on getting a wage for housework

I've heard people say, somewhat cheekily, but sometimes with a straight face, "My cleaner makes more an hour than I do!" Bub, if that were true, you'd quit your job and be cleaning right now. There are obvious mathematical reasons why this is a silly thing to blurt out, but I'm more interested in what this says about people's conception of labour.

When you choose to pay me to clean your house, you're buying my time. If you're reading this and earning an hourly wage, this is true for you, too. Your employer doesn't buy your spreadsheets. He buys your time, by the hour. This is wage labour: this is capitalism; we've pretty much been doing it like this for two hundred years.

But more than buying my time, you're buying yours. You sell your time to your employer, and then, because you spend so much of your week at work, you buy a bit of your free time back from me. There's a dollar value on an hour of your time when you're at work - how much is it worth at home? The same? More? Less?

Consciously or subconsciously, it's hard for people to see cleaning as real work deserving real wages. It's hard for people to put a dollar value on domestic labour. The reason for this is that we're used to women's domestic labour being free. My clients sometimes try to haggle me on price, and I've learned not to take this personally, because the number value they're used to putting on house work is zero.

This isn't because house work isn't skilled. It's not because house work is easy. It's not because house work is such a joy, the pleasure of cleaning is its own reward. If it really was true that your cleaner made more per hour than you (it's not), would that be so strange? Why would that be so inconceivable? It's because house work is women's work, and we're socialised to expect women to provide their labour for nothing.

Women take on the overwhelming burden of unpaid domestic labour across the planet. This is so overwhelmingly backed up by every time-use survey for the last couple of decades I'm not even gonna provide a source. If you don't believe me and want to fight, please do! I encourage you to go look up the stats and make that bibliography for me. I'm not gonna. I'm tired.

We've known this for a long time. In the 1970s, Italian sociologist Silvia Federici co-founded the Wages for Housework movement. She argued that women play an integral role in the economic success of a nation. Women have the job of feeding, housing and clothing workers when they come home from waged employment, in order for those workers to be refreshed and ready to be productive the next day. More importantly; women birth, raise and educate the next generation of workers.

Federici, and other feminists, argued that this valuable domestic labour should receive a wage, because without it, the economy would fall apart. Women's socially reproductive labour is the engine of any nation.

You're reading this in the year 2025, so it won't come as a huge shock that Wages for Housework never really took off. It received pushback not just from misogynists and capitalists, but from leftists and Marxists too.

The Marxist argument against Wages for Housework was primarily that the home is a sanctuary space. The activities and relationships that happen within the home are our one refuge from the unstoppable grind of capitalism and wage labour. We don't want to recreate the transactional and oppressive power dynamics of the workplace in our own families, right? When we finish work and walk through our front doors, certain 1970s Marxists argued, we finally belong to ourselves.

If you're a woman reading this, I'm guessing the hackles are already rising on the back of your neck. Especially if you're a mum. You know better than anyone, the home is not a sanctuary space. As Federici says, "We have never belonged to ourselves, not for any moment of our lives." (Patriarchy of the Wage, 2021)

All this to say: think of your time. Think about how much it's worth, when you're buying it and when you're selling it. If you're doing unwaged work, know that it still has economic value. Think about how we got to this topsy-turvy inverted world where there's an economic funnel by which rich women pay poor women to do the work they no longer want to provide for free. Can we imagine a fairer, more efficient way to clean?

Further reading:
Moira Donegan, How Domestic Work Became Infrastructure

Silvia Federici, Patriarchy of the Wage

Airlie Hoschild, The Second Shift

Lotika Singh, Work, Labour and Cleaning

Angela Y Davis, Women, Race, and Class

Further Listening:

Don't Drink The Milk, Invisible work: Women strike back

You're Wrong About, Emotional Labour with Rachel Monroe and Ash Compton