Negotiating the economic and social value of care work: A Feminist Political Economy framework to assess the outcomes of care collective bargaining

Abstract

Research objective: The demographic transition is transforming the value of care work in European market economies, as visible in the resurgence of strikes of professional care workers (e.g. Artus et al. 2017). The growing imbalance between care demand and care supply is spurring the economic (monetary) value of care work as well as its social (non-monetary) value. Based on feminist political economic and institutional economic theories, this research asks how the economic and social value of professional and informal care work is negotiated in capitalist market economies, and with which outcomes for the value of care work and for gender equality (as measured by the gender pay gap and gendered time use – the gender care gap). Methodology: To investigate these research objectives, the paper is organised in three sections. A first section compares various methodologies to measure the economic and social value of professional and informal care work. A second section conducts a comparative quantitative analysis of the evolution of the value of care work in a selection of European countries, including Germany and Belgium (1999-2024). A third section develops a comparative qualitative institutional economic analysis of the institutional power resources and political-economic strategies of the different stakeholders involved in the valuation of care work in Germany and Belgium (care workers/ trade unions, care sector employers/ employer confederations, civil society organisations and coalitions, public/ state actors,…). Preliminary results: A specific characteristic of care work in capitalist market economies is the interconnection and trade-off between professional (paid) and informal (unpaid) care work (e.g. Elson 1998, Himmelweit 2002, Hoskyns & Rai 2007). As a consequence, the calculation of the economic value of care work comprises both the marketised value of care work, which is included in GDP, and its non-marketized value which, as a positive externality, has a ‘public good’ value and is estimated through time-use studies, but is not included in GDP (Hoskyns & Rai 2007). Besides accounting the marketised and estimating the non-marketised economic value of care work, the literature stresses the extra-economic social ‘relational’ value of care work. This ‘affective/ emotional’ value is an intrinsic characteristic of care work and cannot be valued in quantifiable, monetarisable economic metrics, yet it can be proxied through other indicators, such as the time and capacities of workers to engage in care work (Dowling, 2016: 464). This is operationalised through a comparative analysis of care work value in Germany and Belgium.