Paid and Unpaid Labor
Paid and unpaid work are also closely related with formal and informal labor. Some informal work is unpaid, or paid under the table. Unpaid work can be work that is done at home to sustain a family, like child care work, or actual habitual daily labor that is not monetarily rewarded, like working the fields. Unpaid workers have zero earnings, and although their work is valuable, it is hard to estimate its true value. Feminists have worked long and hard to come up with a way of monetizing and bringing value to women’s unpaid labor. The controversial debate still stands. Men and women tend to work in different areas of the economy, regardless of whether their work is paid or unpaid. Women focus on the service sector, while men focus on the industrial sector. When both men and woman do hold the same positions, there is quite often a income gender gap.
Read more about this topic: Labor Force
Famous quotes containing the words paid, unpaid and/or labor:
“What blessings thy free bounty gives
Let me not cast away;
For God is paid when man receives,
To enjoy is to obey.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“Mothers are likely to have more bad days on the job than most other professionals, considering the hours: round-the-clock, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. . . . You go to work when you’re sick, maybe even clinically depressed, because motherhood is perhaps the only unpaid position where failure to show up can result in arrest.”
—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)