LABOUR-RIGHTS: South Korea Leads in Putting Value in Women’s Work

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 25 2001 (IPS) - South Korea is emerging as an East Asian leader in gender-sensitive labour policies with its commitment to measure the economic value of the country’s unpaid work force, the bulk of whom are women.

Because of its government’s effort to quantify and put economic value to the work done by South Korean women in homes — ranging from family care, cleaning and laundry to marketing and food preparation — their contribution has been entering the country’s economic picture.

“Married women and full-time housewives spend an enormous amount of time in housework activity,” states a new study by the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia-Pacific (ESCAP) here in the Thai capital.

“These types of activities often are not socially acknowledged nor remunerated, primarily because of the difficulty in putting a price tag on the work,” it adds.

But the “value-oriented approach” pursued by South Korea’s National Statistical Office shows it is possible to calculate “specific figures measuring the economic value of housework,” adds the study by the Bangkok-based U.N. agency.

According to these calculations, the housework performed by South Korean women amount to more than 60 to 70 trillion won (about 46-53 billion dollars) annually, according to the study, ‘Integrating Paid and Unpaid Work into National Policies’.

“This is 13 to 15 percent of Korea’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product),” it explains.

The South Korean example shows that indeed, women do most of the unpaid work in and out of the Asian region.

“It is important for governments to estimate the economic value of unpaid work because only after that can the full contribution of women to economies be known, and appropriate policies to improve their welfare be developed,” says Joel Jere, a statistician with ESCAP.

South Korea’s measures also provided insight into who among men or women are more productive. “Korean women spend more time on productive work than Korean men. However, most of the productive work of women has been classified as unpaid work,” notes the ESCAP study.

For instance, while Koreans on average spends close to six hours and 20 minutes daily on productive activities, Korean women spend almost 1.5 times more than the time spent by men on productive activities, it adds.

“Men spend a total of five hours and 59 minutes daily in performing productive activities daily, while women spend nearly seven hours daily engaged in productive activities,” it asserts.

South Korean women are already enjoying the benefits of this conscious effort to put specific values to unpaid work, which helps put such work in concrete economic terms to policymakers in government, affecting even insurance and social security.

Likewise, Heidi Arboleda, regional national accounts adviser at ESCAP, says: “The housewives will have a better appreciation of their role in society and would have more confidence in asserting their rights.”

She says the value placed on unpaid work enables a country not only to assess the status of women, but to create policies that help advance it.

In the event of an accident, for instance, insurance compensation could be calculated on “the future value of the lifetime work as a full- time housewife,” adds Arboleda. “The current exercise on valuation of unpaid work is designed to provide a basis for the revision of the insurance compensation.”

She also expects women to gain from policy shifts arising out of this new economic picture, like providing “family-friendly” work environments, where women could attend to their children’s needs, or job opportunities where mothers could earn an income without sacrificing family welfare.

Women in Australia and New Zealand and the European Union are among those who have gained from such gender-sensitive policies in their countries.

“These countries have estimated the share of the value of unpaid housework to the GDP and used it to advocate for addressing gender issues,” says Arboleda. “In some countries in the EU, policies improving social protection of housewives have ensued as a result of the exercise.”

By contrast this is far from the case in South Asian countries like Nepal, where close to 84 percent of work in the economy is unpaid work, of which 80 percent is the result of women’s labour.

In fact, most of the post-harvest work and subsequent food processing labour are undertaken by women in their homes, but this labour is not included in the national accounts, according to the ESCAP study.

But India has begun working on this scheme. “Albeit still a pilot (programme) it is extensive enough to give valuable information on men’s, women’s and children’s various activities, both in the paid and unpaid sectors of the economy,” says Rosanita Serrano, programme coordinator for the U.N. Development Programme’s (UNDP) Asia-Pacific gender project.

“This should dispel the argument that measurement and valuation of unpaid work is a luxury that only those with resource surplus could indulge in,” she adds. “On the contrary, the poor are the ones who rely on the unpaid work of family members even to survive.”

The ESCAP study also offers a more accurate estimate of India’s workforce. “The study has shown that it is possible to make the invisible work of the poor, and particularly the women, visible through a well designed time-use survey.”

Jere adds that India is also using data from the time-use survey and supplementing this with data from the population census to develop policies.

In the Philippines, Jere explains, the quantification of women’s unpaid work has been used to push for a regulation requiring husbands of full-time homemakers to pay social security contributions on behalf of their wives.

Such developments reflect the “emerging recognition that unpaid work, especially of women, has now caught serious global, regional and national attention for public action to promote women’s economic empowerment,” the ESCAP study adds.

For ESCAP’s Arboleda, this marks a shift from a long-time situation where unpaid work by women has been “taken for granted because there (was) no economic value attached to it.”

Policymakers, she adds, did not formulate social protection policies for those who did not have “paid employment outside of being dependent of a paid worker”.

LABOUR-RIGHTS: South Korea Leads in Putting Value in Women’s Work

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 25 2001 (IPS) - South Korea is emerging as an East Asian leader in gender-sensitive labour policies with its commitment to measure the economic value of the country’s unpaid work force, the bulk of whom are women.
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