Global political economy of care and gender - crisis, extractivism and contestation

The Covid-19 crisis has unprecedentedly highlighted care work and the contradiction between its essentiality for each society and economy, and the low social and monetary value attributed to it. Contradicting conventional economic theories which naturalise care work as female embodied work within the gendered division of labour and define it as unproductive work in the context of separated and hierarchical spheres of production and reproduction, feminist political economy and social reproduction theory value care work as productive work which generates and sustains life. In the wake of structural adjustment, austerity and neoliberal policies, the cut down of public services and privatisation, care work got extracted from the private, non-market sphere and included into the waged labour market. Its peculiar logic of caring with its relational and affective components got subordinated to the market principles of efficiency and profit making. Using - analogous to resource extractivism - the concept of care extractivism in the crisis of social reproduction, the paper analyses different forms of care extraction by cost cutting in neoliberal hospital management, modulisation, rationalisation and digital monitoring of services, by underpaying 24/7 care-taking of the elderly in private households and by transnational care chains based on migration which shift care resources from poorer countries in the Global South/East to more wealthy places in the Global North. Recently, domestic workers unionised demanding recognition, labour rights and fair pay as workers, protests and strikes by care workers e.g. nurses in hospitals challenged the appalling work burden and the depletion of their health because of extractivism. The perspective is the (re)construction of care as commons.