The Care Subsidy to the Labor Market: Rethinking the Care Diamond

Abstract

The market is considered one of the four care agents and has been studied as a provider of paid services. However, the first part of this article posits the relevance of distinguishing two roles the market plays in care provision—private care provider and as the labor market—which shows, as feminist economics argues, that the market receives a subsidy from care work because the capital appropriates the value generated by the mostly female unpaid work in households through the family wage. The second part presents a methodology to estimate this subsidy of care to capital, based on time-use surveys and the computation of how many hours of total work are not paid for with household labor income using data from Mexico as a case study. With these figures, it is possible to develop public policy mechanisms that make the labor market co-responsible in care provision.