turpin@cs.utexas.EDU (Russell Turpin) (06/06/90)
----- A few days ago, I read in the local paper about a study purporting that homemakers who lose their spousal income due to death or disability of their spouse, divorce, or economic circumstance fare poorly in the work world. A common explanation for this is that "woman's work" is undervalued in patriarchal society. This explanation is largely wrong, and reveals mistaken thought that lies behind several of the misguided attempts to correct what some feminists view as economic injustice. The functions that homemakers perform do not have, have not had, and will not have a high economic value. The reason for this has little to do with what is "woman's work" and what is "man's work", and everything to do with facts about modern life and basic economic principle. The facts are these: almost everyone can do what homemakers do. Everyone who has lived on their own has had to keep themselves fed, clothed, and sheltered and had to pay the bills, deal with minor legal problems, keep alive the pets and plants, maintain their home's appearance, and cope with the other minutae of daily life. This includes not just women, but almost all men as well. Moreover, most adults (again men as well as women) have learned to some degree how to change a diaper, comfort an infant, notice illness or fever in children, and somehow to be with a child without abusing the child nor becoming themselves unglued. There are many people who make mistakes with children, but this includes people who are parents and child care professionals as well as people who have only occasional child care experience. (While we might desire exceptional parents for each child, we also desire average people to have children!) These are the facts. The economic principle is this: any function that can be performed by almost everyone and that is willingly performed by many is basic labor, and cannot command economic value much beyond the going rate for basic labor, which in our day and time is tracked by the minimum wage. This means that in most markets the pay for doing laundry, waiting tables, watching children, and domestic service will be about minimum wage, give or take a half. This has little to do with the fact that these tasks are more often performed by women, and everything to do with the supply of willing labor. The same prediction can be made about busboys, dishwashers, and office gofers, even though these jobs are more commonly filled by men. There is a lot of confusion about what an economic claim like the above means. There are some common misconceptions that are best put to rest early. First, stating the economic value of something is not the same as stating its importance. Economic value is a fact about particular conditions, in the case of a wage, how many people can do something, how willing they are to do it, and how much other people want it done for them. Importance can be placed in a broader context. The corporate lawyer who must choose between finishing an urgent brief or attending her young infant will recognize that the latter is more important. But under most conditions, she can arrange to have others do this for her when she wants to work. Caring for children is more important than making legal briefs, but fewer people can do the latter and those who need it are more willing to pay a lot to have others do it for them. Second, the economic predictions carry tacit assumptions about the common case. Some office gofers get paid more than others because they are related to the boss. Some waiters work at four star restaurants and some people who care for children are trained to handle special medical or educational problems. But these are not the common case to which the above prediction applies. When one changes the tacit assumptions, the prediction no longer holds. Third, wages (like other prices) can always be set artificially low or high. A large part of economics concerns the behavior of markets when external forces bias what would otherwise be market prices. If wages are held low, there will be a shortage of qualified applicants and those who remain are often underqualified. If wages are held high, there will be a surplus of qualified applicants, and some workers that are qualified to take more responsible positions will refuse promotion. Managers and employers who must make do under the rules will try to substitute perks for low wages, and require more work and effort to counter high wages. Coincidentally, the same day the local paper carried the story about homemakers going into the job market, the Wall Street Journal had an article about Washington state's attempt to pay government workers on a calculated scale of "comparable worth", rather than allowing demand to meet supply. The article described some "unexpected" backlash from the program. For jobs whose wages were moved low, qualified workers moved on to other employers and the state was unable to fill needed positions. For jobs whose wages were held high, there were long waiting lists of applicants and workers were refusing promotions. The Washington legislators are learning (as have their peers in the Soviet Union) that intervention can create shortages and surpluses, but cannot change the laws of economics. Hopefully, the feminists behind this legislation will learn that changing the economic lot of women also requires changing what women do, not just mandating a reevaluation of "women's work", a concept that feminism had once wisely discarded. ----- One final note: I am for comparable worth in the sense of paying people the same rate for the *same* work. The comparable worth that the Washington state government instituted is something very different. This scheme tried to calculate proportional scales for *different* jobs on the basis of amount of education and training required, stress inherent to the work, and other factors. The problem is that these things do not determine economic value; supply and demand do. Whether the interjection of command into the market is based on Marxist theory or comparable worth ideals, it will always run aground the way markets really work. Russell