Unpaid Work and Mystification.

I like this study (OK that link is to the WaPost blog, but here's the salary.com link) about how stay-at-home moms would earn about $130K/year if paid for all the work they do. The study is of course deeply flawed, and here's why: the study assumes the mother to be doing a variety of odd jobs -- part-time positions -- cobbled together to make a more-than-full-time job. In fact, the study provides 2/3rds of the compensation in overtime pay:

The average stay-at-home mom reports working almost 92 hours per week, earning $88,424 (or 66% of our hypothetical pay) from overtime.

I'm not doubting that stay-at-home parents work that much. However, you'd be hard pressed to find anywhere that's going to pay you overtime for being a jack-of-all-trades. My father once worked four jobs: high school teacher (FT), college instructor (PT), prisoner education instructor (PT), and high school basketball referee (PT). I'd estimate his working week at that time to be about 60 hours a week (more like 75 hours if you count all the prep/grading time rather than actual classroom time). However, since these were cobbled together positions, none of them paid overtime.

In the District today we have many people who work over 40 hours a week and see neither benefits nor overtime, because they are working multiple part-time jobs. A truer estimate of what our stay-at-home mom would make would include the reality of the workplace: part-time (and I now quote) "housekeeper, day-care teacher, cook, computer whiz, laundry machine operator, janitor, facilities manager, van driver, chief executive and psychologist" will not get you anywhere in the world. It gets you what you might call "exploited." And let's be serious for a moment: Chief Executive of a 4 or to be really generous 8 person organization? I'm guessing it doesn't pay as well as CEO for General Electric.

However, the study does point out something obscured by material conditions: an awful lot of our economy/lifestyle is based upon uncompensated labor. Marx makes a distinction between productive and "unproductive" labor in the "Theories of Surplus Value". Productive labor produces surplus-value and therefore capital; unproductive labor does not -- it is labor done to reproduce conditions of life or for one's own consumption:

The largest part of society, that is to say the working class, must incidentally perform this kind of labour [cooking, cleaning, etc.] for itself; but it is only able to perform it when it has laboured “productively”. It can only cook meat for itself when it has produced a wage with which to pay for the meat; and it can only keep its furniture and dwellings clean, it can only polish its boots, when it has produced the value of furniture, house rent and boots. To this class of productive labourers itself, therefore, the labour which they perform for themselves appears as “unproductive labour”. This unproductive labour never enables them to repeat the same unproductive labour a second time unless they have previously laboured productively.

It is worth noting that "unproductive labor" is entirely dependent on "productive labor" to maintain material support, that is without productive labor producing some sort of income there would be no use at all for "unproductive labor." Marx continues a bit later on:

... productive labour is such as produces commodities, and unproductive labour is such as produces personal services. The former labour is represented in a vendible thing; the latter must be consumed while it is being performed. The former includes (except for that labour which creates labour-power itself) all material and intellectual wealth—meat as well as books—that exists in the form of things; the latter covers all labours which satisfy any imaginary or real need of the individual—or even those which are forced upon the individual against his will.

The basic distinction is between that which can be resold and that which cannot.

This nifty essay does a tremendous job of articulating the exclusion of domestic labor from Capitalist relations:

Domestic labor, as Smith points out, is not labor that is sold on the market. Moreover, as Coulson, Magas and Wainwright as well as Smith have argued,
domestic labor produces use-values for immediate consumption, not commodities that are sold on the market. As such, domestic labor does not produce exchange-value and thus does not constitute socially necessary labor in the economic sense.

The distinction is important for an understanding of how Marx arrives at "socially necessary labor":

Domestic labor is labor in the general sense of an interaction between persons and nature in order to produce a useful product. However, it is not productive labor in the contemporary economic sense (that is, within capitalism) because productive labor is based on a specific relation of production wherein surplus-labor is produced by the worker and appropriated by the capitalist as surplus-value in the form of profit. In the "privatized family", which is itself an articulation of the private property relations of capitalism, no surplus-value is produced and appropriated by the capitalist.

Anyone still reading?