We stay-athome mums are worth more than £12,000
Unpaid domestic work is what keeps the country going, says Estelle Lee, while juggling children, dogs, dinner, laundry…
Time is money, as the saying goes. Except if you are a stay-athome parent or the one picking up most of the domestic slack, then it’s worth about £12,000 a year, according to a statement released by the Office for National Statistics yesterday to demonstrate how unpaid work boosts the overall economy outside of the traditional “market” valuation of GDP.
To put it in context, overall unpaid household service work was equivalent to 63.1 per cent of GDP, which means there’s a lot of juggling going on out there.
I would have read this in the news myself before I was called to discuss it, except for the fact that I had to get up at 6am to prepare breakfast, remind my two children (six and seven) that they needed to get dressed, brush their teeth, eat, finish their reading, pack school bags, feed the dogs, unload a dishwasher and hurriedly put the bins out, which had been forgotten. Add to that the hourlong round trip to school (no school gate chat) and it was well past nine before I could even start to think about these findings.
The laundry lies unwashed in the room next door and I’m reminded by the empty fridge in the kitchen that I need to find a solution for dinner later. It makes me think £12,000 a year doesn’t even come close to approximating the unpaid value that parents (not always women) add to the economy on an annual basis.
If you were outsourcing all these activities at a competitive rate based on somewhere between £10 and £20 an hour across a working week, it soon starts to add up. I’m not a mathematician but it would cost considerably more than £12,000. A full-time nanny alone costs from £21,000 a year. Factor in a weekly cleaner (£30) and a tutor (£40 per hour) and you can see how quickly costs for otherwise unpaid domestic work could spiral.
And it’s important to understand how modern lives are changing as we cram more and more in, and how this is adding untold pressure, even if it is not adding cost. The report gets to the point when it says, “People’s total hours of work (unpaid and paid) are also important for considering stress levels across the population.”
In her book Half a Wife, published in 2012, Gaby Hinsliff succinctly opened the floodgates to the rather obvious reality that every household needs “half a wife” when you have two people working; someone to tackle the daily onslaught of admin and the – in my experience – usually eye-rollingly female ownership of the geographical whereabouts of Sellotape, sports kit and car keys.
Since then, many have leaned in, out and probably gone a bit mad in the process. This being one of the reasons that I gave up my job as a full-time editor of a magazine a year ago and headed to a small village in Somerset to reassess and find some muchneeded balance.
Like most people, we don’t have a full-time nanny or housekeeper. My husband works as a solicitor and is a proponent of agile working. Which is great unless he has a client who is less than agile in their view of having bums on seats in London, meaning I’m mostly at home trying to do everything else. As a freelance writer, on paper I have the fluidity to fit work around our life and mop up the requirements of family life – but the reality can be somewhat different. Christine Armstrong, author of The
Mother of All Jobs (Bloomsbury), quite rightly points out that we just don’t value domestic work.
“The problem is,” she says, “we have a million more mothers working than we did 20 years ago and yet all this domestic stuff still needs to get done. The value of the time it takes is not being recognised.”
It’s the emotional labour, too, where women are most likely to engage. Because it’s not just the doing that takes time, it’s the stress in working out how you are going to do it all and – without a support network – find someone to help you do it. “Women will keep going until they make themselves ill,” says Armstrong.
I certainly recognise what she says to be true, even with a hands-on husband (when he’s here). I still find that most of my productive online admin (replying to emails, ordering a food shop, paying bills and maintaining a tenuous social link with friends via Whatsapp) has to happen at night.
In Somerset, there isn’t the same pool of resources to tap into as there was when we were both working in London. Given that I don’t have the money to employ a roster of staff, we juggle madly with school pick-ups, online shops and attempt not to drop any balls. If anyone has any idea what to dress my kids up in on International Day tomorrow at school, do please let me know. If you can rustle up a costume, even better. I won’t be able to pay you, though.
Outsource all my jobs at a competitive hourly rate and costs would soon spiral