The author's mother with her second child. Photo: Author.
My father hosted dinners for the political, feudal, and industrial elite of Pakistan; my mother laboured so that the food and the atmosphere worked for the business deals and networks that were being built.
After my father died at the young age of 46, my mother transferred her caring work to me and my two siblings. Her labour got my father success in his community and career, it has gotten me and my siblings pretty far as well.
Yet, her labour remains in the house and will die without recognition and compensation (like a state pension, unemployment benefits, or wages). In this, my mother shares a fate with Noor.
Work doesn't end when you go home
Noor is 48 and has two children of working age. Her husband recently died. For as long as she can remember, she has worked – mostly cleaning other people's houses, sometimes working as an assistant in a girls hostel or a mess.
These days, besides my house, she works in two other places. I ask her daily routine:
“My day begins at seven in the morning when I get up to clean my house and finish chores left over from the previous night. I then prepare my children’s clothes and their breakfast. After this, my son drops me to the bus stop on his way to work.
I start my first job at eight at the colonel’s house. I wash the dishes, wash and iron his clothes, and keep his house clean which means dusting and hoovering mainly. After that, I walk about 20 minutes to come here. You know what work I do here.
Then at three, I walk to another house about 15 minutes away. There, again, I am asked to clean. When I am done with work between 5-6 pm, I either take the bus home or sometimes my son picks me up on his motorbike.”
I interrupt her: “So, your work is then over?” She smiles and says, “No.” She continues:
“Once home, I rest a little and then start to clean my house and cook for the children. They try to help but are too tired from work. My work isn’t finished before 10 pm. I have done this for nearly 35 years. I am very tired and my body aches most days. But what can I do? I have to make a living.”
The nature of domestic work
The work women like my mother and Noor do is reproductive labour. They are not producing a visible product (‘goods’ that labourers working in factories produce such as cars) but they are reproducing everyone’s labour power.
Take only my example. With the help of my mother and Noor, I am able to reenergise since I don’t do any of the domestic chores. The energy I have comes from the labour they do. That is, I take their energy to reproduce mine.
Reproductive labour does not form part of the calculation of our country's Gross Domestic Product; the GDP only counts productive labour, that is the labour that produces a product.
For her work in my house, Noor gets Rs 12,000 per month. But were she to stop working, I would lose a lot more. If I were to do my own labour, I would not have the energy to write, read, and lecture. Losing that, I lose my whole income.
Noor isn’t just re-creating my energy; she is reproducing the labour of four households and more than 12 people on a daily basis. But while women like Noor get compensated with a low wage, my mother doesn’t even get that since, being a mother and wife, she is expected to do the work out of 'duty' and 'love.'
Produce the labouring class
When I started following my father's example of hosting dinners to build networks, I invited activists Selma James and her partner Nina Lopez – both of the Global Women’s Strike – to my mother’s house in North London for Sindhi food (Again, my mother made the food and I, being the male, played the host).
Selma taught me something profound. Let me explain what she argues and why, for it is far more sophisticated than Aristotle’s philosophy. What women do, she notes, is “produce the whole labouring class.” She elaborates:
“First it [labouring class] must be nine months in the womb, must be fed, clothed, trained. Then when it works, its bed must be made, its floors swept, its lunchbox prepared, its sexuality not gratified but quietened, its dinner ready when it gets home … This is how labour is produced and reproduced when it is daily consumed in the factory or office. To describe its basic production and reproduction is to describe women’s work.”
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The reward for this labour is shocking. A United National Development Program report from the 1970s notes that “women do ⅔ of the world's work, receive five percent of the world's income and own one percent of the world's assets.” These figures might be dated but they certainly reflect my house: Noor does ⅔ of the work, gets about five percent of my house’s income if not less. My mother gets no income.
The right to compensation
Selma and other feminists demand that women’s reproductive labour be counted in the GDP, compensated by the state, and that they be given all the benefits other labourers get such as unemployment benefit and pension.
As the dinner ended and the plates were put away for me to wash (for once), my mother and Selma exchanged recipes for pumpkin soup and my mother suggested that she would translate the demands of the International Women’s Strike into Sindhi.
My house – divided into hierarchies – is an example of the exploitation of domestic and women's labour. It is time, we as men, began to recognise the labour of women and stopped justifying the exploitation as ‘nature’ or ‘duty’ or ‘love’. We have to demand the state to compensate all labour that goes into producing our wealth.
Are you a housewife who believes your due labour rights should be recognised? Tell us about it at blog@dawn.com