Caregivers are the ghostwriters of economic success: their work subsidizes states, the private sector and households

It’s an essential ingredient for life. It keeps us fed, nurtured and healthy and enables social systems to function. It’s skilled, emotional, exhausting, rewarding work. Work that props up our lives, households, communities and economies. It’s ‘women’s work’, work for poor people, work for migrants. Without it we would have nothing.

Yet care is massively undervalued and ignored across the world, its contribution to economies invisibilized. While growth and profit remain the priority, care of people and the planet is relegated to the sidelines.

This continues, despite caregivers carrying the burden of Covid-19. Researcher Christine Berry summed this up when writing about the British government’s approach to childcare: ‘Privately, governments and employers both know that unpaid childcare is essential and demanding work, and that the scale of it has just exploded. Publicly, they must pretend this work does not exist, since they have no appetite to properly support it.’¹

Care work is too often treated as a private matter. It is ‘unproductive’ work, carried out ‘beyond’ the market and naturalized to certain groups of people to be performed out of love, virtue or duty. It’s not the business of the economy. While care work might be treated as a ‘gift’, and can be full of joy, its capacity has limits. Those carrying it out – paid or unpaid – are too often treated as expendable. Yet caregivers are the ghostwriters of economic success: their work subsidizes