Wages for Housework
The International Wages for Housework Campaign is a grassroots women's network campaigning for recognition and payment for all caring work, in the home and outside. It was started in 1972 by Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Silvia Federici, Brigitte Galtier, and Selma James, who first put forward the demand for wages for housework. At the third National Women's Liberation Conference in Manchester, England, the IWFHC states that they begin with those with least power internationally – unwaged workers in the home, and unwaged subsistence farmers and workers on the land and in the community. They consider the demand for wages for unwaged caring work to be also a perspective and a way of organizing from the bottom up, of autonomous sectors working together to end the power relations among them.
In Silvia Federici's, essay she argues that the domesticated work women do in the house is an act of love rather than a chore. She is persuading the reader into seeing how the unpaid nature of the work gives the capitalist society an edge over the housework that women are doing, keeping these women financially dependent which is a normal thing to have no separate money of their own, therefore having less freedom. These women made Wages for Housework into a political movement rather than just making it about how much money is earned for the job that they are completing, by making this a political movement there was more attention put on this area of the feminist movement.
History
Creation: 1970s
Wages for housework campaign was founded in 1972, by the three pillars of the feminist movement: Selma James, Silvia Federici, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Wages for housework was one of the six demands in Women, the Unions and Work or What Is Not to Be Done, which James presented as a paper to the third National Women's Liberation Conference. The ''Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community, which James co-authored with Mariarosa Dalla Costa, which opened the "domestic labour debate" and became a women's movement classic, was published soon after Women, the Unions and Work. The first edition of Power of Women did not come out for wages for housework; its third edition, in 1975, did. This movement came from a larger movement happening in Italy called the Autonomist Marxist movement, initiated by the critique of unpaid labor in the household, and how women are blatantly exploited for their work. After the Manchester conference, James with three or four other women formed the Power of Women Collective in London and Bristol to campaign for wages for housework. It was reconstituted as the Wages for Housework Campaign in 1975, based in London, Bristol, Cambridge and later Manchester.In 1974, the Wages for Housework Campaign started in Italy. A number of groups calling themselves Salario al Lavoro Domestico formed in various Italian cities. To celebrate, one of the founding members, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, gave a speech entitled "A General Strike" in Mestre, Italy. In this speech she talks about how no strike before has ever been a general strike before, but instead, only a strike for male workers. In Padua, Italy, a group called Lotta Feminista, formed by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Silvia Federici, adopted the idea of Wages for Housework.
Between 1974 and 1976, three autonomous organizations formed within the Wages for Housework Campaign in the UK, US and Canada: Wages Due Lesbians, the English Collective of Prostitutes and Black Women for Wages for Housework, co-founded by Margaret Prescod and Wilmette Brown. Black Women for Wages for Housework focused on specific issues of Black and third world women, including calling for reparations for "slavery, imperialism and neo-colonialism". Wages Due Lesbians called for wages for housework and wanted lesbians included in those wages so that it did not exclusively go to "normal women" and for "the additional physical and emotional housework of surviving in a hostile and prejudiced society, recognized as work and paid for so all women have the economic power to afford sexual choices". Wages Due Lesbians also worked alongside The Lesbian Mothers' National Defense Fund, founded in 1974 and based in Seattle, which aimed to help lesbian mothers who had to fight custody cases after coming out. In 1984 WinVisible was founded in the UK as an autonomous organisation within the IWFHC.
In 1975 Silvia Federici started the New York group called the "Wages for Housework Committee" and opened an office in Brooklyn, New York at 288 B. 8th St. Flyers handed out in support of the New York Wages for Housework Committee called for all women to join regardless of marital status, nationality, sexual orientation, number of children, or employment. In 1975 Federici published Wages Against Housework,'' the book most commonly associated with the wages for housework movement.
Men who agree with the WFH perspective formed their own organisation in the mid-1970s. It is called Payday men's network and works closely with IWFHC and the Global Women's Strike in London and Philadelphia especially and is active with conscientious objectors and refuseniks in a number of countries. In 1977, two years after Black Women for Wages for Housework was formed in New York there was a split. The WFH group in New York which Silvia Federici had formed dissolved in 1977. The Italian Padua group led by Dalla Costa, who was close to Federici, left the IWFHC and dissolved not long after. Dalla Costa has blamed the political repression in Italy in the late 70s for the dissolution of the Italian WFH groups.
Black Women for Wages for Housework carried on in New York and in London. It had a major success at the first congressionally mandated women's conference in Houston, Texas, in 1977. Working with Beulah Sanders and Johnnie Tillmon, the Black women who led the National Welfare Rights Organization, they got the conference to agree that "welfare payments" should be called a "wage". They believe that this helped to delay welfare cuts by 20 years.
IWFHC had an anti-war and anti-militarist perspective from the start, and called for the funds to pay for unwaged caring work to come from military budgets. In England the organization was part of the women's movement against nuclear weapons at Greenham Common and against the building of a new nuclear power reactor at Hinkley.
The U.S. PROStitutes Collective first started in New York in 1982 and later moved to San Francisco and Los Angeles. It campaigns for decriminalization of sex work and for resources so women, children and men are not forced into prostitution. Ruth Todasco, who started the Wages for Housework Campaign in Tulsa, later founded the No Bad Women, Just Bad Laws Coalition which focused on the decriminalization of sex work.
1980s and 1990s
Throughout the 80s and 90s, the IWFHC representing a number of countries of the Global South and Global North, lobbied the United Nations Conferences on Women on unwaged work. They succeeded in getting the UN to pass path-breaking resolutions that recognized the unwaged caring work that women do in the home, on the land and in the community. They also highlighted the environmental racism that fell on communities of colour and low-income communities generally, bringing together women from the Global South and the Global North who were leading movements against pollution and destruction caused by the military and multinationals.In 1999 the IWFHC called a global women's strike after Irish women asked for support for a national strike in Ireland to mark the first International Women's Day of the new millennium. Since 8 March 2000, the IWFHC has become more widely known as the Global Women's Strike, which it co-ordinates from the Crossroads Women's Centre in London, England. There are GWS co-ordinations in India, Ireland, Peru, Thailand, Trinidad & Tobago, and close collaboration with Haiti and other countries.
Silvia Federici and several others from the early campaign have continued to publish books and articles related to the demands of Wages for Housework. The Wages for Housework Campaign called for a Global Women's Strike on March 8, 2000, demanding among other things, "Payment for all caring work – in wages, pensions, land and other resources." Women from more than 60 countries around the world participated in the protest. Since 2000 the GWS network has continued the call for a living wage for women and other caregivers, and they have led or joined campaigns focused on pay equity, violence against women, and sex workers' rights, among other issues.
2000s and 2010s
In 2019, the Global Women's Strike network and Wages for Housework Campaign joined a coalition of organizations calling for a Green New Deal for Europe. Wages for Housework Campaign co-founder Selma James contributed to the GNDE platform report which includes a policy recommendation to "fund a care income to compensate unpaid activities like care for people, the urban environment, and the natural world." The idea of a "care income" expands the original demand for wages for housework to include all indispensable yet unpaid work that involves caring for people and the planet, or caring for life.2020s
On 9 April 2020, in response to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic and the climate emergency, the Global Women's Strike and Women of Colour GWS networks released an open letter to governments amplifying their call for a "care income". In December 2020, Nadia Oleszczuk of the Consultative Council formed in Poland during the October–November 2020 Polish protests stated that the Council was considering wages for housework as one of its legislative demands.In 2021, a new civil code came into effect in China, which declares that a spouse can request compensation in a divorce if they have more responsibility than their spouse for caring for elderly relatives, childcare, and/or assisting their spouse in their work. Specifically, Article 1088 of the Civil Code states that "Where one spouse is burdened with additional duties for raising children, looking after the elderly or assisting the other spouse in his/her work, the said spouse has the right to request compensation upon divorce against the other party".
In a landmark case in 2021, a Beijing district court ruled that a man must compensate his former wife for the housework she did while they were married; she was granted compensation of 50,000 yuan for five years of unpaid labor. Pilot programs of unconditional cash payments to women were made in several Indian states in the 2020s, justified as wages for housework in some of the states. As of 2025, the BBC estimated that 118 million women in twelve states were receiving the cash transfers, typically for – per month.