The International Wages for Housework Campaign was a feminist global social movement, which grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972 and organized resistance and public debate on the social formations produced by gendered labor and reproductive labor, for example domestic work like housework, childcare, gender discrimination, and the socially reinforced performance of gender roles, gendered desire, and leisure inequality. The Campaign's platform included the women's right to work outside of the home, unemployment benefits, parental leave, and equal pay. The Campaign was formed in Padua, Italy by Selma James, Brigitte Galtier, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici. A major tenet of the campaign was that reproductive labor is the foundation of industrial work, in its important role in the maintenance and care of gendered male workers, yet a type of labor not recognized as productive enough to be wage labor.
The demands for the Wages for Housework used Marxist frameworks to think through the reliance of capitalist economies on exploitative labor practices against certain populations. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and some participants in the Wages for Housework campaign were enmeshed in the intellectual movement operaismo, which developed around factory strikes in Northern Italy in the 1970s. The Wages for Housework Campaign shared with operaismo the idea that the fair working conditions including wage is key to the social recognition of labor. Operaismo encouraged workers to act in their direct interests, and engage in factory strikes to demand better conditions. The Wages for Housework campaign applied also shared discussions about the social factory with operaismo; whereby "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society". The campaign activities included student protests, community workshops, and direct action protest.
Wages for Housework published a Marxist autonomist journal, Matériaux pour l'intervention. Several publications grew out of its ideas, which expanded on the claims of the original group and of more general topics in labor and exploitation. In Italy, Quaderni rossi, published by Raniero Panzieri, and Mario Tronti, dealt with a variety of topics relating to the class struggle.
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United States
In 1973, Silvia Federici helped start Wages for Housework groups in the US and in 1975, the Wages for Housework opened an office in Brooklyn, New York at 288 B. 8th St. The New York group was called the "Wages for Housework Committee." Flyers handed out in support of the New York Wages for Housework Committee called for all women to join regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual orientation, number of children, or employment. In 1975 Federici published Wages Against Housework, the book most commonly associated with the movement.
Branches of the Wages for Housework Committee appeared in other cities across America. They were organized in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, Tulsa, and Cleveland. Along with these committees, other autonomous organizations that fall within the Wages for Housework campaign began to organize within the United States. For example, in 1974 International Black Women for Wages for Housework was founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown in New York City. Prescod also founded the Black Women for Wages for Housework in Los Angeles alongside Sidney Ross-Risden in 1980. The Black Women for Wages for Housework focused on not only unpaid housework for the average housewife, but specific issues of black and third world women. They called for reparations for "slavery, imperialism and neo-colonialism."
Both San Francisco and Philadelphia were home to Wages Due Lesbians, an organization that was first created in Britain in 1975. Wages Due Lesbians called for wages for housework along with extra wages for lesbians for "the additional physical and emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society, recognized as work and paid for so all women have the economic power to afford sexual choices." Wages Due Lesbians also worked alongside The Lesbian Mothers' National Defense Fund, founded in 1974 and based in Seattle, which aimed to help lesbian mothers who were a part of custody cases after coming out.
San Francisco was also home to the U.S. PROStitutes Collective (US PROS). US PROS was created in 1982 to help decriminalize prostitution and also prevent men, women, and children from being forced into prostitution. Likewise, Tulsa housed the No Bad Women, Just Bad Laws Coalitions. It was founded by Ruth Taylor Todasco in 1981 and also focused on the decriminalization of sex work.
Maps Wages for housework
Social wage campaigns
Wages for Housework is part of more general social wage campaigns in the 1970s interested in late capitalism. These campaigns used analysis of Fordist compromises during the twentieth century to argue that family wages or social security payments had amounted to wages paid for housework in the advanced capitalist West. A number of other autonomous organizations interested in compensation for domestic labor were formed in 1975: Black Women for Wages for Housework, Wages Due Lesbians, the English Collective of Prostitutes (ECP) and some years later WinVisible (women with visible and invisible disabilities).
Recent history
In recent years, the demands of the Wages for Housework Campaign have been applied to many more recent debates in the gendered aspects of labor including, reproductive rights, sex work, and demands for women in leadership roles in business.
Silvia Federici and several others from the early campaign have continued to publish books and articles related to the demands of Wages for Housework including Fererici's 2012 book, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle.
Publications
- Louise Toupin. Le salaire au travail ménager. Chronique d'une lutte féministe internationale (1972-1977) Éditions du Remue-Ménage, 2014.
- Silvia Federici. Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle. PM Press, 2012. '
- Silvia Federici. Wages Against Housework. Published jointly by the Power of Women Collective and the Falling Wall Press, 1975. Link goes to full text of the book.
- Cox, Nicole, and Silvia Federici. Counter-planning from the kitchen: wages for housework : a perspective on capital and the Left. New York: New York Wages for Housework Committee. 1976.
- Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, and Selma James. The Power of women and the subversion of the community. Bristol: Falling Wall Press Ltd. 1975.
- James, Selma, Nina Lopez, and Marcus Rediker. 2012. Sex, Race and Class-The Perspective of Winning a Selection of Writings 1952-2011. Chicago: PM Press. http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=867353.
See also
- Microwork
- Post-Fordism
- Knowledge economy
- Knowledge market
References
External links
- Selma James and the Wages for Housework Campaign - article by Shemon Salam in New Beginnings, a journal of independent labour
- "Women in the Workforce" collections. Barnard Archive.
Source of article : Wikipedia
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