A Social Provisioning Employer of Last Resort: Post-Keynesianism Meets Feminist Economics

Notes

1. Two qualifications are needed. Firstly, although there are different understandings of the concept of “social reproduction,” in this article I use it to refer to both the unpaid labor and caring that go into the production and re-production of life's conditions. For a comprehensive definition that encompasses biological reproduction, including sexual, affective and emotional services; unpaid production of goods and services in the home and within the community; and the reproduction of culture and ideology which can both stabilize and challenge dominant social relations see Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2010: 3). For an analysis of the ways in which social reproduction is organized through households, the market and the state, and the crucial role immigration policies play in the organization performed by the latter, see Fudge (2011: 120–135). Secondly, I refer to the “privatization” of social reproduction to highlight the process by which social reproductive activities are being increasingly provided in the market by profit making entities as well as in the household by unpaid laborers. This concurrent trend is exacerbated under conditions of neo-liberal austerity that see some parts of the population having to provide more unpaid labor while others can afford to purchase more social reproductive labor.

2. This is for instance the thrust of the US Financial Reform Bill passed on July 15, 2010 which includes the establishment of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency, the obligation for most Over-the-Counter (OTC) derivatives to be traded on formal exchanges and the obligation for deposit-taking banks not to buy or sell financial products for their “trading accounts” (Dodd-Frank 2010).

3. Seguino is here referring to the subprime mortgage crisis which, particularly in the USA, saw loans going “to groups that have faced discrimination and other barriers to livelihood generation, suggesting their low income and vulnerability make them targets of predatory lending practices” (2010: 195). She is at the same time arguing that this is symptomatic of a more general problem concerning stagnating workers' incomes and debt-financed consumption (ibid.: 181). Now, despite the lack of comprehensive and systematic income disaggregated data on access to consumer credit, the US Economic Policy Institute, relying on the Federal Reserve Board's survey of Consumer Finances data, shows how the growth of consumer debt has affected all income groups, except for the very wealthy, even though higher borrowing has taken place at the middle end of the income hierarchy (see Economic Policy Institute 2011). In the UK, the Griffiths Commission on Personal Debt which was established to investigate the increasing indebtedness of low-income families acknowledges that while 1.9 million households are still excluded from the mainstream financial sector, low-income families “still need access to credit…to buy essentials such as household appliances, furniture or clothing…[and] access to small, short term cash loans through doorstep lending, pawnbrokers, sales-and-buy-back shops and mail order catalogues helps families manage day to day problems” (Griffiths 2005: 15). Indeed although unsecured personal debt “is spread throughout the population as a whole [it] disproportionately affects low income families, lone parents and people in their twenties and early thirties” (ibid.: i). Thus, the fact that the level of mainstream borrowing by low-income families is relatively lower than that of middle income groups only points to the fact that access to mainstream consumer credit has occurred on an unequal basis and indeed low income families have had more recourse to unsecured personal debt. The increasing reliance on debt to keep up demand in the face of squeezed income is at issue here: as the Commission has noted “because growth in lending has been faster than the growth in income, the ratio of household sector debt to income has risen from around 40% in 1975, to just over 100% in 1995, to 140% in 2005” (ibid.: 10). This is an increase similar to that registered in the USA over the same period (see Economic Policy Institute 2010).

4. As they put it, “…the most substantial and durable achievement of the Conservative years was a one million plus rise in state employment sustained by Mrs Thatcher's pragmatic acceptance of increasing public expenditure regardless of her rhetoric about rolling back the state.[and] state plus para-state employment [also] increased by nearly 1.3 million between 1998 and 2007 so that these two sectors account for no less than 57% of the total increase in the number of employees” (Froud et al. 2011: 20).

5. Danby identifies two additional differences: an undersocialized entrepreneur as the maker of investment decisions, one which “faces an uncertain future alone” rather than making decisions “in the midst of ongoing relationships” (2004: 61); and an undertheorized, neutral state whose role is merely to support, stabilize and facilitate private business interactions (ibid.: 62–65).

6. This is not to say that social reproductive activities are not profitable. They indeed are, and services such as advanced health care and higher education have been, and are being, privatized for profit. Access to these services remain however dependent on income. At the same time, sectors which do not require high capital investment, mainly because labor cannot be easily replaced with capital and its productivity improved through technological development, will experience a different degree of privatization. I thank Judy Fudge for raising this issue and pointing me in the direction of Himmelweit's work which has shown how, in relation to these sectors, an increase in wages will comport an increase in the cost of care, with the likely result of “inequality in access to affordable care becoming a major issue in many high income countries” (2013: 12).

7. This is one of the crucial differences with the citizenship's income movement. Gorz, one of its major proponents, argues that efforts should concentrate on “distributing all the socially necessary work and socially produced wealth” so that “people will be able to divide their lives between a wide range of activities which will have neither payment nor profitability as their necessary condition or goal” (1999: 46). However, although he points to the need for a “political break,” it is not really clear how this is to come about besides demanding that the state grants a citizenship's income for the productive labor we are all engaged with. This leaves a whole set of important questions about this process unanswered, for instance about the nature of our interaction with the state on which we place the demand for a citizenship's income; the parameters informing the (re)valuation of the different forms of labor we engage with and/or wish to bring about; and the means through which the massive indigent population can effectively participate in redefining “work.” The ELR, on the other hand, does not introduce a political break overnight. However, it offers the opportunity to get a socially desirable wage immediately that enables participation in exactly such a complex process.