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A Critique of the Caregiver Credit

C. L'Hirondelle - 2005

The goal of the Caregiver Credit (a US campaign) is to have unpaid caregiving work, usually provided by women, be financially compensated. This is not a universal livable income for everyone, but a targeted benefit limited to caregivers. They argue that caregivers should not be lumped in under a universal livable income because that would not differentiate between those who provide care work and those who might, for example, just want to hang out and go surfing.

While this seems logical, there are several major flaws with a targeted income campaign versus a universal livable income. There are surface flaws as well as fundamental economic flaws.

Fundamental Flaw 1) Jobism creates a stunning waste of natural and human resources.

When people demand jobs, they are really demanding money to live with health and dignity. But because work has been mythologized, there is a big stigma to be associationed with anything that might be considered advocating anything that might be associated with laziness.

Jobism ignores most of the work that is done on the planet -- unpaid work -- and simultanerously ignores those who do this work: women. Jobism also ignores that many people cannot take jobs to solve their poverty. They are children, or elderly, or people with disabilities or people with health problems who make up a huge portion of the world's population.

The biggest blind spot in jobism, however, is the fact that there cannot be more jobs without more consumption.

Jobism also ignores the fact that rising productivity though automation means fewer jobs in the future not more.

Because of this, jobists (many union leaders in the west) often support the creation or maintenance of good paying government jobs. In effect they want a guaranteed income for the few. Yet the creation of a GLI would actually protect wages and working conditions for necessary and essential work.

Even 'alternative' think tanks like the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and the Social Planning and Research Council of BC write that a progressive approach to reduce poverty would "emphasize the need for more decent-paying jobs, and would seek to build a full employment economy." (A Bad Time to Be Poor, June 2003, page 39).

Even as people reflexively demand jobs, most people don't dream of spending their lives doing soul-sucking work. They dream of more time to themselves, time to think, to do art, crafts, music, to play, to cook good food, to grow a garden, to spend time with loved ones. People dream of time-off from work, of 'free' time and the fact that people have less and less reveals just how 'un-free' the job system makes us.

"For this 'job', which everybody had congratulated me upon getting, which was
supposed to be so ennobling, which was to make a man of me, was actually
degrading, destructive, and above all useless. It was degrading because it reduced
men to the status of beasts... It was destructive because it reduced a glorious
setting to a black obscenity. And it was useless because the gold, which was
mined at such expense and human cost, was melted into bars and shipped
to Fort Knox in the United States where it was once again confined below ground...
The whole, vast, complicated operation seemed to me to be pointless...
Would we or the nation have been worse if we had stayed drunk all summer?"
Pierre Berton, The Smug Minority

Back to Objection Number One
Next: Objection Number Three

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