RN14 - Gender relations in the labour market and the welfare state

Class, Race and Gender

in the Caring Economy and Beyond

The call for a caring economy is a call for public budgetary investments in paid and unpaid care, at home, in the community, in the healthcare, education and welfare services systems and elsewhere in the community. A caring economy is not an altruistic project but an economically sound model in which the fiscal returns from investing in care are high, allowing great investment and, when compared to other more profit-oriented investments, greater economic and social rewards, for the same net cost. Scholars who engage in the call for a caring economy see it as an opportunity to secure a continuous increase in the number of quality jobs, where employees can choose shorter or longer hours shifts. Quality jobs in the context of a caring economy mean that the higher income reflects improved training, working conditions, and career structures. Moreover, a caring economy that is based on the expansion and enhanced quality of a broad range of services responding to human needs is concurrently contributing towards the continuous promotion of social cohesion and social support on all levels in ways that cross class, race and gender boundaries allowing social life to be based on organizing principles of inclusion and reciprocity. The call for a caring economy is an attempt to achieve gender equality by undermining labor market segregation, the greatest mechanism reproducing the gender wage gap through undervaluation of feminized (care) work.

            A caring economy magnifies our understanding of current casualization and precarity in the labor market as an obstacle to recovery from a range of crises: the health-care crisis of covid-19, the financial crisis, the immigration crisis, the global crisis of enhanced poverty both in the global south and the global north; the violence crisis; and the climate crisis. The caring economy is a perspective that focuses on human need and vulnerability as well as shouldering the need to dissolve oppressive structures of all type.

            How can a caring economy perspective inform our studies of class, race and gender inequalities? How can such a perspective open up research questions either on current price paid by those who depend on state funding and are therefore exposed to austerity, casualization, precarious employment, or, on collaborations with business, organizations, civil society, activist, mainstream economists and policy makers, generating the solidarity required for promoting a caring economy for all? We invite papers of a broad range of topics that could enrich our understanding of a caring economy, its contributions and its problematic assumptions including a re-constitution of an essentialist maternal identity for all females. We open up the discussion so that it is also a conversation on current and future feminist action. Any of the topic below are relevant:

• Gender relations in times of crisis
• Risks and opportunities for a more just society
• Class polarization during times of crisis
• Class relations and solidarity
• Power relations in the workplace
• Work and family challenges vs. sources of support
• Precarious employment and gender inequality in the public sector and the labor market more broadly
• Continuing undervaluation of feminized work and care work
• Gender violence and state responses
• Intersectionality and the challenging of intersecting inequalities
• Climate crisis adaptation and class, race and gender vulnerabilities

Please send 250 abstracts

 orly.benjamin[at] biu.ac.il ()

before 15th of April, 2022.