On the occasion of the 22and Invisible Work Day, April 5, the Association féministe d’éducation et d’action sociale (AFEAS) asks the governments of Quebec and Canada to recognize this work by decreeing a National Invisible Work Day on the first Tuesday of April . After two years of pandemic, the recognition and valuation of invisible work are even more crucial issues for achieving equality between women and men.
Will our repeated demands in this regard since 2001 finally be heard? Without social, political and economic recognition, unpaid work remains invisible and is one of the factors of women’s poverty throughout their lives.
Unrecognized work
According to a Statistics Canada study, the economic value of Canadian unpaid household work is between $516.9 billion and $860.2 billion in 2019, or between 25.2% and 37.2% of gross domestic product (GDP). . This percentage is greater than the contribution of all the manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade sub-sectors combined. The study also points out that “the COVID-19 pandemic has increased the need to quantify the value of unpaid household work by highlighting the importance of these activities for the functioning of Canadian society and the economy”. It is therefore essential that Statistics Canada regularly assess this essential work in the same way as other economic sectors.
Exacerbated by the pandemic
Recognized by the UN in 1975, unpaid work has skyrocketed since the start of the pandemic. With the health emergency and confinement, women, more than men, have taken charge of school at home, domestic work, caring for loved ones in need, while continuing to work from home when they hadn’t lost it. According to the Council on the Status of Women, the pandemic has made it possible to take a sharp look at the effects of the historical undervaluation of jobs in the carebecause they are linked to the traditional unpaid work of women.
Major impacts for women
The unequal sharing of unpaid work within families puts women at a disadvantage when it comes to accepting promotions or even, in many cases, working full-time or even part-time. With the pandemic and the massive loss of jobs in non-essential trades, women are the ones who have lost the most. As of January 2021, according to the Royal Bank, some 500,000 women who lost their jobs due to COVID-19 had still not returned to work. Two-fifths of them would now be part of the long-term unemployed. These job losses combined with the lack of places in daycare services have, among other things, brought women back into the private sphere and have set back several gains relating to equality between women and men.
An essential recognition
How much longer will we have to wait for tangible recognition of this work? Hasn’t the pandemic made us see how essential all this care work is to society? How can this setback be reversed, while putting in place the social and economic measures necessary to put an end to the impoverishment of women?
It is essential that the governments of Quebec and Canada put in place specific and adapted measures to ensure that the post-pandemic recovery does not harm women, but on the contrary that it makes it possible to recognize the essential role of invisible work, still mostly done by women. Various measures necessary to recognize this invisible work have moreover been presented by the AFEAS and its partners of the Inter-Association Committee for the promotion of invisible work in the manifesto for the promotion of invisible work.