Unpaid Care Work and Its Impact on New Yorkers’ Paid Employment
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The widening gulf between the vast need for care in our society and the limited accessibility of care has led us into a “crisis of care.” While the need for care is universal, care work has been relegated to the status of a private concern since the rise of capitalist industrialization. As the increasingly sharp divisions between the public realm of the market and the private realm of the home led to more fixed and gendered divisions between productive labor (“men’s work”) and reproductive labor (“women’s work”), the labor of caring—for children, for elders, for those with illness or disability—was devalued, whether unpaid or paid. This pattern has been reinforced by neoliberal restructuring of the economy and public services, even amid shifts in labor market participation and changes in gendered norms of care work in the family. To explore current patterns of unpaid caregiving and its impact on New Yorkers’ paid employment, this policy brief shares relevant findings from the 2022 Empire State Poll, carried out by the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR).