleep, you go to sleep unless you're actually driving a car or something. Second, a hair dryer (on cold) is the best way to dry an ass to avoid rash.
I thought preventing domestic-partner violence pretty clearly falls under "anti-exploitation."
Now, there are justice issues if caregiving jobs are systematically bad jobs (which they generally are -- underpaid and with bad working conditions). And there are justice issues if women and people of color are more likely to have those bad jobs (which they also generally are). But I don't think those issues are conceptually distinct from the issues around any bad jobs that are disproportionately held by women and POC, just because they're caregiving jobs.
I'd agree with that (mostly). I think all of that's true, but I'm not sure that's enough to say that we can exclude those issues from an analysis of gender equity.
The reason why I tried to connect it to care-giving specifically was to demonstrate that it was connected to the gender analysis being done in the article. I do think that the gender-specific elements are just the tip of the iceberg and that most of the problem does lie in, "the issues around any bad jobs that are disproportionately held by women and POC." But I still feel comfortable saying that it isn't quite right to just push it into the "other issues" bucket.
But, perhaps, I am doing the "But what about $THING" move that MC mentioned. My hope was that introducing other elements wasn't merely nit-picking but also a way to demonstrate that her list serves rhetorical purposes (as well as analytical purposes) and that considering an expanded list makes it easier to see the way in which she glides past some issues that will ultimately require more attention.
I thought preventing domestic-partner violence pretty clearly falls under "anti-exploitation."
I almost made a point that "anti-poverty' could fit under anti-exploitation -- that isn't obvious that it needs to be it's own category. I do think there's some muddiness going on in that some of her 7 categories are primarily analytical and some, like anti-poverty, are on the list because of facts about the world.
So, yes, we could also imagine a shorter list -- but that wouldn't necessarily be an improvement, because it might be cleaner conceptually but also exacerbate the problem of gliding past important issues without highlighting them . . .
AFAICR anti-exploitation was to be achieved by making benefits receivable by right, not subject to the whims of an employer, official or family member. Those conditions can all be met, but not protect a women from domestic violence, except to the extent the income makes it easier for her to leave; but AFAIK material dependency is only part of the story in most abusive relationships.
17: I brought it up because, while I don't at all think this was your intent, I think that issue is generally raised as part of an argument that moving caregiving tasks from one woman (as an intra-family unpaid caregiver) to another (as a paid caregiver) can't possibly be an increase in gender equity.
And I think that's a bad argument, so I want to react to it when it's even implicitly referred to. As I argued above, I am better off, personally, than I would have been if I had devoted myself to unpaid caregiving for the period when my kids needed full-time care: if we're just looking at the outcomes for me and Tim, if I'd stayed home for that period I'd be comparatively economically screwed by the career interruption.
But I could work for pay in that period because I hired another woman (who was fantastic) for seven years to spend eight hours a day with the kids. Now, I could hire her because I'm richer than she is -- there's inequality there. But her lifetime economic position wasn't injured by that seven years of eight-hours-a-day caring for Sally and Newt the way mine would have been. For her, it was a paid job, that as a job was similar to other jobs she could have gotten. She got social security credit, when the job came to an end she was able to get another, similar but better paying job partially on the strength of that work experience and her relationship with us. The fact that she had a series of caregiving jobs and her husband had a series of non-caregiving jobs did not, as far as I can tell, exacerbate gender inequity between the two of them.
Tl:dr --the gender inequity in imposing unpaid caregiving on women within the family is not simply shifted, but can be meaningfully reduced, when some of that caregiving is substituted with paid caregiving.
And I think that's a bad argument, so I want to react to it when it's even implicitly referred to
It's a good point, and I both appreciate you pressing the point, and was just trying to make clear that I thought I could concede that point and still retain the reason that I had for mentioning care-giving in that part of my argument.
Incidentally, I just went back to the original essay to see if the addressed the question and it's worth quoting. I would say both that it's obvious that my summary of the UB model left out some of these parts and also that I'm still not convinced by some of her moves. For example when she says "must" in the excerpt what exactly does that mean? Presumably it means "logically required" but that's really "logically required to achieve the most ideal version of this possible" it doesn't actually provide much guidance about a non-ideal version.
How would [UB] organize carework? The bulk of such work would be shifted from the family to the market and the state, where it would be performed by employees for pay. Who, then, are these employees likely to be? In many countries today, including the United States, paid institutional carework is poorly remunerated, feminized, and largely racialized and/or performed by immigrants. But such arrangements are precluded in this model. If the model is to succeed in enabling all women to be breadwinners, it must upgrade the status and pay attached to carework employment, making it, too, into primary-labor-force work. [UB], then is necessarily committed to a policy of "comparable worth"; it must redress the widespread undervaluation of skills and jobs currently coded as feminine and/or "nonwhite," and it must remunerate such jobs with breadwinner-level pay.
...
[UB] is far removed from present realities. It requires massive creation of primary-labor-force jobs -- jobs sufficient to support a family single-handedly. That, of course, is wildly askew of current postindustrial trends, which generate jobs not for breadwinners but for "disposable workers." ...
when she says "must" in the excerpt what exactly does that mean?
Something like "justice requires"
And, yes, it's all ideal theory. My writeup, hopefully written during my cross-country flight tomorrow, will be on thinking through the limits of that in terms of guidance for political practice.
(In the interests of abstract fairness, the way I've written the last couple of comments looks, in retrospect, as if I'm saying that I had sole responsibility for the kids and Tim was checked out. This was not at all, remotely, the case -- I'm contrasting my situation with one where I would have had sole. or at least strongly predominant, responsibility.)
I'm sure he was right there, regurgitating food down their throats.
I read NickS's analysis, which inspired me to read the original article. I suspect a lot of Nick's points would have slid right by on a shallow reading, but I noticed them once I was primed.
The article does feel like an odd mix of "assume a pony" and "given the practical effects of pony ownership...", but it also feels like a good level of abstraction to think about the broad issues. The careful layout of the Universal Breadwinner model and its weaknesses did a good job of highlighting the default assumptions that I was making about how to improve the welfare state.
Also like Nick, I think that her concluding section was a bit brief to assume so many positive outcomes, even if the benefits of a Universal Caregiver do make intuitive sense.
One of the hardest problems in all of the systems appears to be intentional--the lack of judgement and analysis as to required care giving, since we want to prevent case workers from influencing the decisions, or turning carework back into means tested and denigrated assistance. Without some means of fine grained analysis of the carework demand--and, honestly, even with it--I suspect that state compensation for time will be heavily socially litigated. eg: Why do Molly's Mom and Dad get only a 25% salary replacement, but Becky's gets 35%? If you don't differentiate, then people with more demanding carework are back to supplementing their wages & benefits with unpaid labor.
Still, I found the essay and discussion that NickS began a great starting point for more thought. Thanks!
Something like "justice requires"
I wouldn't go that far. Because, again, that passage doesn't frame the "must" in terms of gender equity, it's in relation to the requirements (that she infers/defines) of the ideal UB policy (it might not be a requirement of some other policy).
thinking through the limits of that in terms of guidance for political practice.
I'll be curious to read that. I didn't really engage with any questions about political practice questions in my write-up, so I'll be interested in your take.
We used to have what we called the Swedish Pooping Chair. I don't remember the real name now, but it was some Scandinavian brand. Whenever he went in, he crapped something fierce. Fortunately, the chair had a washable fabric seat.
Could somebody add 13 posts ahead of it so as to avoid breaking the 40-post rule?
Vox has a well-written but depressing article by somebody who's job in 2010 required them to call people who had exhausted their unemployment benefits to tell them that they would be cut off.
This anecdote relates to the discussion about how intimate-partner violence can relate to the welfare system.
Despite the toll of angry call after angry call, the painful reality of what people live through would often hit me. It hurt not to be able to help them.
One woman called me and I had to explain to her that she could not collect unemployment because she had quit a job and was deemed ineligible for her reasons for leaving. And then she hadn't earned enough wages at her next job to clear the original determination.
Her reasons for leaving job one and getting fired from job two? She had to flee the area she lived in to escape an abusive relationship. Her ex found her a few weeks after she settled into a new job and beat her so badly she was hospitalized for more than a week, and her new job fired her. And I had to tell her there was nothing we could do to help her. A good day was a day I didn't have to take a call like that.
Argh! I missed this discussion because Mr JPJ wanted me to go kayaking instead.
Just wanted to note that I really appreciate NickS's analytic summary.
Yay! Thanks.
I'm still interested if CB does another response as well.