- Conference
- 2022 Virtual National Women's Conference
- Date
- 29 September 2021
- Decision
- Carried
While women were already doing most of the world’s unpaid care work prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, research suggests that the crisis and its shutdown response have resulted in an increase in this burden. It is likely that the impacts for women and families will last for years without interventions.
What we refer to as “the economy” would not function without the foundation of work provided by the “care economy”: the reproduction of everyday life through cooking, raising children, and so forth.
The paid economy has slowed not only because people are physically not allowed into workplaces, but also because many families currently need to raise and educate their children without institutional support, which is reducing working hours and increasing stress. It has long been recognized that gross domestic product ignores the care economy and heterodox economists have promoted alternative economic systems that could value care work and facilitate a fairer sharing of domestic labour while promoting environmental and economic sustainability.
The work each of us does to maintain everyday life for ourselves and our family depends on our economic and social status and personal family situation, but might include raising children, cooking, cleaning, caring for elderly relatives, shopping, household management, as well as mental tasks such as planning schedules and performing emotional labour such as tending family relationships.
In April, the United Nations (2020) released a report confirming that unpaid care work has increased, with children out of school, heightened care needs of older persons, and overwhelmed health services. But the pandemic and lockdown are not experienced equally: for some people, there are advantages to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, families are under a whole new set of pressures, depending on circumstances. The demands on working parents of our previous “normal” everyday life were already stressful, overwhelming, lonely, and nonsensical and the burden on women tended to be worse.
We call upon Unison’s National Women’s Committee work with the NEC to raise awareness and campaign on behalf of women suffering from the effects of COVID, in particular
• Recognising the unequal burden on women as unpaid care givers balancing this with paid work
• The need for flexible working arrangements that recognise the realities of the demands on women’s lives in terms of caring for children and the elderly.