The Real Case for Paying for "Unpaid Labor"

The economic argument for subsidizing childrearing has little to do with whether domestic labor has value and everything to do with who is reaping its rewards.

There is an account on X with the handle ItIsHoeMath. I have no idea who this person is. I don’t follow them and, until yesterday, had never interacted with their posts. But, perhaps because the algorithm has my interests pegged, hoe_math has wound up on my For You feed twice in the past few months, each time making a sort of haphazard attempt at a dunk on the concept of “unpaid labor,” and specifically the idea that we ought to pay people for the work of raising kids or running a household.

The account first caught my eye a few months ago, when it took aim at the idea that “women should be paid for doing housework for their husbands.” Hoe reasoned that if a woman requires payment for housework, then her husband should “be able to fire her and hire a replacement.” In other words, women ought to support their families for free, or accept being treated as employees by their husbands. Then, yesterday, I opened X and was greeted with another lengthy tweet from Hoe about the silliness of the notion of “unpaid labor,” which they regard as “an ideal litmus test for untouchable women.” Again, they specifically took issue with the idea that "‘women's work,’ like cooking, cleaning, and raising children, is a job that should be paid, sometimes by the government.” This time, the (somewhat fuzzy) allegation was that if a woman is unwilling to undertake the work of the home for free then she must not see the value in caring for her own flesh and blood.

At the risk of taking these posts too seriously, I think they are worth pondering to the degree that they both misconstrue the economic case for “paying for unpaid labor.”