The topic of managing work, self and
family arises from the ever-increasing emphasis on the economy and economic
life as the only valued and visible expression of human activity. It is also a
gendered dilemma which rests on men’s and women’s relationships to the unpaid
work of reproduction and care provision and the mainstream economy.
The split between work and family was
once distributed mainly on gendered lines, leaving women financially dependent
on men’s earnings, and men separated from the hands-on unpaid work of cleaning,
laundry, shopping, and personal care of infants and sick and aged relatives.
Women’s increased participation in the paid workforce from the mid-1970s
onwards has, to some extent, dismantled the rigid separation of gendered roles.
Women and mothers now expect to work,
and fathers are increasingly expressing a desire to spend more time caring for
their children. In practice, working hours for many full-time workers have been
steadily increasing and men have not been overly enthusiastic about actually
doing domestic work, but women’s growing presence in the workforce is emptying
the population of unpaid care providers, or stretching their time ever more
thinly.
Unpaid care work is economically
invisible, unrewarded and unvalued, yet the personal relationships forged in
unpaid care work - with our partners, our children, our parents - are the
bedrock of our personal and social lives. Without the care and work of another
human-being, none of us would make it to adulthood. Every adult is an
expression of endless parental hours of feeding, soothing, changing, washing,
teaching, helping and protecting, and as old age and illness strike, there is
again a need for many hours of care provision.
Instead of presuming that intrafamilial
care will always “naturally” exist, policy-makers need to be valuing such care
as a human survival resource, recognising that just as we need clean air and
clean water, we also need the personal care of other human-beings, particularly
in infancy, sickness and old age. Instead of recognising and valuing unpaid
care and those who receive and provide it, and ensuring that the circumstances
which enable people to provide and receive care are supported, there has been a
steady restriction of support to targeted contexts of care, particularly
impacting on low-income groups.
The push to downgrade unpaid care work
has been expressed in the policy momentum for “welfare reform” which has
gradually expanded the range of requirements for workforce activity being
imposed on people claiming parenting payments. Despite the caring activity
embedded in the parental role and the higher demands of only having one
available parent, the Government has signalled plans for increased demands for
“mutual obligation” and “workforce requirements” for single parents of
school-age children.
Five to twelve-year-old children of
parents who have separated face new restrictions on access to parental care.
The proposed welfare changes signal expectations that primary school age
children with one parent can do with less access to parental care and will
instead have to access child care services which may or may not meet their
needs, and may or may not be available at the times and places parents and children
need it. Further, the “mutual obligation” framework abolishes the capacity of
single mothers to self-manage their paid work and family care demands in favour
of a bureaucracy-led prescription of required conduct.
A contradiction in the proposed new workforce
demands on single mothers is the positive support offered to partnered mothers
to stay out of the workforce and care for their children. Family tax benefit
part B payments are not income-tested for single income families, but reduce
sharply once the family has a second earner. The sum effect is that partnered
mothers face high effective marginal tax rates if they enter the paid
workforce. Again this contradiction emphasises that while children with two
parents are being supported to have a parent providing full-time unpaid care,
children with only one available parent face restricted parental care through
increased paid workforce requirements.
Apart from the evident discrimination
against children of separated parents, the policy approach also fails to
account for the reality that the population of single mothers is drawn
primarily from the population of married mothers. Encouraging married mothers
to stay out of paid work while simultaneously forcing single mothers into paid
work means that mothers and children face completely different demands,
depending on whether they have a partner. The least consideration appears to be
whether children’s interests are served by imposing particular requirements on
different groups of mothers.
Maintaining a balance between paid work
and family needs is even harder when there is relatively little protection for
casual workers, who can be called on at odd hours at short notice, and who have
no leave entitlements or job protections if they or their children are sick.
Income insecurity and mutual obligation requirements can leave mothers having
to choose between their children’s emotional and physical needs and the
family’s economic survival. The care needs of children of all ages tend to rise
during and after parental separation as the transition into a single parent
household is typically one of upheaval for the family. Often there has been a
period of deteriorating relationships before separation, while the actual
separation often involves a change of residence and a change in household
members. In separations involving family violence there is the added chaos and
distress of traumatising violence, and the need to relocate away from known
neighbourhood and family and school supports.
The “care squeeze” is being felt across
the population as Australians work increasingly longer hours, but middle and
high income permanent workers have many more opportunities to restructure their
working hours, purchase alternative care, exercise leave entitlements and
delegate tasks to subordinates. Men in the full-time paid workforce still
typically delegate their family care demands to their partners, forcing many
mothers to fit their earning work around their unpaid work. Mothers
predominantly cluster in low-paid low-skill casual jobs in the services sector
where they provide a flexible, on call workforce.
When mothers are partnered the shared
demands of earning and family care mean more choices around the division of
labour between the couple. Despite the higher demands and restricted resources
of single mothers, it is single mothers and their children who experience the
most dramatic restrictions on their opportunities to find the balance between
paid work and family, let alone time for themselves.
Veerapagupathy,
Chothavilai Beach,
Thengamputhoor,
Kanyakumari.
Call @: Ph: 04652-221337, Mob:
8220099080.
Email: aveholidayhome@gmail.com
Website: www.aveholidayhome.com
No comments:
Post a Comment