Marnie Holborow explores the deeply exploitative and misogynistic currents of modern childcare under neoliberal capitalism. Arguing for a state-led solution to lift families and parents up from the chaos of the private market childcare industrial complex.
A recent report from Irish Life found that Ireland’s gender pension gap was 36 per cent. Its findings were that women would need to work eight years longer than men to get the same pension.
The official gender pay gap in Ireland last year was13 per cent. The larger gender pension gap gives a more accurate picture, because it takes into account lifelong earnings.
The pension shortfall for women stems from lower pay and time spent outside paid work. Across the EU, studies show that on average women spend 4.5 years less in paid employment than men. In Ireland, it is six years. A third of employed women in the EU had a work interruption for childcare reasons, compared to 1.3 per cent of men.
In other words, women juggling paid work and childcare – feeds into lower pay, less job progression, more part-time work, longer periods out of paid work.
Despite fathers in two parent families contributing more to childcare, across all types of families and homes it is still disproportionately women who pick up the tab.
This leads to specifically female employment patterns. There are many more part-time workers among employed womenthan among men; in the EU it is 28 per cent compared to 8 per cent. Up to the age of 25 there is little difference between labour participation rates between men and women. But after that, female labour participation rates diverge according to whether they are parents, and the age and number of children that they have. Young mothers experience a much lower employment probability than young fathers.
‘Informal’ childcare
For all its talk of gender equality, EU policy documents tend to blur the social causes of the gender pay gap. One EU reportclaims that gender pay disparity arises from ‘differences in the average characteristics of male and female employees.
The notion of ‘informal childcare’, widely used in policy documents from Brussels, compounds the problem. Within EU childcare policy, childcare is described as ‘formal’ (which covers public and private ‘centre-based’ childcare services) and ‘informal’ (i.e. care provided by family members, neighbours, non-certified childminders). Targets regarding provision of childcare, we are told, should take account of these ‘different childcare traditions’.
While about a third of all children under 3 years of age are enrolled in formal childcare centres, this is generally on a part-time basis, in terms of the normal working day. Only 17 per cent of children below 3 years of age are in full-time childcare.
‘Informal’ childcare’ is taken for granted and remainswidespread. Almost half of all children (49 per cent) aged less than 3 years across the EU are cared for exclusively by their parents.
The reliance on ‘informal childcare’ is common in Ireland,and even more so in Northern Ireland. In both jurisdictions, centre-based care is used when mothers are employed, and family income levels are higher. A ESRI report also shows that centre-based care is more common as the main form of care among three- and four-year-olds than it is among younger children. This is because for three- and four -year- olds, preschool provision is free.
The reliance on ‘informal’ childcare is one of the deeper causes of why discrimination against women stubbornly persists.
Subsidising the market
In Ireland, public expenditure on early childcare in Ireland compared to other OECD countries is very low. It is at less than 0.4% of GDP whereas other countries such as Iceland and Sweden spend four times that.
And 74 per cent of Ireland’s formal childcare provision – crèches, play groups, Montessori, playschools, Irish language naionraí and childminders – operate as private businesses.Irish childcare costs are exorbitant – one the most expensive in Europe – and consume on average a as much as a quarter of a household’s income.
As with so much service provision in Ireland, the state feeds this situation by subsidizing the market. The Irish government parties back this approach. Sinn Fein call for an ‘incremental increase’ in government spending on childcare, to extend the subsidies for childcare but do not call into question the private status of the providers. People before Profit go further. They call for childcare providers to be taken into public ownership. Treating early childcare like education, with free access for all, is the only way to ensure that early childhood education and care be fully tailored to the children’s – and parents’ – needs.
In the existing Early Childhood and Education Care schemes, most working parents are entitled to receive a state-provided subsidy towards the cost of privately provided childcare. For preschool programmes, the entitlement is to 15 hours per week. In Northern Ireland, it is 12.5 hours per week.
This is very restricting. Some free childcare for fixed hours simply does not fit with paid employment. Access to childcare outside of these hours, before or after free preschool years, must be paid for.
The limited subsidy scheme assumes that the parent will be able to fit paid work around domestic caring work. It onlypartially reduces family constraints for labour force participation, while completely disregarding the pressures working parents are under. It provides no guarantees for the right to work and at the same time ignores the right for care to be fully recognised. Some has gone so far as to claim that Irish system amounts to a ‘mother-worker’ regime, rather than a comprehensive childcare system.
The provision of After School care and education is again subject to the unreliability of the market. Privately contracted After Schools to Primary Schools can disappear at a whim, as the parents of the one at Grace Park School, North Dubin found out recently. The Board of Management of the School withdrew the After School contract, and 75 children were left with nowhere to go. Suddenly for the parents, giving up work in the afternoons seemed like the only option. The parents mounted a strong protest keep the After School and the school was forced to listen. The case highlights just how important is the right to full-time childcare for all young children.
Social divides
Neoliberalism and fiscal-stabilization principles have engulfed EU social policy. They prioritise not publicly funded social services and labour rights but ‘labour activation’ at any cost. More women have been drawn into paid work in the neoliberal regime of deregulation and the slashing of social spending. Women are offered no extra social supports as they take on paid work.
More women in paid work at all levels has resulted in what has been described in the Irish context as ‘work-poor’ and ‘work-rich’ households. For low-income homes, the absence of adequate social care services obliges women to find solutions which can fit paid work around caring responsibilities at home. Family members are called upon to provide childcare; mothers take on part-time paid work to accommodate their caring responsibilities or take time out from paid labour. Middle-class and professional women, in dual income homes, have other options: they can pay for full-time childcare services to meet their career needs.
Those who work in childcare in a privatised system often have to put up with low pay, poor conditions and a high turnover of staff, something which the recent SIPTU Early Years campaign has highlighted.
Labour in this sector is also provided disproportionately by women of colour. Filipino and African carers, Latin American au pairs: migrant women experience discrimination and lower rates of pay. Visa restrictions, the narrow eligibility categories for work permits, and in childcare in the home force migrant workers into accepting lower rates of pay. Another gap within the gender pay gap is created.
Capitalism failing
The lack of free and accessible comprehensive childcare, run as a part of the public service is the reason why gender pay inequality persists.
If we are ever to win fully comprehensive childcare, we need to tackle the issue at root. In our battles for accessible childcare, we need to bring childcare workers and parents together to put pressure on the government to cough up the extra public money needed.
According to a recent Global Gender Gap report by the World Economic Forum, it would take over 132 years on present trends to close the gender pay gap for all women.
Capitalism is not about providing public services: it is about privatising them and making them into something that makes profit. As a result, the state gets care on the cheap. As Raj Patel and Jason Moore put it, to ask capitalism to pay for care is to call for an end to capitalism.
Childcare should be a central social priority. Like education, it should be a social right and free. Our campaigns and battles against this profit driven society should offer another way for how childcare could be accessible for all, provided to the highest standards by properly paid staff as part of the public sector and provide a proper basis for gender equality. It is not much to ask.
Marnie Holborow is a member of People Before Profit and the Socialist Workers Network. She is the author of a recent book Homes in Crisis Capitalism: Gender work and revolution ( Bloomsbury 2024).
