Other Halves: Women, Work
          and a Universal Basic Income

Anne Else
13 Farm Road
Northland
Wellington
 

First, a review of some of the facts about women, paid work, and income in New Zealand today.

The typical female employee, full-time or part-time, is now a woman in her mid-thirties or forties. By 1991, the official statistics tell us, 46 percent of married women were in the full-time labour force, up from only 26 percent 25 years ago. In about 30 percent of all male-female couples, both partners have full-time jobs.

But these figures are misleading, because they are only a snapshot of the whole population at one moment. To see what is really happening, we need to look at particular age groups. Between ages 24 and 54, more than 60 percent of Pakeha women are in the labour force. For those in their mid-thirties to late forties, it goes up to around 70 percent.

Well over half of all Maori and Pacific Islands women aged 30 to 50 are in the labour force too. But unemployment has hit these two groups much harder than Pakeha women, and more of them are now classed as "not in the labour force". The sectors which employed the largest numbers of Maori and Pacific Island women - especially manufacturing - have had the worst job losses. Natalie Jackson has come up with a startling statistic: Maori women currently in their mid thirties have experienced levels of unemployment which are equal to double the average during the Great Depression of the 1930s, for the entire period since 1976. This covers their whole employment age lives so far. 1

Because so much women's employment and unemployment is still hidden, the true figures on their involvement in the labour force are probably much higher. In 1981, Susan Shipley found that women's labour force participation rate stayed above 70 percent right through ages 20 to 49. Among women whose youngest child was 5 or 6, over 85 percent either had a paid job or were looking for one. 2 That was fifteen years ago.

Now, the pay gap. Going by ordinary-time hourly rates, the 1995 pay gap between women and men averaged 18.9 percent. But it varied hugely by industry. It was only 8 percent in construction - but very few women work there. In business and financial services it was 32.5 percent, and in the trading banks it was a whopping 38.3 percent. 3

By 1993, the centenary of women's suffrage, well over a third of all women wage and salary earners - 37 percent - had a weekly income of less than $300 from all their paid jobs, compared with only 14 percent of men. At the other end of the scale, the pattern is reversed. In 1987, only 2 percent of all women on wages or salary earned more than $700 a week. By 1993 this had quadrupled, to 8 percent. But over the same period, the proportion of men earning over $700 went up from 14 percent to 30 percent. 4

These differences accumulate, leading to very large differences between male and female incomes over their lifetimes. The only times when male and female median incomes converge are at the beginning and the end - between ages 15 and 19, and over age 65.

The major underlying reason for these massive income differences is often put in negative terms - women are "not in the paid workforce" or are working "only part-time" or have "interrupted careers". But these terms are misleading. Women earn less than men not because they are not working, or are working less, but because they are working without earning. They are doing unpaid work, at home and in the community. Even more importantly, they are held responsible for most of the vital unpaid work which our society requires, whether they are actually doing it or not.

In combination, these factors have a huge, multi-faceted impact on women's income earning capacity. And today there are new factors to contend with. Women, like men, are now facing an extremely volatile, unstable job market. First, there's been the shift to the service industry, which has happened more rapidly in NZ over the last ten years than anywhere else. But it's not nearly such a dramatic shift for women. The future is where women have always worked. Today two-thirds of all New Zealand's employed people work in services: 55 percent of employed men and 79 percent of employed women, up from 45 percent and 71 percent respectively in 1971.

Hours on the job are changing rapidly too. On the one hand we are seeing the growth of extremely long hours. A third of all employed people in New Zealand now work more than 40 hours week. On the other we are seeing the growth of part-time, casual, on-call jobs which often do not provide a survival wage for even one person. Part-time work now makes up 29 percent of all jobs, up from 5 percent in 1961, and one in three employed people work fewer than 40 hours a week.

Unpaid work responsibilities are not compatible with very long hours or with unpredictable hours and income. Part-time jobs for women are viable only when they are combined with a partner's stable full-time wage. Increasingly that is not the case.

How does our society regard unpaid work? To a very large extent, it does not regard it at all. As Marilyn Waring has pointed out, unpaid work literally "does not count". 5 The prevailing form of economic discourse sees unpaid work, when it sees it at all, as a purely private matter. Having children, for example, is an individual choice. Once a child is born, its parents must support it and raise it themselves, paying others to supply help as required. If they can't afford to do this, they should hand it over to others who want it and are able to pay all the costs involved. The state will supply some assistance, such as a basic education - though even this is under attack from some quarters.

As for the elderly, the state will supply a basic pension - though again, this is now under attack - and some other limited assistance, but family members must supply the rest. Presumably it is also a personal choice to have long-lived parents - or perhaps it is the parent's choice to go on living. People who do not choose to have children are of course less likely to have someone to call on for help in their old age. But they should foresee this problem, and save enough to pay for the help they will need - just as everyone should foresee the possibility of having their earnings interrupted by illness or unemployment, and take out the appropriate insurance.

This line of argument sees almost no place for state welfare of any kind, save as a meagre last resort to prevent outright starvation, let alone for a universal basic income. The twin pillars of society are individual choice, and individual responsibility - making your own bed, then lying on it. The labour market is the central mechanism for human survival. You must either earn your own living from paid work, or find someone else who is prepared to give you a share of what they earn. If you take on unpaid work, and get little or nothing for it, that's your problem.

In my new book, False Economy, I argue that this approach bears no relation to real life. 6 Unpaid work is not an optional extra resulting from private choice. It is essential to the whole of our economic and social life. If it suddenly stopped being done, what we call the economy would immediately cease to function. Unpaid work is not supported by paid work: each supports the other. They are interdependent.

In practice, a range of existing state benefits are paid to people who cannot take on paid work, or enough paid work, because they are doing unpaid work. The obvious example is the domestic purposes benefit. It is overwhelmingly women with children who get this benefit. In June 1995, over 100,000 people with over 173,000 children were getting it, and all but 9 percent of those getting it were women. 7

But what exactly is this benefit for? It is not, in fact, a payment for the unpaid work of looking after children. It can't be, because so many other women are doing this work for nothing. If you pay some, you should pay them all - and we can't have that, can we!

Instead the DPB is really an unemployment benefit - but of a very strange kind. The woman who gets the DPB is getting it because, in effect, she has either failed to get, left, or got the sack from her previous job - not the job of looking after children, or the paid job she perhaps had to leave when she became a sole parent, but the job of looking after a male breadwinner, in return for a share of his wages.

However, being responsible for the children prevents her from taking a paid job to replace the lost share of the male wage. The task of looking after the children is not a contribution in its own right, and it is not work in return for the DPB. It is merely an obstacle stopping her from contributing to society through paid work. The language of the latest document from Social Welfare, whose title is From Welfare to Wellbeing, makes this quite clear. Its income support vision is to enable people on income support, including women on the DPB, "to transform dependency into contribution". 8

The unemployment benefit is much simpler. It has nothing to do with unpaid work. It too is a replacement for a missing wage - but in this case it is a replacement for the person's own missing wage, not someone else's. In June 1995, over 83,000 men were getting unemployment benefit, compared with only 34,000 women. Over one in four of the men were married, compared with fewer than one in eleven of the women. Married women who lose their jobs are not entitled to unemployment benefit if they have husbands who earn more than a pittance. They must simply go back to their real jobs - looking after a man in paid work. If the husband loses his job and gets an unemployment benefit, the couple is not allowed to earn more than $80 a week between them before the benefit - his benefit - starts to disappear.

New Zealand Superannuation is another matter altogether. What is usually completely ignored in any discussion of superannuation is the fact that many of those who get it, particularly the women, are doing enormous amounts of unpaid work. In many cases it is the first independent income they have ever had. But in fact this benefit has nothing to do with paid or unpaid work. Women and men each get it in their own right once they reach the qualifying age. If they are living alone, they get a living alone allowance on top of the basic pension. It is the nearest thing we have to a universal basic income. Perhaps this is why there is so much concern about it!

As economist Susan St John has recently stressed, keeping superannuation in its current form is of vital importance to women. Similarly, only a genuinely universal and genuinely basic income scheme will work for women. The last thing we want is some kind of watered down "wages for housework" scheme, which would serve only to trap women in unpaid work, just as women on the DPB are trapped now.

Even the OECD is starting to see that fundamental change is necessary, not only for women, but for men too. In a 1987 paper on The Future of Social Protection, it pointed out that two "essential questions" for the near future were clear:

If part-time work is to be more frequent, how can part-time work and part-time income support be combined without causing incentive problems and generating excess costs?
How should [social security] contribution systems be structured if a decreasing proportion of remuneration takes the form of employee earnings? Is there a case for transferring some of the contribution burden from earnings to the value-added in production? 9

Taken together, these questions point toward some form of universal basic income. One of the key benefits of a universal basic income for women is that it would provide greatly enhanced opportunities for everyone to do their share of unpaid work and for everyone to combine paid and unpaid work. And looking at what is happening to jobs, that is by far the most sensible option we can devise for the future of work.

 

Endnotes:

  1. Natalie Jackson with Ian Pool, "Familial Capacity: the demographic components of caring capacity", in Rights and Responsibilities: papers from the International Year of the Family Symposium, Wellington, 14 to 16 October 1994, IYF and the Office of the Commissioner for Children, 1995:5 [emphasis in original]. For other statistics quoted here, see Statistics New Zealand, All About Women in New Zealand, Statistics New Zealand, 1993; and Lisa Davies and Natalie Jackson, Women's Labour Force Participation in New Zealand: The Past 100 Years, Social Policy Agency, Department of Social Welfare, 1993c
  2. Susan Shipley, Women's Employment and Unemployment: a research report, Massey University Department of Sociology/Society for Research on Women, 1982. [back]
  3. Anna Smith, "Gender pay difference proves stubborn", Dominion, 24 April 1996. [back]
  4. Statistics New Zealand, Labour Market 1994, Statistics New Zealand, 1995. [back]
  5. See Mariln Waring, Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth, Allen & Unwin/Port Nicholson Press, 1988. [back]
  6. Anne Else, False Economy: New Zealanders Face the Growing Conflict Between Paid and Unpaid Work, Tandem Press, 1996. [back]
  7. For benefit statistics, see Department of Social Welfare, Statistical Information Report 1995, DSW, 1995. [back]
  8. Department of Social Welfare, From Welfare to Wellbeing, 2nd edition, DSW, 1995, p.5. [back]
  9. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Working Party on Social Policy, "The Future of Social Protection" (MAS/WP1(88)02), December 1987, p.8. [back]

 


Women's Policy Forum | | Anne Else | | 1996 UBINZ Conference

www.oocities.org/ubinz/AElse1996.html