Our unpaid work is worth £19,000 a year
EVERY adult carries out unpaid work worth nearly £19,000 a year, a study reveals.
More than a quarter of the time we spend working for free is taken up with driving to our jobs or acting as a taxi driver to ferry children around.
The rest involves washing, cleaning, cooking, childcare or looking after frail and vulnerable older or disabled people, according to the Office for National Statistics report.
Unpaid household work in 2016 was worth an overall £1.24 trillion, or £18,933 for every individual, it said.
This exceeded the £ 1.04 trillion brought in by industry outside the finance and City sector – which includes manufacturers, utilities, accountants, law firms, hotels and restaurants, transport companies, airlines, construction and farmers.
If the figures are broken down, household jobs such as cleaning would be worth £199,353 million, and transport is valued at £ 358,350 million. Childcare would be valued at £351,734 million and adult care would be put at £59,453 million.
Although unpaid work is usually arranged privately, researchers said it was increasingly organised over the internet, where the working time involved and costs or rewards are hard to measure. Online dating – or ‘ relationship forming’, as the ONS calls it – is among the valuable services that cannot be counted by traditional economic methods.
Researchers said: ‘Although not captured within gross
‘Taxi driver for children’
domestic product, these measures are important for a complete understanding of how the economy is changing.’
About £1 out of every £6 which would be earned in the household ‘shadow economy’ – £2,651 for every person – goes on consumer spending necessary to unpaid work, such as petrol, electricity, gas and food.
And a high amount of our unpaid work involves looking after people who need continuous round-the- clock care. As the population ages, the amount of effort put into this kind of care – nearly always carried out by family members – has risen to almost 90 per cent of all the looking after people are involved in.
Some 2.2 million vulnerable adults were being cared for free in 2016. The ONS said: ‘Adult care amounted to 7.9 billion hours, which would equate to the work of over four million adult social care workers working every week of the year.’
The report says the unofficial economy is offering alternative ways of working and of buying services. ‘Accounting for unpaid activities is increasingly important in a digital economy,’ it said.
‘Not only are many alternatives to traditional services increasingly being offered online free of charge, at point of use at least, but new activities and ways of production are being generated, such as online relationship forming and networking, and digital content production such as social media videos and blogs.’