Wages for Housework

The International Wages for Housework Campaign (IWFHC) 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 (mothers, housewives, domestic workers denied pay), 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 1975, Silvia Federici argued in an essay that domestic work is presented to women as an act of love for their families rather than work. She highlighted domestic labor as a central aspect of women's lives. As unwaged and unrecognised laborers women possess less freedom to pursue other activities, are forced to be dependent on their spouses and often do not see themselves as workers, thus being unable to organise and strive for better conditions. Advocating to get wages for housework was meant as a political strategy for highlighting reproductive labor as labor rather than a natural aspect of women's lives that they desire and enjoy. Federici was hoping to demonstrate that solutions such as abandoning all relations with men or entering the workplace and fighting for equal pay with men are insufficient. As long as reproductive work is organised in a capitalist system, women will not be free to both participate in society and not have to be exploited without pay.