SOC352H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Panel Data, Motivation, Furusiyya
READINGS: Lecture 3
Donna Baines (2004), “Caring for Nothing Work Organization and Unwaged Labour in
Social Services” in Work, Employment and Society 18.2
• Examines the relative pay of occupations involving care, such as teaching, counseling,
providing health services or supervising children
• Uses panel data from National Longitidunal survey of youth
• Care work pays less than other occupaitons after controlling for the education and
employment experience of the workers, many occupation and industry chracteristices and
unmeasured, stable characteristic of those who hold jobs
• Both men and women face this relative wage penalty
• But more women than men pay the penalty since more women do this form of work
• We use the term "care work" (or caring labor) to refer to occupations in which workers
are supposed to provide a face-to-face service that develops the human capabilities of the
recipient.
• By "human capabilities" we refer to health, skills, or proclivities that are useful to oneself
or others.
• These include physical and mental health, physical skills, cognitive skills, and emotional
skills, such as self-discipline, empathy, and care
• This paper provides empirical evidence supporting the hypothesis that those who work in
• occupations involving care face a relative wage penalty.
• Wage penalty: those in these occupations receive, on average, lower hourly pay than we
would predict them to have based on the other characteristics of the jobs, their skill
demands, and the qualifications of those holding the jobs.
Why hypothesize a wage penalty for care work
• we hypothesize that care work pays less than we would expect it to given the other
characteristics of the work and the workers who do it.
o Based on 4 mechanisms
▪ Economic dependence of those who need care
▪ The association of care with women and mothering
▪ The difficulty of achieving productivity gains per worker in the care sector
▪ Tendency of market wages to be less In jobs involving intrinsic motivation
• The economic dependence of those who need care
• people need care most when they are the least able to work to pay for care.
• This is part of the inherent "dependency" of childhood, old age, and illness.
• When those with few resources need care and the care is provided by paid workers, then 2
• some third party pays for the care, typically family members or the state
• how much is available to pay the care workers depends upon how affluent the family
members are, or how rich the economy is from which the state draws taxes.
• But how much is available to support care also depends on the level of altruism of those
paying for the care toward those who need the care
• It is unclear whether state resources will be forthcoming to pay care workers as much as
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others who do work requiring a similar amount of skill.
• The association of care with women and mothering
• Paid care work often involves the provision of services that women are expected to offer
to their family members out of love and obligation
• paid care work consists of those functions of care for dependents historically done by
women in the family.
• With social differentiation, these functions are done less in the family and more in state-
and market-governed institutions.
• The way one thinks about this work is strongly affected by schemas about gender and
motherhood that come from the culture, or from early relationships with mothers or
other caregivers.
o Such schemas may make individuals likely to see modest relative pay as
appropriate for care work.
• "devaluation thesis" asserts that our culture devalues women relative to men, and then,
by association, any activity done largely by women is valued less than that it otherwise
would be.
• hypothesize that there will be a pay penalty for care work even after controlling for sex
composition.
o Implies that jobs involving care pay less than other women's jobs of similar skill
levels that do not involve care.
• jobs involving care pay less than other women's jobs of similar skill levels that do not
involve care.
• Care work may thus be devalued even relative to other equally female-intensive jobs
• The general problem is that skills associated with mothering are more likely to be seen as
"natural" and, thus, either be unnoticed or be seen as not deserving of remuneration
• While mothers are revered, there is a sense that they should provide care out of love, not
for money.
• This notion may be extended to paid care work so that care workers are implicitly
expected to prove their proper motivation by accepting a wage penalty.
• The dichotomy-producing tendencies in Western thought also encourage the notion that
one works for love or money, not both
• Such dichotomous thinking encourages the idea that commodifying care dries up real
love, or worse, makes the sacred profane
• In addition, people may resist the idea of paying care well because this threatens their
sense of entitlement to have care freely given to them when they need it
• they entail respect for the sanctity of care work, and even put care workers on a pedestal
of respect, but ironically, result in denying a decent income to those who provide care
• These cultural constructions also make it difficult to organize care workers into collective
action seeking better earnings for their work
• The difficulty in achieving productivity gains in the care sector
• the service sector of the economy is less amenable to productivity-enhancing technical
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