Valuing domestic labour: the changing meanings of ‘housework’ under capitalism

The slogan Wages for Housework, first raised five decades ago, triggered a debate on domestic labour within the wider context of the mode of production and processes of social reproduction. Marxists and Feminists foregrounded the household as the site of women’s invisible, unrecognized labour from different standpoints with regard to class and gender, pointing to the linkages between the household, (un)paid work and women’s subordination. With the deepening of the crisis of capitalism - which drives many to migrate for livelihood - and significant shifts in contextual frameworks, women’s contribution emerges as critical in coping with below subsistence level wages. strategies adopted by capitalism in the neo-liberal era. The ILO’s C 189 partially aimed at recognition of this, underlines the challenge of developing methodological frameworks to examine the multiple forms and locations of domestic labour to understand women’s oppression at the intersection of class and gender in the context of the crisis in contemporary capitalism.