Wages for housework: If your job is working in the home, should you be paid a salary?

Irish Times

25-05-2025

'If you are a stay-at-home mom, your husband should be paying you a salary.' That's the pitch made by financial influencer Tori Dunlap, aka @HerFirst100k, in a
TikTok
post. Filming from the driver's seat of her car, she ticks off the jobs most mothers do without pay: 'Chauffeur, chef, nanny, project manager for the house...'
The replies roll in – some appreciative, most dismissive. 'Bills paid, food on the table, card in my wallet and time with my kids. I'm paid better than any full-time job,' writes Robi Cheaux. 'She's compensated with free meals,
housing
, clothes,
car
, trips,' says Michael Candeta.
Others object to the transactional logic of a wage. 'If you are
married
and have to 'pay your wife', you aren't actually married,' Sean Brady argues. 'Feminism is when my husband is my employer,' writes Roseann Adu.
The conversation turns to performance reviews, with one person writing: 'If she wants a night off from making dinner, submit a PTO request one week in advance.' What's surprising is not that the internet objects to a wage for housework, but that a decades-old debate still sparks outrage.
READ MORE
In the 1970s, the activist Silvia Federici published a manifesto as part of the Wages for Housework campaign. Demanding a wage made the work, which was almost exclusively done by women, visible in a new way. It also challenged the idea that certain tasks and burdens – childcare, homemaking, the mental load – were somehow 'natural' to women.
Federici called her manifesto Wages Against Housework, switching out 'for' with 'against'. She was suggesting that the money itself isn't really what's at stake. She believed that demanding a wage brings it into a market where it can be seen as work and, more urgently, refused.
If capitalism was an iceberg, the economist team JK Gibson Graham have argued, then waged labour is just the tip. Under the surface are countless acts that go unrecognised and unpaid, but which keep the system afloat. These include childcare, voluntary work and even the 'work' of the biosphere.
We don't usually cost these types of work. Economists call these jobs 'externalities', or benefits the capitalist system reaps without paying. In an attempt to bring more of the iceberg to the surface, economists have recently calculated that the work of a stay-at-home parent is equivalent to a salary of $175,000 (€154,778) a year.
Today, if you are sick, elderly or dying, the state hopes that you have a family member who can care for you
Externalities have only grown since the 1970s campaign for wages; invisible work fills the gap between what neoliberalism promises and what it actually delivers.
In her book Family Values, Melinda Cooper argues that state welfare systems increasingly rely on the family – not as a beneficiary, but as a backstop. Neoliberal reforms reimagined the family as the first and proper site of care, responsibility and moral reform. Take changes to child support, for example. In the 1960s, the American welfare system directed its resources not to poor mothers, but to identifying and pursuing biological fathers to compel financial contributions. The state didn't just demand care – it sketched the form it would take, defining who counts as a family.
In this way, Cooper argues, 'welfare reform sought to remind women that an individual man, not the state, was ultimately responsible for their economic security'. Today, if you are sick, elderly or dying, the state hopes that you have a family member who can care for you. When you go to work and your wage won't cover childcare, the state hopes that your family will step in, in the shape of a partner who isn't working outside the home or a grandparent, or an aunt who works from her home as a childminder.
Dunlap's insistence that a man should pay his wife a salary evokes the era of the 'family wage' – when a single income (normally paid to a man) could support an entire family. Today it's far more likely that both partners work outside the home, with (mostly) women taking on a second shift of unpaid care work after hours.
The vitriol and eyerolling comes, I think, from the impossible demand such a claim makes
As some replies to Dunlap's video suggest, a wage for housework isn't just about costing labour. If a partner pays their spouse a wage, the very nature of relationships change. If 'love' hides domestic work, then wages risk turning lovers into co-workers – or worse, employer and employee.
[
What the rows over skorts and public toilets reveal about Irish attitudes to equality
Opens in new window
]
[
Marriage equality 10 years on: A boy sees us hold hands and says 'I f***ing hate gay people'
Opens in new window
]
We're not always comfortable costing externalities. Like a marriage with its own HR department, they risk putting a price on priceless things – like a mother's love for her child. In doing so, these things can be robbed of their real value. It's not about putting a price on love or family, though. It's about exposing the illusion that our care comes without a cost.
So, what would it look like to cost care? Environmental economists propose a Pigouvian tax. Named after the economist Arthur C Pigou, it is levied at corporations to offset the harms they cause but don't usually pay for. Carbon credits are one example. Reparations for centuries of colonial extraction, ecological devastation and slavery in the Global South could be another.
What if we flipped the model? What if we taxed the benefits that capitalism absorbs for free? I'm proposing an inverted Pigouvian tax: a levy on corporations and institutions that profit from the unpaid care work they don't provide. Revenue could be redistributed as a care wage, a universal basic income, or put into public services like childcare and elder care.
Why is a wage for housework
still
so controversial in 2025? It doesn't only come down to sexism. The vitriol and eyerolling comes, I think, from the impossible demand such a claim makes. The reality is that capitalism needs unpaid work.
If we brought all that work on to the ledger – if we counted every nurse suffering from burnout and every exhausted mother – the books wouldn't balance. The system would break.