PIG IRON 6B: The Work of Love

Essays in Dignity and Political Economy

These essays are written in dialogue between a human thinker and an AI interlocutor. The thinking is collaborative. The voice and the judgement are human. The form is the argument. There are gaps. Help us fill them.

The manifesto these essays argue toward — Listen to Me — is already published on this blog.

Essay Six B — The Work of Love

Care, Dignity and the Economy We Actually Have

Essay Six A laid out the arithmetic. The demographic inversion. The frozen threshold. The invisible subsidy of unpaid carers worth £184 billion annually — nearly a second NHS — that appears nowhere in the public accounts. The political failures spanning four decades and multiple governments. The clear statement that adequate provision requires more public money and the similarly clear acknowledgement that more public money requires more tax.

If you found that uncomfortable, this essay will not be easier. But it is uncomfortable in a different way. Where Six A was arithmetic and political economy, this one is about people. Specifically about the people who do the work that makes human life possible at its most vulnerable — and what it means that we have systematically decided that work is worth almost nothing.

The word care is doing several things simultaneously in this essay and it is worth separating them at the outset.

There is the formal paid care sector — the care homes, the domiciliary care agencies, the residential support services for people with disabilities. Approximately 1.5 million people work in this sector in England. They are paid at the bottom of the wage distribution, have among the highest turnover rates of any sector, and do work that is physically demanding, emotionally intensive and socially essential.

Then there is the informal unpaid care provided by family members and friends — the 5 million people across the UK who look after someone they love, often at significant cost to their own health, finances and career. As established in Six A, their collective contribution is worth approximately £184 billion annually and is the invisible foundation on which the entire system rests. Actually, invisible to power: very visible to ordinary people.

And there is care in the broader philosophical sense — the orientation toward others that makes human community possible. The attention, the responsiveness, the willingness to subordinate your own immediate interests to the needs of someone else. This is what the feminist philosophers call the ethics of care, and it is both a description of what good care work involves and an argument about what a good society should value.

These three are connected. The devaluation of paid care work and the invisibility of unpaid care work are not separate problems. They are expressions of the same underlying logic — that work oriented toward others, toward maintaining and reproducing life, toward the vulnerable and the dependent, is less valuable than work oriented toward production, accumulation and exchange. This logic is not natural. It is historical. It was constructed. And it can be changed.

The People Who Do This Work

Start with who actually does it. Because the abstraction of the care crisis — the demographic charts, the funding gaps, the policy failures — can obscure the specific human reality of what care involves.

Care work at its most intensive means helping someone get out of bed in the morning. Washing them. Dressing them. Managing their medication. Preparing their food. Helping them to the toilet. Sitting with them when they are frightened. Being present when they are in pain. Doing this for multiple people across a shift, in conditions that are often understaffed, with equipment that is often inadequate, for a wage that is often barely above the minimum.

The emotional demands are as significant as the physical ones. Arlie Hochschild, whose 1983 work The Managed Heart introduced the concept of emotional labour, described the requirement placed on workers in caring roles to manage not just their actions but their feelings — to maintain warmth, patience and attentiveness regardless of their own emotional state, as a condition of employment. This is not incidental to care work. It is the core of it. And it is entirely invisible in how the work is valued and compensated.

The care workforce in England is approximately 1.5 million people. Around 80% are women. A disproportionate share are from ethnic minority backgrounds — care work has been a significant route into the formal economy for immigrant communities, particularly from West Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. The median hourly wage is £12.00 — just above the tenth percentile of the whole economy. Vacancy rates are approximately three times the wider economy average. Staff turnover is among the highest of any sector. The work is hard, the pay is low, and people leave.

This is not a market signal about the value of the work. It is a political signal about whose work counts.

The Historical Construction of Care’s Invisibility

The devaluation of care work did not happen by accident. It has a history. And that history is inseparable from the history of gender, of enclosure and of the construction of the market economy.

Silvia Federici‘s Caliban and the Witch — one of the most important and least read works of feminist political economy — traces the simultaneous enclosure of common land and the enclosure of women’s bodies and labour in the transition to capitalism in early modern Europe. The witch trials are not, in Federici’s reading, a medieval superstition. They are the mechanism by which female knowledge, autonomy and community power — the herbalist, the midwife, the woman who controlled her own fertility — were systematically destroyed to create the docile domestic labourer that capitalism required.

The argument is this. The market economy that emerged from the enclosures required a class of workers who would sell their labour for wages. It also required the reproduction of that labour — the feeding, clothing, caring and raising of the next generation of workers. This reproductive work had to be done. But it could not be paid for within the wage system without dramatically raising the cost of labour. The solution was to assign it to women, define it as natural rather than economic, and render it invisible in the accounts.

This is Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession applied to domestic and care labour. The unpaid work of social reproduction — raising children, caring for the elderly, maintaining the household — subsidises the paid economy at an enormous scale. It always has. The feminist political economists simply made the mechanism visible.

Nancy Fraser, in Cannibal Capitalism, updates this argument for the present. She argues that contemporary capitalism continues to depend on unpaid social reproduction while simultaneously destroying the conditions that make it possible — through precarious employment that makes household stability impossible, through austerity that withdraws the public services that supplement domestic care, through the intensification of paid work that leaves no time for the work of care. The system cannibalises its own foundations. And the people who bear the cost are disproportionately women, disproportionately from ethnic minority backgrounds, disproportionately from the working class.

The numbers from Six A bear this out. 10.3% of women provide unpaid care compared with 7.6% of men. 1.2 million unpaid carers live in poverty. 69% of carers who are employees say they have not focused on their career as much as they would like. 21% have taken on a lower paid or more junior role to fit around their caring responsibilities.

The Bullshit Jobs Inverse

David Graeber‘s Bullshit Jobs — published in 2018, based on an essay that went viral in 2013 — made an argument that resonated so immediately and so widely that it clearly touched something real. A very large proportion of jobs in advanced economies are experienced by the people doing them as pointless. Corporate lawyers who know the contracts they draft serve no social purpose. Middle managers who know their role is primarily to justify the existence of the management tier above them. Financial sector workers who know their activities extract value from the economy rather than creating it.

Graeber’s taxonomy of bullshit job categories — flunkies, goons, duct tapers, box tickers, taskmasters — is simultaneously funny and devastating. And his central observation is the one that lands hardest in the context of this essay. The most socially necessary work — caring for people, teaching children, maintaining the physical infrastructure that everyone depends on — tends to be the worst paid. The most socially useless work — financial engineering, corporate legal work, much of the management consulting industry — tends to be the best paid.

In most contemporary economies, those at the top of the job tree also apparently require more money as the incentive to get out of bed and work harder. Those at the bottom, or not in employment, apparently require less and/or the threat of replacement by someone cheaper. Why?

This is not a coincidence. It is the market working as designed. Wages reflect bargaining power, not social contribution. The care worker cannot withdraw her labour without someone dying. The hedge fund manager can. The care worker’s irreplaceability does not translate into bargaining power because the system has other mechanisms — immigration, outsourcing, the threat of privatisation — that keep the supply of care labour abundant enough to hold wages down.

Meanwhile the hedge fund manager’s irreplaceability is performed rather than real — most hedge funds underperform simple index funds over any meaningful period — but the performance is sufficiently convincing, and the legal and financial barriers to entry sufficiently high, that the wages hold.

The inverse relationship between social contribution and economic reward is not inevitable. It is produced by specific institutional arrangements — labour law, union rights, the structure of corporate governance, the tax treatment of different forms of income — that can be changed. The Nordic countries, with their stronger union movements and more compressed wage distributions, demonstrate that care work can be valued differently. The gap between a care worker’s wage and a consultant’s wage in Denmark is considerably smaller than the equivalent gap in England. This is a policy outcome, not a natural fact.

What the Devaluation Costs

The devaluation of care work has costs that extend well beyond the care workers themselves. They ripple through the entire system.

The most immediate cost is quality. Care work done under conditions of extreme time pressure, by workers who are exhausted, underpaid and resentful, by providers who are cutting costs to survive on local authority fee rates that have not kept pace with inflation — this care is not the care that dignity requires. The scandals that periodically emerge from residential care settings — the abuse, the neglect, the institutional dehumanisation — are not primarily the product of individual bad actors. They are the product of a system that has been systematically starved of the resources, the staffing levels and the workforce stability that good care requires.

The second cost is workforce sustainability. Staff turnover in the care sector is approximately 28% annually. This means that on average a care home loses more than a quarter of its workforce every year. The institutional knowledge, the relationships with residents, the accumulated understanding of individual needs and preferences — all of this is lost with every departure. The human continuity that is fundamental to good care — knowing someone, being known by them — is structurally undermined by the conditions that drive people out of the sector.

The third cost is to the unpaid carers who step into the gaps that the formal system cannot fill. When a local authority reduces its domiciliary care provision — as most have done repeatedly over the austerity decade — the care does not disappear. It is transferred, invisibly and without payment, to family members. Usually daughters. Usually at significant cost to their own employment prospects, financial security and health. Carers are significantly more likely than non-carers to report poor mental health. They are significantly more likely to have reduced their working hours or left paid employment entirely. The economic cost of this forced transfer of care — in lost productivity, in health costs, in reduced pension contributions — is never counted because it never appears in the accounts.

What Dignity Requires

Not utopia. Direction. Concrete, evidenced, affordable direction.

The first requirement is adequate pay for care work. This means a genuine living wage for all care workers — not the current National Living Wage, which is set at a level that does not actually sustain a decent life in most of England, but a wage that reflects the skill, the physical demands and the emotional labour that care work actually involves. The evidence from countries that have done this — Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands — is that adequate pay reduces turnover, improves quality and ultimately reduces the systemic costs of the revolving door workforce.

The objection is cost. Local authorities commission care at rates that cannot sustain higher wages without additional funding. The response is that additional funding is required — and that the cost of not providing it, in turnover, in quality failures, in the health costs of the workforce, and in the unpaid care that family members provide when formal care is inadequate, is considerably higher than the cost of paying properly.

The second requirement is genuine recognition and support for unpaid carers. Not a symbolic gesture. Practical support — respite care that is actually available, carer’s assessments that are actually conducted, carer’s allowance that is set at a level that reflects the work rather than treating it as a minor supplement. The current carer’s allowance of £81.90 per week — payable only if you provide more than 35 hours of care per week — is an insult dressed as a benefit.

The third requirement is a care system funded through collective provision rather than individual asset depletion. The means-test threshold raised substantially. A genuine lifetime cap on care costs set at a level that actually protects people from catastrophic loss. Funded through the fiscal mechanisms discussed in Six A — progressive wealth taxation, reform of National Insurance, serious inheritance tax reform.

The fourth requirement is to make care work visible in how we measure economic activity. GDP counts the output of the financial sector. It counts the arms trade. It does not count the care that keeps people alive and connected and human. The measuring what matters foundation of the manifesto applies with full force here. If we measured what care contributes — the suffering it prevents, the quality of life it maintains, the human connections it sustains — and if we measured what its absence costs — in hospital admissions, in premature deaths, in the health costs of unpaid carers — the political economy of care would look very different.

A False Narrative Rebuttal

A word on enforcement and the benefits cheat narrative. Because it needs saying directly.

Yes. Some people claim carer’s allowance who should not. Some people game the eligibility criteria. Some caring relationships are less intensive than the claimed thirty-five hours per week. This happens. Pretending it does not would be dishonest and would rightly undermine the credibility of everything else in this essay.

But consider the actual numbers before the narrative runs away with itself. Carer’s allowance fraud and error combined — including both deliberate fraud and innocent mistakes by claimants and the DWP — runs at approximately 4% of expenditure according to DWP’s own figures. The total carer’s allowance bill is approximately £4 billion annually. That means the fraud and error combined is approximately £160 million. In a system costing £34 billion in formal social care alone, this is not the crisis. It is a rounding error dressed as a scandal.

Meanwhile the tax gap — the difference between what HMRC is owed and what it collects, including avoidance, evasion and error — is estimated at approximately £47 billion annually. By HMRC. The enforcement resources directed at benefit claimants versus the enforcement resources directed at tax non-compliance tell you a great deal about whose rule-breaking the system takes seriously. A benefits inspector visits a carer’s home. A FTSE company’s transfer pricing arrangements receive a negotiated settlement.

This is not to say enforcement does not matter. It does. A system that is visibly gamed loses the social trust that makes collective provision politically sustainable. Your instinct that this damages trust is correct. The damage is real.

But the direction of the damage is misunderstood in the dominant narrative. The benefits cheat story — relentlessly amplified by certain newspapers and certain politicians — creates the impression that the primary threat to collective provision is the fraudulent claimant. The evidence suggests the primary threat is the political decision to underfund the system so severely that the legitimate claimants cannot receive adequate support, while the fraudulent fringe is used to justify further restriction.

The person claiming carer’s allowance they do not fully deserve is a problem. The government that freezes the threshold for fourteen years, scraps the lifetime cap and underpays care workers at the tenth income percentile is a larger problem. Both can be true simultaneously. The narrative that focuses entirely on the first while ignoring the second is not concerned with the integrity of the system. It is concerned with reducing the system.

The enforcement answer is proportionate, humane and directed at scale. Better DWP systems that flag inconsistencies without treating all claimants as suspects. Stronger enforcement of tax avoidance by individuals and corporations at a scale that would dwarf any savings from carer’s allowance fraud. And — crucially — a carer’s allowance set at a level that reflects the actual work rather than the current insult of £81.90 per week, because a system that pays fairly is a system that people feel less need to game and more reluctance to abuse.

Trust in collective provision is built not by suspicion of claimants but by visible adequacy of provision. When the system works — when care is genuinely available, when workers are genuinely paid, when carers are genuinely supported — the fraudulent fringe loses its political salience. When the system fails — as it currently does, systematically and visibly — the fraudulent fringe becomes the story that fills the gap where policy should be.

The Ethics of Care as Political Economy

The feminist philosophers who developed the ethics of care — Carol Gilligan, Nel Noddings, Joan Tronto — were making an argument that extends well beyond the care sector. They were arguing that the orientation toward others, the responsiveness to need, the attention to the particular and the vulnerable, is not a private virtue or a female speciality. It is a political and social capacity that a good society needs to cultivate and value — not just in the domestic sphere but in its institutions, its public life, its economy.

Joan Tronto’s Moral Boundaries identifies four phases of care — caring about (noticing that care is needed), taking care of (assuming responsibility), care giving (doing the work of care), and care receiving (responding to the care given). In the current arrangement, these four phases are distributed very unequally — the responsibility falls on those with least power, the work falls on those with least reward, and the decisions about what care is needed and who provides it fall on those with most distance from the actual experience of giving and receiving it.

The sortition proposal from Essay Four is directly relevant here. Citizens’ assemblies on care — composed of randomly selected citizens including carers, care workers and care recipients — would produce very different frameworks than the political processes that have generated the current arrangement. The evidence from deliberative processes on exactly these questions is consistent. When ordinary people are given genuine information, genuine time and genuine deliberative structure to think about care — about what they would want for themselves and their families, about what is fair, about who should pay — they arrive at positions considerably more generous and considerably more honest than anything the political system has managed.

Because behind the veil — as Rawls understood — we would all choose something that looks like dignity.

The Work of Love

There is one more thing to say and it is the most important.

Care is not only an economic and political problem. It is the expression of something fundamental about human life. We are all dependent. We were all dependent at the beginning — completely, entirely, unable to survive without the sustained attention of another person. Most of us will be dependent again at the end. Many of us will be dependent at points in between — through illness, through disability, through the ordinary vulnerabilities that a human life involves.

The pretence of independence — the liberal political philosophy that imagines the primary human unit as the autonomous, self-sufficient individual making rational choices in the market — is a fiction that can only be maintained by making the work of care invisible. By assigning it to women. By not counting it in the accounts. By treating it as natural, as private, as outside the economy.

When you make it visible — when you count it, value it, pay for it properly and distribute it fairly — you have to acknowledge something that the dominant ideology finds deeply uncomfortable. That we are dependent on each other. That the capacity to give and receive care is not a weakness but a fundamental human capacity. That a society organised around that capacity rather than around the fiction of independence would look very different from the one we have.

That is what dignity requires in the end. Not just adequate funding and proper wages, though those are necessary. The acknowledgement that the work of love — the caring, the attending, the being present with someone in their vulnerability — is the most important work there is. And that a political economy that cannot see this, cannot count it and cannot value it is a political economy organised around a lie.

Essay Six A did the arithmetic. This essay has tried to say what the arithmetic is about.

The next essay returns to the narrative problem — how you tell this story in a way that changes what people think is possible. Because the arithmetic and the ethics are necessary but not sufficient. They require a politics. And the politics requires a story that people can actually hear.

Next: Essay Seven — Learning to Think. Civic education, critical thinking, and why the how of learning matters more than the what.

The manifesto these essays argue toward — Listen to Me — is on this blog. The gaps in these arguments are real and acknowledged. If you see them, say so. The conversation is the point.