Why are men so angry about the growth of the care economy?

Amid all the productivity debate ahead of the government’s roundtable, it’s been hard to move for people blaming the care economy for undermining our performance.

A year ago, Danielle Wood from the Productivity Commission warned that as the care economy expanded, it “will drive down productivity overall, and you have got to work harder elsewhere”. The e61 Institute, run by Woods’ predecessor Michael Brennan, pointed out last October that higher wage growth in the care economy was sucking workers away from other industries. Then shadow treasurer Angus Taylor attacked Labor’s expansion of what he referred to as “the so-called care economy” as harming productivity. Luci Ellis at Westpac noted that the expansion of the care economy would harm productivity, leaving us in the “care economy slow lane”. Recently, The Australian blamed our poor productivity performance on government spending on “low productivity endeavours” such as the care economy.

It’s true that caring — whether for the sick, seniors, people with disabilities, or kids — is less amenable to productivity growth than other areas of the economy because it is labour-intensive. And we actually regulate care standards — staff: child ratios in childcare, mandates for nurses in aged care — so that we make it more labour-intensive. That’s a good thing, unless you’re a childless economist who thinks they’ll never get old.

And it has grown more quickly than the rest of the economy — not just under Labor, but over the past decade. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics workforce data, the Australian workforce has grown by 24% since 2015, but the caring sector workforce has grown by 61% during the same period. So, inevitably, our average productivity performance has been affected — e61 suggests around 10% of the gap between our current productivity performance and our performance up until the mid-2000s is attributable to the growth of the care economy.

Not all commentary uses the productivity lens. Economist Conrad Liveris in The West Australian argued in June that “aged care, child care, disability support aren’t just services, they are infrastructure. They enable everyone else to work. But we treat them like a cost centre instead of the productivity engine they are.” It’s a good summation of the skewed thinking about the care economy.

The real home of attacks on the care economy is The Australian Financial Reviewwhich has mounted a war on it for many months. And no tactic is beneath them. Last December the AFR was happy to cover a report by McKinsey blaming the care economy for the fact that Australia was now an economic “problem child”. Presumably McKinsey’s solution was an opioid epidemic of the kind it helped cause in the United States.

And last week the AFR covered a report from the Centre for Independent Studies authored by Robert Carling about government spending. Carling’s paper — apart from a bizarre claim that half of voters now rely on government for their income — is sound. Australia has witnessed a big increase in government spending in recent years, and especially since the pandemic. But while Carling discussed the care economy, he was careful not to omit the big rise in defence spending currently going on, or rising investment in infrastructure.

By contrast, in the AFR‘s account — which inevitably seized on the spurious stuff about people relying on government — it barely mentioned defence spending, and didn’t mention infrastructure spending at all. Instead, it obsessed about “a massive ramp-up in outlays on disability support, aged care and childcare”.

The AFR‘s problem with the care economy isn’t so much the economic orthodoxy that it is less amenable to productivity growth, but about partisanship: like The Australian and like Angus Taylor, for the AFR the care economy is a problem because Labor has not merely invested in it but, rightly, been proud of its investment. The care economy is a target because of Labor — even though caring employment actually grew faster under Scott Morrison than it has under Anthony Albanese. Its language is echoed by right-wingers online, who can be found on Twitter equating the care economy with “socialism” and complaining it is “crowding out” market-sector growth.

The bulk of these critics of the care economy are male, in contrast to the fact that around three-quarters of the workers in the care economy are women, and the growth of the care economy has meant that since 2015, female employment in Australia has grown by 30.5%, compared to 20.1% for men.

Then there is the view that caring or service industry jobs, which are more likely to be feminised, aren’t real jobs — whether it’s making a coffee, or hairdressing, or caring for a toddler; they aren’t economically productive roles in the same way as making a widget in a factory, or trading stocks behind a screen, or building a house, is productive. And that view is certainly not confined to the right — it’s the logic behind Labor’s Future Made In Australia silliness.

But there’s something else deeper, more long-term at work here — something that exposes the hypocrisy of this loathing of the care economy.

One reason — by no means the only reason — that the federal government now spends over a quarter of GDP compared to less than 19% of GDP under Whitlam is that it does so much more, especially in the caring (and education) sectors. One of the biggest stories of how the Australian government has changed over the past half-century is in the expansion of government-funded caring services, taking the burden of paying for, and providing, care for the ill, seniors, preschoolers, and people with disabilities off families and shifting it to government.

This caring work was always done, regardless of whether governments funded or provided it or not. Funding it only brought it onto the budget papers and under the scrutiny of economists. In its private form, it was almost invariably done by women. Mothers stayed home and looked after kids, and cared for kids with disabilities as they grew up. Daughters invariably ended up looking after ageing parents. Wives cared for ageing and ill husbands, who usually predeceased them.

Now, far more of that work is carried out by government-funded providers, for all sorts of reasons. As a society, we recognised the need for a healthcare safety net, such that even people who despised Medicare, like the Liberals of the Howard era, accepted it. We began to worry about impediments to female workforce participation once we realised we were going to start running out of workers, so we subsidised childcare. Politicians were shamed into action by endless stories of poor aged care. We decided that as a civilised society, we needed to give people with disabilities quality assistance.

Few male economists or commentators back in the 1970s ever lamented the productivity of caring work when women were simply expected to do it, or reflected on how to make it more efficient. But it was primarily men who benefited from it. They could pursue careers without childcare responsibilities. They could fall ill or age into non-independence, knowing their wives and female children would likely look after them. No-one spoke about the “care economy” because female caring wasn’t valued, or even considered, by male economists.

Decades on, the assumptions might have changed, but such work is still undervalued, quite literally, as the Fair Work Commission has been concluding in a rolling set of decisions over the past three years: it has found the labour of care workers simply has not been valued accurately because of gender-based assumptions.

But now it’s the whipping girl of the productivity debate, and the target of resentful men who dismiss it as not a genuine part of the economy, but some sort of left-wing plot to crowd out the private sector.

Press this mob for a solution and you’ll come up empty-handed. There are three options: either we care less — literally, governments hand more of the care economy to the private sector, or we fund it publicly. Anyone watching the fallout from numerous abuse scandals in childcare, or the Northern Beaches Hospital debacle in NSW, or the constant news of the rorting of the NDIS by private providers, is unlikely to enthusiastically support privatisation. That leaves caring less. Cut back on childcare funding, and health funding, and let aged care standards slip, and let the disabled fall back on their families, if they have any.

Question is, who’ll look after all those male commentators if they get sick or become disabled? Who’ll care for their kids? Who’ll nurse them in their dotage? Some woman somewhere will do it, right?