It used to be called a labour of love. Looking after children, caring for family, sometimes caring for ill or elderly relatives too. No one was born to do it. Arguments about women having maternal instincts hit the dust when it came to explaining why so many also cared for their incontinent, bed-ridden in-laws too. Yet someone had to, and usually women did.
Love's labour is now at risk, not only because women are being encouraged to join a paid economy - the biggest nightmare of which is the prospect of labour shortages, and men aren't encouraged to take up the slack - but also because the economic policies sponsored by successive governments, and particularly the PDs, have brought the definition of human identity as close as makes no difference to what it was for Marx, particularly as the Stalinists read him.
"To each according to their [paid] work" was how they expressed it, meaning that the only productivity to count was the kind that contributes to the balance of payments. The message has potentially fatal implications for the entire voluntary sector - as the Simon Community recently reported - which always ran on free labour. It will eventually have cost implications for hospital and long-term care centres, but the implications that matter immediately are those for children, and for those parents, mostly mothers as yet, who want to stay home to look after them.
With the inter-departmental committee on childcare set to report in the autumn, the circle of competing interests which made this issue live is about to be squared.
This is the first and biggest test faced by post-industrial Ireland, and will speak volumes for the emphasis we will give in future to other areas where social and economic priorities appear to conflict. Can we balance the needs of people with the pressure of the economy? Is GDP per head a false idol, or an authentic measure of well-being and social cohesion?
In the days when Ireland was a primarily rural economy, children were seen, to borrow business language, as potential profit generators, whose usefulness spanned a range of functions from tilling the land, to caring for elderly parents, to sending home from abroad that pay packet which would educate the younger ones.
Read the business pages now and children appear to be characterised as loss-making ventures, bottomless pits with long-term, high-spend needs, and not a lot of measurable return to investors at the end of it all. Cost of maternity, cost of fit-out, cost of childcare, schooling, college/university, not to mention the additional accommodation requirements needed to house them are the identifying features of tomorrow's child.
One recent estimate targeted at potential pa rents in full-time employment calculated child care costs alone from birth to nine years of age at a grand total of £26,240. Why bother to incur them? You could buy a 2000 reg. soft-top coupe for less.
No single-model childcare package will cope fairly with the diversity of parenting situations now in force, so the need to devise a portfolio model of benefits, allowances and tax-breaks for parents is clear - a multi-purpose approach which gives enough flexibility to negotiate the first 20 years of life, from the high-care pre-school years, to the easier primary years, and back again to the high-need years of adolescence.
It sounds Utopian, but targets should aim for the day when time out from paid employment to care for children is seen a positive addition to a worker's CV. Such time out must be supported by additional access to life-long learning so that skills can be kept up-to-speed, and these leave allowances must be specially promoted to white-collar men, who in other European countries are reluctant to avail of it, presumably because they will lose out in their careers.
At the heart of the strategy is the need to examine what we mean by love's labour, and how we are prepared to support it. Traditional divisions of work along paid and unpaid lines assumed a mutually-reliant team where some went out to do visible work, and others stayed home to do the invisible stuff. The macro community reflected this symmetrical arrangement: paid and unpaid work together composed an ecology as delicate, and as inter-dependent, as a rain forest.
THE symmetrical society is virtually gone. With its ecological balance out of skew, the community stands to lose out overall. Status relies almost completely on having paid work, with unpaid and voluntary labour unable to find respect and value in an overweeningly commercial system. Love's labour may be less, if not lost, because no one has the time to do it, despite the rhetoric about caring that scents political mantras. Those who do may feel they are being exploited, unless we find a mechanism to make their contributions count.
Change hurts, but it is happening, and we need to act - urgently. However, because our systems of measurement have focused only on the visible aspects of employment, we haven't yet found a way to manage change while keeping the social fabric fresh. One answer is to reframe the way we measure work by expanding the concept and values of the market to the traditional practices of love's labour by giving them a financial value, which means status.
They need to be made visible in the only way that is seen to count. This would change the way we view the private and voluntary spheres, where market principles always came second to the values of love, loyalty and service to others. Yet without such reframing, those very principles are at risk, as a direct result of economic policies that undermine the value of unpaid work and community service.
Other European countries have started. John Major's government, on the recommendation of women's minister Cheryl Gillam, instructed the British Treasury to produce household satellite accounts, and the practice has continued since October 1997. The outcomes show how much work and value is expended, by measuring unpaid work and enabling a whole-perspective snapshot to show how these dimensions of the social economy can balance official gross national product.
The logical conclusion of such practices could extend the concept of the minimum wage to all citizens who care for others, regardless of whether they have a spouse who is in paid employment. Similar in effect to the parent wage used in other European countries, this would remove discriminatory conflicts such as where non-earning spouses are excluded from community training schemes and from some potential new childcare arrangements, or where widowers are effectively prevented from staying home with their children.
The rain forest was always a predatory place, but it still sheltered the rarest and gentlest of creatures. Building a symmetrical society takes vision, yet without such a balanced ecology, even the strongest among us may find it harder to survive. Love's labour or a nation of technocrats?
We are about to find out.