In the recent elections in Tamil
Nadu, it was the filmstar turned politican Kamal Hassan who came with the
proposal of basic income for housewives for undertaking domestic work. The idea
was women do household work yet they are not paid in any form. This work
constitutes productivity and needs to be monetized and hence must be paid. This
idea has been gaining some traction or debate though the context in which Kamal
would have spoken was electoral. The view that household work needs to be monetized
is not something new. Feminist literature has been discussing about the same. There
are certain judicial observations on the same, though judiciary hardly has any
role in the same. Therefore, it would be interesting to examine at some length the
proposals that are in play.
Women engaged in household work, in
the unpopular opinion, has nothing to do with patriarchy. It is essentially an
outcome of the division of labour. There is a household production function. The
household does produce output some of which is monetized and thus takes care of
the needs of the household. The occupational character of the profession in the
past necessitated men to work outside and earn for the family. This implied
that women would look after the domestic needs in the family like childcare, domestic
cooking and other household work. If one were to draw the theory from production
possibility curve, it was akin to the family being treated as a microcosm of
society itself. The family would produce a given set of output in the context
of deployment of factors of production. If both husband and wife were to
produce at the full employment potential, there would be certain output that
would be produced on the production possibility frontier. The family would
settle on the production possibility frontier at a point wherein it could maximize
its output given the constraints.
To borrow from the indifference
curves, the family would settle on a producer indifference curve given the
constraints. There would be maximization of utility subject to constraints in
terms of income etc. If the family were to target an income and if one could
not meet the income, the other had to supplement the income. In other words, it
was the targeted income and the utility it derived that determined the decision
of the womenfolk in the family to work or otherwise. The decision to have more
children in relatively lower income families linked to more hands means more
work translating into more income was an outcome of the same. Hence at a very
preliminary analysis, it is evident that the division of labour was an outcome
of natural economic thinking, relative opportunity costs rather than an
explicit assertion of patriarchal authority as the feminist literature indicate
to. For instance, in the hunter gatherer societies, it was extremely difficult
for women to go hunting or food gathering given their biological constraints. It
was thus natural for men to do this work with the relative context of the women
engaging in domestic work. Thus it was the opportunity costs that determined
the division of labour rather than anything else.
The current debate thus has little
connection to natural economics but more presumes on a supposed patriarchy. There
is of course a need to build models to highlight the household production.
Current productivity models do not account for the same. The models account for
work done for consideration but ignore the work engaged in shared economy or household
economy without consideration. The productivity with reference to child care,
domestic working like cleanliness, cooking, washing clothes or utensils if done
within the family does not get accounted for. However, if there exists a maid
or child caretaker, given the money exchanging hands, this becomes a part of
the economy and thus the national output and income. Yet, this concept does
raise questions on the mechanism of disbursing the income.
The first question is about who
finances the income. The answer at this moment seems to be the state. This in
turn would be analogous to the concept of Universal Basic Income in some ways. It
is essentially money transfer to the families for domestic work. This again
would pose a question on the families who hire maids for work. This implies if
maids are paid, will the families get paid or otherwise. There is a possibility
of families while employing maids would indicate they haven’t employed to
pocket the money. In other words, it would be mean the maids and other household
workers would have to be formalized and thus lot of bureaucratic mingling would
happen. Secondly, there exists a possibility of women having gained the target
income declining to join the work force. This would reduce women’s
participation in workforce. The lowering participation in workforce coupled
with transfer payments with zero marginal product would increase revenue
expenditure, thus deficit and perhaps float inflationary tendencies. This is
not something different what happened during the roll out of MNREGA.
There is no doubt that such ideas
look lucrative from the political grandstanding and woke views. Yet when one examines
them at depth, their unintended consequences are one too many. it would
increase the wages in the formal economic sector if they have to attract women into the job. If women were to not receive
these payments from the state if they are working, there is a good possibility
of many women preferring to stay off rolls in workplace to claim this money. Therefore,
in some ways, the work force composition would change with many women while
working in practice may indicate to be housewives on paper. This would be the
reverse of the intended situation. The firms too might seek to leverage the
same given they do tend to have workforce which would prefer to remain off
paper. In such instances, all that is happening is the money transfer taking
place without any genuine empowerment of women as would be the original
intention of the proposal.
As suggested above, it might sound
woke to support the idea of basic income for household work, but the unintended
consequences would perhaps derail the idea and bring together new challenges.
Women empowerment is needed and critical yet the methods that are being chosen
are bereft of common understanding of economics. In this context, the failure
if bound to be certain.
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