Growing the core economy: Gender,time and sustainable development

Introduction

These are hard times. The backdrop to this Viewpoint (indeed, to the whole journal issue) is a sense of chronic turbulence and insecurity. We can respond by withdrawing into whatever we can find by way of self-protection, or by seizing the moment to promote radical change for the common good. Crisis provides opportunities. My perspective on women and the local economy starts from the premise that we must find ways to move from where we are – with widening inequalities, accelerating climate change, depleting natural resources and a deepening slump in the global economy – to where most of us would want to be – in a strong, healthy and just society, with a flourishing economy that treasures and protects the natural environment and with some hope of leaving a secure legacy for future generations.

This implies a major transition to develop an economy that serves the interests of people and the planet, rather than the other way around (Spratt et al., 2010). It requires a repositioning of political goals, so that competitiveness and growth cede precedence to well-being for all and sustainable social justice. For these purposes, ‘well-being’ is taken to mean feeling good physically and mentally and being able to function in the world: it describes people’s emotions, their sense of competence and connection to others (Bok, 2010; Michaelson et al., 2009). Crucially, the words ‘for all’ sum up an imperative to create conditions for everyone to enjoy well-being, regardless of background or circumstances. That calls for an equality of opportunity that is profound rather than shallow – depending not only on rules against unfair discrimination, but also on proactive fairness and ‘sustainable social justice’, meaning the fair and equitable distribution of social, environmental and economic resources between people, places, generations and, crucially for this issue, between genders (Coote and Franklin, 2009).

The challenge is substantial. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, between 1970 and 2005 the top 0.1% of UK taxpayers (that is 47,000 individuals) increased their income by 694%, while the bottom 90% (24.8 m taxpayers) increased theirs by only 48% over the same period (Brewer et al., 2008). A profoundly unequal society was hit by the credit crunch in 2008 and by the Coalition Government’s austerity programme in 2010 and beyond. In the name of budget deficit reduction, services and grants for health and social care, children and young people, homeless families, and a great swathe of public and third-sector programmes aimed at helping poor and vulnerable groups are being drastically downsized or axed altogether. A similar fate confronts leisure and sport facilities; libraries; film, theatre and arts projects; and post-school education. Women, who make up two-thirds of public sector employees, have been hardest hit by the cuts.

Towards a new social settlement

All this points to the end of the UK post-war settlement and the ideals on which the British welfare state was founded: a government committed to raising taxes to build a framework of public goods and services that enable everyone, on the basis of need rather than ability to pay, to be protected against the risks of illness and unemployment, to be decently educated and housed, and to have enough money to live on (Timmins, 2001). The extension of equal opportunities for women (however incomplete) was at least partly a product of the welfare state: education and training, health care, family planning, parental leave, childcare, benefits and tax credits, public sector employment and a wide range of local facilities (libraries, parks, swimming pools, buses to name a few) made it possible for many women to widen their horizons and make choices they could not have made before the Second World War. The very idea of equality was embedded in the universal services on which the whole edifice was based.

Notwithstanding its immense achievements, the post-war settlement is due for an overhaul. From the outset, it has rested on the premise that the economy will grow, yielding more taxes to pay for more and better services. There are two problems with this assumption. First, a return to economic growth, defined as an increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is not only uncertain because of the nature of the global crisis, but also in many people’s view unsustainable, because even if the economy did grow, it could not be rendered ‘weightless’ in time to avert catastrophic damage to the natural environment (Jackson, 2009).

Second, there is little evidence that more of the same kind of public services would bring commensurate benefits. A defining characteristic of the welfare state has been that paid public servants provide help to individuals who are needy and have problems. It has saved a lot of people from destitution and early death, but it is a deficit model that generates a culture of atomised individualism and dependency. If you are just a passive recipient of the ministrations of others who are paid to look after you, you can lose control over what happens to you. If your voice is unheard and you feel unvalued, this undermines your physical and mental well-being. You get used to thinking that others know more and are better placed to fix your problems – although what they do will not deliver the best outcomes because your own wisdom and capabilities have not been brought into play. In many services, especially health, you are treated as an individual (if you are lucky) or as a body part (if you are not), with no account taken of context or relationships.

The Coalition Government’s idea of a ‘Big Society’ to fill gaps left by its public spending cuts has introduced a seductive narrative, but is wide of the mark. It seeks to shift responsibility from the State to individuals and from public services to groups and organisations in commercial and non-profit sectors. It implies a massive transfer from paid to unpaid labour. It pays no attention to forces within modern capitalism that lead to accumulations of wealth and power in the hands of a few at the expense of others. Nor does it recognise that the current structure of the UK economy selectively restricts the ability of citizens to participate and benefit. It is likely to leave the poorest and least powerful a long way behind (Coote, 2010).

Neither the ‘Big Society’ nor the welfare state it seeks to replace has had a clear enough sense of what constitutes successful outcomes. Both are anchored in the politics of economic growth, where the primary measure of success is GDP, on the manifestly false assumption that wealth will ‘trickle down’ to make everyone richer and happier.

Circumstances have combined to create a vicious circle: intractable and widening inequalities that impose heavy social and economic costs on society at large; a sick economy and slim prospects for sustainable growth; a welfare system that is unfit for the future, now the victim of savage spending cuts rather than radical transformation; plans for a ‘Big Society’ that seem likely to augment the problems of the poor and further widen inequalities; and a concept of value that is at odds with what is genuinely valuable in terms of human progress.

Is there a way out? Is it possible to build a well-being system – rather than a welfare state – that is fit for the 21st century? What resources and mechanisms could it deploy? In the first place, such a system cannot rely on continuing economic growth, for reasons I have indicated. Without growth, we must get used to looking after ourselves and each other in much tighter fiscal conditions. Even with a more progressive tax system, and a lot more government borrowing, we would have to make every penny stretch further. However, that should not lead inexorably to decline, because the conventional market economy is not the only resource available.

Growing the core economy

There is potential for growth in what has been described as the ‘core’ economy: the human resources that comprise and sustain social life (Goodwin et al., 2003). These resources are embedded in the everyday lives of every individual (time, wisdom, experience, energy, knowledge, skills) and in the relationships among them (love, empathy, responsibility, caring, reciprocity, teaching and learning). They are ‘core’ because they are central and essential to society. They underpin the market economy by raising children; caring for people who are ill, frail and disabled; feeding families; maintaining households; and building and sustaining intimacies, friendships, social networks and civil society. They have a key role, too, in safeguarding the natural economy, since everyday human behaviours and lifestyles strongly influence the way we use environmental resources. If we get it right, a thriving core economy will provide essential resources for a well-being system that is fit for the future.

The human assets and relationships that make up the core economy are largely uncommodified, unpriced and unpaid, routinely ignored and often exploited. Yet they have value and are exchanged. The core economy, which involves the production and distribution of human resources, can flourish and expand, or weaken and decline, depending on the circumstances and conditions within which it operates. It can ‘grow’ if it is recognised, valued, nurtured and supported.

While the core economy is rooted in families and households, it extends well beyond the domestic sphere, operating through extended families, wider social networks, neighbourhoods, and communities of interest and place. It includes all the unpriced and unpaid activities that are carried out by friends looking out for one another, grandparents sharing childcare and helping out, parents being school governors, volunteers cleaning up local parks or visiting people who are housebound, neighbours doing each other’s shopping or keeping each other’s keys, or exchanging gossip and advice. It provides the essential social functions that keep people connected with one another. Some of these activities are formally organised – for example, through national charities or local authorities. Most arise organically from close social relationships. They are predominantly female activities: indeed, the fact that the core economy is distinct from the market economy both expresses and reinforces the historically gendered division of paid and unpaid labour.

The core economy underpins and gives shape to social and economic life. If people’s everyday resources and relationships are brought into the centre of policy making, strengthened and enabled to flourish, it becomes possible to move from an economy based on scarcity of economic resources to an economy based on abundance of human assets. It also becomes possible to move beyond a deficit model of need which focuses on problems that require fixing, to a more rounded and positive approach to promoting well-being. Co-production illustrates the point.

Co-production

Co-production is a term used to describe a particular way of getting things done, where the people who are currently described as ‘providers’ and ‘users’ work together in an equal and reciprocal partnership, pooling different kinds of knowledge and skill. It draws upon a long history of self-help, mutual aid, asset-based community development and other forms of participative local action, including time banking; it adds up to much more than consultation or ‘user’ involvement (Cahn, 2001; Parks et al., 1981; Wann, 1995). It starts from the premise that people have assets not just problems and that everyone has something of value to contribute. Individuals play an active role, often alongside family members, neighbours, professionals, or others with a relevant interest, in deciding how they want to live and what it would take to improve their lives, and then play a significant part in realising their goals.

This way, co-production taps into the abundance of human resources in the core economy and encourages people to join forces and make common cause. There are countless examples of co-production in practice, ranging across health and social care, parenting, education, criminal justice and local authority decision making (Slay and Robinson, 2011). At best, it builds local networks and strengthens the capacity of local groups; it changes the way people think about themselves and what they are capable of doing; it draws upon the direct wisdom and experience they have about what they need and what they can contribute. All these factors can help to improve well-being and prevent problems occurring or intensifying. By transforming the way people think about and act upon ‘needs’ and ‘services’, co-production has the potential to democratise the character and substance of the public realm. Equally, it can transform the way independent non-profit and commercial organisations do their work. It has strong implications for professionals and others who provide services, because they will have to change how they think about themselves, how they understand others and how they operate on a day-to-day basis. They must learn to work with people, rather than doing things to or for them (Boyle and Harris, 2009; Boyle et al., 2009, 2010).

But lest we get too starry-eyed about co-production, it is important to note that it is not a blue-print that can be applied in any circumstances to achieve predetermined effects. It is a broad approach, based on a set of principles that may or may not be followed; the quality of outcomes will depend on who is involved, how and under what conditions. These caveats apply in equal measure to the ‘core economy’ as a whole.

Problems with the core economy

The core economy does not float freely beyond the reach of public life and paid employment. Nor is it inherently good or right. It is profoundly influenced by the rules, protocols and power relations that emanate from the State and the market. It shapes and sustains social and economic life. It also reflects and reproduces social and economic divisions and inequalities.

As I have noted, most of its transactions involve women working without wages – a pattern that generates lasting inequalities in job opportunities, income and power between women and men. These are often compounded by age, race, ethnicity and disability.

Time is a key resource in the core economy. Everyone has the same amount of time but some people have a lot more control over how they use their time than others. Some people – mainly women – have low-paid jobs as well as heavy caring responsibilities, so they are poor in terms of time as well as income. Notably, around half of lone parents cannot earn enough money to stay out of poverty while making sure that their children are looked after (by themselves or someone else), however long or hard they work (Burchardt, 2008). How paid and unpaid time is distributed between men and women and across different social groups will serve to narrow or widen inequalities (Coote et al., 2010; Goodwin, 2010).

For this and other reasons, transactions in the core economy can privilege some people over others (for example, where better-off parents share a car pool to ferry children to career-enhancing after-school activities). Individuals and groups may be excluded or disempowered because of how much discretionary time they have, where they come from, where they live or their state of health. Some neighbourhoods seem to be awash with activities that enrich and strengthen social connections, while some appear beset by divisions or distrust, or have less opportunity for social exchange because, for example, there are no meeting places, or populations are transient, or fear of violence keeps people indoors. In many places, these positive and negative tendencies exist side by side. Some ethnic and cultural groups have stronger traditions than others of self-help and mutual aid, although these may go hand-in-hand with values and customs that perpetuate inequalities (such as class-based snobbery, racial prejudice or subordination of women).

It therefore matters a great deal how the core economy develops. This will affect not only the prospects for a 21st-century well-being system, but also the quality of people’s daily lives and relationships, the distribution of power and resources between them (especially between women and men), their physical and mental health and their future opportunities. Such changes can either exacerbate social divisions and inequalities, or help to promote sustainable social justice and well-being for all.

What are the benign options, then, for growing the core economy? For a start, it surely depends on devolving power and encouraging local action wherever possible. This is partly about formal devolution, with more power for local authorities and, within them, for neighbourhood-based decision-making bodies. It is also about opening up opportunities for people to take control over what happens in their own localities and providing access to resources that will make local action feasible and effective. This would need to go hand-in-hand with measures to encourage the fair distribution of opportunities and resources between localities. But even assuming a degree of equality between localities, the prospect of more devolution and local control begs the question: who has power to participate and benefit – and what can be done to help spread that power across the population?

It is beyond the scope of this Viewpoint to examine the full range of options for distributing power. I have noted that most transactions in the core economy are carried out by women, and that time is a key resource. I now turn to the distribution of time and its implications for gender and family relations.

Redistributing time

There are strong grounds for a gradual shift towards a much shorter, ‘normal’ working week. The case has been examined in more detail elsewhere (Coote et al., 2010). I will focus here on the implications for gender and family relations.

In the right conditions a shorter working week could help to ensure that fewer women lose their jobs in the recession, but also to distribute paid and unpaid time more evenly between women and men. By all accounts, women spend more time than men doing unpaid work. This has happened in spite of a massive influx of women into paid employment over the last three decades. Profoundly entrenched assumptions about what are ‘natural’ patterns of employment and time-use for women and men affect the types of work they do, the hours they spend in paid employment and the value attached to their respective occupations. As a consequence, women continue to be channelled towards a narrow range of paid occupations that are seen as ‘women’s jobs’, to command lower pay in the labour market and – often because of this – to ‘choose’ to do part-time jobs when they have children, leaving their higher-earning partner in full-time employment while they do the childcare and housework. There is a circular effect, reinforcing norms and expectations, perpetuating inequalities in income, time use and opportunities, and shoring up the general assumption (if not the reality) that men are the main breadwinners for their families. In a world where market-based values predominate, this combination leaves women with less money and power than men, and little scope for doing things differently (Bryson, 2007; Perrons, 2009).

If a much shorter working week became the norm, it would open up opportunities for sharing paid and unpaid work more equally between women and men. It will be necessary to overcome the negative effects on individual and family incomes (of which more later). But it is useful to consider separately how gender inequalities would be affected if men were able to spend much more time engaged in housework and childcare. If men began to change their patterns of time use, this could eventually help to dissolve gender stereotypes about work and pay, breaking the mould of unpaid labour being routinely under-valued and raising the status and pay of ‘caring’ jobs. It could, in short, open up more choices for women and undermine the roots of gendered inequalities in income, status and opportunity. Over time – as cultural and psychological adjustments are made – it could also improve quality of life and well-being for men.

The current work patterns appropriate most male adult waking time for paid work, casting home and family in a subordinate role – with invidious effects on parent-child relationships.

To illustrate the point, let us consider the efforts of Family 360, a US consultancy engaged by major corporations to help busy executives become more efficient parents without sacrificing office time. It advocates quantifiable ‘high-leverage’ activities. For example, a father is advised not to find out how his son got on at school today, but to ‘do something the son will remember’, because there is ‘a scale to quantify efforts to “create memory”’. The idea is to speed up ‘the very activities that most deeply symbolise fatherhood’, in order to prepare the executive and his family ‘to live in a total market world’ (Hochschild, 2005). Measurable efficiency at home and at work is the goal and, as this example shows, unpaid time is assiduously attuned to the interests and norms of paid employment. It is an extreme example, perhaps, but not far removed from arguments put forward in the UK, where organisations are said to be ‘increasingly aware of the business case for a work-life balance’ (Workplace Options, 2009). The Work Foundation seeks to position ‘families in the minds of policy-makers and business as generators of the national wealth and a valuable resource from which everyone … benefit[s]’ (Bevan and Jones, 2003: 1).

There is much to be said for recognising the value of family relationships and unpaid time. But these assets must be recognised as vital components of the core economy, not simply as resources to be cashed in by the market. Their chief value lies in what they can do for people and the planet and for the pursuit of sustainable social justice.

Problems with redistributing time

However positive and varied the benefits of moving to a shorter working week, there are bound to be serious difficulties in making the transition. There are few incentives for employers, but the most obvious transitional challenge is that a shorter working week would reduce the amount of money people can earn. Those on low rates of pay would be hardest hit. It could be seen as adding to the burden of people who are already poor and powerless. Many now have to work very long hours just to make ends meet.

The problem is not insuperable but change would need to be incremental, with gradual reductions in working hours over a decade or more. It would give policy makers time to design and implement supportive measures, including a higher minimum wage and a range of flexible options to suit different people’s needs (such as job-sharing, school term shifts, extended carer’s leave or sabbaticals). Glasgow Living Wage (http://www.glasgowlivingwage.co.uk/) shows what can be done. Launched by Glasgow City Council in 2009 to tackle in-work poverty, the wage was raised to £7.20 an hour in April 2012. There are now more than 150 employers across Glasgow who have joined the scheme.

Gradual change will also allow for transition to a decarbonised economy, and changing assumptions about ‘normal’ levels of consumption. The criteria for deciding how much income is ‘enough’ might then be adjusted accordingly. By helping to reduce the number of hours that families require for out-of-home provision, a shorter paid working week could help create more favourable conditions for achieving universally accessible and affordable childcare.

I would not argue that these are solutions to the problems associated with moving to a shorter working week, only that change is possible. We tend to think that social norms are deeply entrenched and very hard to shift, but there are many instances of attitudes changing dramatically over the course of just a few years.

We may be some distance from the point where majority opinion tips towards favouring much shorter hours in paid work, but there is a growing body of evidence about the environmental, social and economic benefits of making the transition. A wider debate about how we use, value and distribute work and time will help to build momentum.

This may sound ambitious, but let us not forget what a sorry state we are in, how very slim the chances are of returning to ‘business as usual’, and how thoroughly unjust and unsustainable ‘business as usual’ has been. That is why it is important to open a debate about how to achieve radical change.