Crises of care, crises of work

Laetitia Vitaud has a post on her Laetitia@Work Substack about why too few people will be working in the future. What I liked about it is that from the off she largely parked both the question of AI and the issue of demographics and the ageing population, and instead focussed on issues that are to do with the structure of labour markets.

She focuses on four issues:

• Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers
• Housing crisis trapping workers
• The caregiving time bomb
• Deteriorating health of workers.

She summarises them: 

These are four interconnected reasons that have little to do with “personal choices” and everything to do with the collective institutions that we’re allowing to weaken and crumble, even as we should be celebrating their anniversaries.

There’s a mixture of American and French data in her piece (probably because US data is still reasonably easy to come by, at least until Trump fires the rest of the National Statistics Bureau for producing data that does not support his Panglossian worldview), and, from memory, because she lives in France.

But these issues seem to me to be common across the rich world. And they fit into something that I have discussed here before: that capital in general, and cities in particular, are finding it hard to reproduce themselves, economically and socially.

So let me just parse her arguments on each of these points, maybe with a diversion or two into her links.

#1. Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers

In the US, working mothers helped to drive the recovery of the economy post-pandemic, but have been leaving the workforce again over the past year. Some of this is down to so-called ‘Return to office’ [RTO] mandates, which are uneven but make it harder for working mothers to work [1].

Vitaud quotes a US economist, Misty Heggenness, who likens it the moment in the Barbie movie where Ken takes control:

“It’s become harder for women, particularly those with caregiving responsibilities, to thrive in this job market… It’s clear that we’re backsliding in the Ken-ergy economy, that the return-to-office chest pounding is having a real ripple effect.”

Of course, one of the reasons for this is that childcare costs have increased, so losing the flexibility of some homeworking creates immediate financial problems, no matter how buoyant the labour market is. Although it seems likely that the result of imposing RTO mandates is that companies become less competitive in the labour market, it will be hard to see that in very noisy business data any time soon.

One of the consequences that is harder to see in the data, both at an individual level and for the economy as a whole, is under-employment: women taking jobs they are over-qualified for because they are closer to home or give them more childcare flex.

The ripple effects extend across entire industries and the entire economy. It also means lower growth. Of course, there are also huge implications for the women themselves—their lifetime earnings will be lower, they will most likely return to jobs that don’t pay the salaries they were making when they left.

Of course, focussing on the US may not be helpful: it’s an outlier in terms of childcare and in sectors that are more obsessed with RTO. But it’s also worth noting, as she does, that the issue of hybrid working seems to have been added to the culture wars checklist by the right in other countries as well.

#2. Housing crisis trapping workers

The costs of housing have ballooned, especially in cities, pretty much everywhere in the rich world. And this has consequences for everything else:

Housing scarcity is an invisible hand shaping nearly every aspect of working lives, social structures, and even our most personal decisions about careers and family formation.\

Vitaud’s preferred theory for this is that the growth of services and knowledge work effectively untethered desirable work from locations, so they gravitated to big cities where people wanted to live. This is a good enough theory that you can trace backthrough the work of John Urry and Scott Lash, and Diane Coyle, over the years, but it’s at least as likely that the cost of housing is high because of [1] deregulation of housing markets and [2] the asset bubble triggered by the billions-worth of quantitative easing that was injected into the world’s richer economies in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The problem this creates goes like this:

For every well-paid person in knowledge work who can theoretically work anywhere, there are approximately five people in service work who usually earn significantly less. These “essential” workers—in hospitality, restaurants, elderly care, childcare, healthcare, and other service sectors—serve knowledge workers, care for their children, clean offices, and prepare meals. Unlike knowledge workers, they cannot work remotely and must live within reasonable distance of where the work is located.

And so people end up either being unable to afford to live near their work, or the move further way and, once again, do work for which they are over-qualified. Or they stay in the city and pay a premium for housing that takes a disproportionate share of their income. Good for landlords, not good for the general economy (or for social equity).

#3. The caregiving time bomb

The French data projects that by 2030 one in four French workers will responsible for caring for an elderly relative. That’s a big number, and it’s quite soon, although I’d want to see a bit more detail on how ‘care’ is defined.

Again, the people who end up doing this work are more likely to be women, because

even in households with supposedly “equal” divisions of labour, the burden of elder care falls disproportionately on them (or at least the “choice” to give up paid work for care work is overwhelmingly theirs to make).

Many of these women are unlikely to return to the labour force. Vitaud says that currently about half of the unpaid carers to older adults are employed, but juggle work with their care of duties. And just looking at this for a moment through a narrow economic lens:

the danger is what happens before the loss [of a parent] —when caregiving responsibilities pull thousands of skilled, experienced people out of the workforce for years at a time. Without collective action, this silent drain of talent will accelerate, weakening our economies and worsening gender inequality.

#4. Deteriorating health of workers

There are two issues here: both the generally poorer health of an ageing workforce, and the increasing prevalence of mental health issues, including depression and anxiety. She also notes that we don’t yet understand the long-term health effects of sedentary screen-dominated work. French and German data suggest high rates of absence through sickness already, with few workplaces designed for older workers.

The averages also conceal important differences:

Averages conceal the truth that health outcomes are tightly bound to education and income. Poorer workers face multiple, compounding health risks that make consistent employment harder to sustain, triggering a vicious cycle: poor health leads to reduced earning power, which in turn worsens health.

Vitaud concludes that these four effects are all consequences of the weakening of collective institutions, which in turn is turning social problems into personal issues:

The real failure lies in cutting back foundational protections without building new ones for our era’s most pressing challenges—elderly care, affordable housing, lifelong professional reinvention, and resilience in the face of climate change. The pattern repeats across all these issues.

And while I agree with the description of what’s happening, and the future-facing issues that are emerging quite quickly, I think we need a bit more systemic analysis here.

‘Social reproduction’

The people who have written best about this, in my view, are writers on the left who have focussed on the economics of care and the consequences for ‘social reproduction’—the ability of societies and cities to sustain themselves over time.

This piece is already long, so I’ll be brief, but the pattern of the last 40 years is that whole areas of care have been turned into cash machines by innovative parts of capital with the connivance of government [2]. In short, capital, and capitalism, always has a tendency towards crisis by undermining the things that are necessary to sustain capitalism. (The more theoretical version of this is explained here by Nancy Fraser.)

But the underlying argument here is that over a period of 50 years—and accelerating since the 2008 crisis—we have seen a process whereby increasing areas of the economy have been turned into places run according to the rules of finance capital. Initially this involved running private sector businesses according to financial rules.

As Rebecca Carson argues in her recent book Immanent Externalities, this now extendsinto all of the spaces that are essential to our reproduction as human beings. These spaces, which include housing, schools, childcare, eldercare, and health practices, have become new sources of profit. In other words, if we are going to address the issues that Laetitia Vitaud identifies, we don’t just need new institutions. We need innovation in new forms of ownership—social, public, communal, non-profit—that take these institutions back outside of financially-driven management systems.

— Footnotes

1. Worth noting briefly here that Return to Office mandates have no effect on productivity—they appear to worsen it—and tend to be pushed through by male bosses in sectors with higher levels of macho management: banking, technology, the US government etc.
2. ‘Innovative’ here is not meant in a good way. As Simon Caulkin wrote recently, “What [Private Equity] does care about is industries or sectors that share certain characteristics. They have guaranteed demand, an assured income stream, and are small in scale – qualities that make them particularly susceptible to PE’s blunt instruments of consolidation or ‘rollup’, leverage and debt financing. So yes, PE loves vet practices, funeral services, human care homes and dental surgeries – with the love felt by killer whales for seals and penguins or crocodiles for small deer or wild pigs.”

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A version of this article is also published on my Just Two Things Newsletter.