The Invisible Work That Holds Society Together: Why Care Is a Matter of Justice
Care, Social Reproduction and Institutional Justice
Many institutions are designed around an implicit
image of the autonomous individual who is continuously available for full-time
employment, politics and public life. This model ignores dependency,
relationships and the time required for childcare, eldercare, informal
caregiving and domestic work[1].
Yet these activities sustain human development, social cohesion and continuity
between generations[2].
Care is a relationship among people with rights,
preferences, capabilities, and unequal forms of dependence. Care is therefore
not valuable merely because it is intimate or relational. It can become
neglectful, controlling, exhausting, or unsafe when recipients lack voice,
workers lack time and protection, or families are left without alternatives.
Paid care is also stratified by gender, class, migration status, race, and
contractual security. A just care system must protect the recipient’s
preferences, privacy, continuity, and complaint rights while providing workers
with decent pay, staffing, professional discretion, safety, and freedom from
exploitation. Institutional justice must therefore consider both the conditions
of caregivers and the autonomy, voice, privacy, safety, and community inclusion
of those receiving care. Protection against neglect cannot justify unnecessary
control or institutionalization.
The distinction between public and private life
has helped make care institutionally invisible. Paid employment is measured,
regulated and economically valued, while unpaid care is treated as a private
responsibility. Care professions are also frequently underpaid despite their
social importance. Because women continue to perform a disproportionate share
of care work, this arrangement produces gender inequalities in income, career
development, leisure, political participation and economic independence[3].
These inequalities are reproduced through
full-time employment norms, tax and welfare incentives, traditional gender
expectations and economic systems that recognize market output more easily than
relational value. Caregivers consequently face time poverty, exhaustion and
restricted opportunities. Their experiences are also underrepresented in
policymaking, preventing institutions from identifying and correcting the
problems generated by their own assumptions.
A coherent care policy can be organized around
five tasks: recognize care as essential social infrastructure; reduce avoidable
and exhausting care burdens; redistribute responsibility among genders,
households, markets, communities, and the state; reward paid care through
decent work and adequate resources; and represent caregivers and care
recipients in decisions that affect them[4].
Care work must first become visible. Time-use
studies, supplementary economic accounts and social indicators can document
both paid and unpaid care. Such measurement should support rather than replace
an understanding of care’s relational complexity. Time-use data and supplementary
accounts can reveal work excluded from conventional economic statistics, but
monetary estimates should be presented as one lens rather than the value of
care itself. Quantitative measures should be combined with distributional
analysis, staffing and continuity indicators, and the reported experience of
caregivers and recipients.
Public policy should recognize care symbolically
as a central social contribution and materially through better employment
conditions, support for informal caregivers and resources reflecting its actual
importance.
Labor markets should accommodate care through
predictable scheduling, proportionate working-time flexibility, protected leave[5],
and—in occupations where it is genuinely possible—remote or hybrid work. These
arrangements must increase worker control rather than permanent availability,
and they cannot substitute for care services. Because many frontline and care
occupations cannot be performed remotely, flexibility policy must be assessed
for occupational and class inequality..
Leave arrangements should encourage a more equal
distribution of care between genders. If one partner is expected or financially
incentivized to assume most responsibilities, institutional support may
reproduce rather than reduce inequality. Individually allocated and adequately
compensated leave can normalize caregiving among all genders[6].
Cultural change remains necessary, however, because formal rights have limited
effect when social expectations continue to identify care primarily with women.
Care should also be redistributed from individual
households towards society as a whole. Affordable childcare, professional
eldercare, long-term care and support for informal caregivers reduce dependence
on private resources and family capacity. Financial assistance, respite care,
information and practical facilities can prevent caregiver exhaustion. Robust
care infrastructure improves care quality while enabling broader economic and
social participation[7].
Collective provision does not require eliminating
personal choice or informal relationships. A balanced model can guarantee
accessible basic services while allowing different families and communities to
organize care according to their circumstances. Public responsibility and
individual autonomy should therefore be combined rather than treated as
opposites.
Care provision should be assessed through
accessibility, continuity, relational quality, safety, worker conditions,
recipient autonomy, and effective complaint and safeguarding mechanisms[8].
Low cost or rapid throughput is not evidence of efficiency when it produces
staff turnover, fragmented relationships, coercion, or preventable
deterioration.
Care experience must be represented in
decision-making. Caregivers and care recipients can contribute experiential
knowledge to advisory bodies, participatory processes and policy development[9].
Meeting schedules, participation procedures and compensation should be designed
so that people with care responsibilities can genuinely take part.
Systematically collecting qualitative and quantitative information about care
can further connect everyday realities to institutional learning.
A deeper transformation requires reconsidering
the relationship between care and the economy. Economic performance should be
assessed not only through growth, income and market production but also through
care capacity, accessibility, quality, well-being and the distribution of care
burdens. Care is not economically unproductive; it creates and sustains the
people, capabilities and social relationships upon which all other production
depends.
Beyond minimum guarantees of services, leave,
income security, and decent care work, governments may test care credits or
allowances, shorter standard working time, or broader income guarantees[10].
These options differ in cost, gender effects, labor-market incentives, and
risks of reinforcing unpaid family responsibility. They should therefore be
introduced through transparent pilots, distributional modelling, and scheduled
evaluation rather than presented as interchangeable solutions.
Several structural tensions remain. Care is
time-intensive and difficult to reconcile with narrow measures of efficiency.
Greater public provision requires resources and institutional capacity.
Complete collectivization may reduce choice, whereas excessive individual
responsibility produces inequality and exhaustion. Market mechanisms can
sometimes promote flexibility and innovation but may undermine accessibility or
relational quality. Care is also difficult to quantify, creating a risk that
only measurable outcomes will influence policy.
These tensions can be managed through broader
indicators, preventive investment and hybrid organizational models combining
public funding, professional standards and carefully limited market mechanisms.
Quantitative data should be complemented by experiential knowledge, narratives
and multidimensional evaluations[11].
Institutional reforms must operate alongside education, public communication
and changing social norms.
Care and social reproduction are not peripheral
welfare issues but foundations of social and institutional life[12].
A society that neglects them undermines its own continuity, equality and
resilience. Democratic correctability therefore has a relational dimension:
institutions must be capable of seeing care, learning from those who provide
and receive it, and translating their experiences into policy. A sustainable
society recognizes care as a shared responsibility and a central form of human
and social value.
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Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane,
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[1] Joan C. Tronto, Caring Democracy (New York: New York University
Press, 2013); Nancy Fraser, ‘Contradictions of Capital and Care,’ New Left
Review 100 (2016): 99–117.
[2] Eva Feder Kittay, Love’s Labor (New York: Routledge, 1999); United
Nations, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, 2515 UNTS 3,
especially arts. 12 and 19.
[3] International Labour Organization, Care Work and Care Jobs for the
Future of Decent Work (Geneva: ILO, 2018), https://www.ilo.org/publications/major-publications/care-work-and-care-jobs-future-decent-work;
UN Women, Progress of the World’s Women 2019–2020 (New York: UN Women, 2019).
[4] ILO, Care Work and Care Jobs (2018). The ILO’s 5R
framework—recognize, reduce, redistribute, reward, and represent—provides the
organizing structure.
[5] European Union, Directive (EU) 2019/1158 on work–life balance for
parents and carers; European Commission, EU Legislation on Family Leaves and
Work-Life Balance, https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/gender-equality/women-labour-market-work-life-balance/eu-legislation-family-leaves-and-work-life-balance_en.
[6] ILO, Care at Work (2022); Rebecca Ray, Janet C. Gornick, and John
Schmitt, Parental Leave Policies in 21 Countries (Washington, DC: Center for
Economic and Policy Research, 2009). Policy effects depend on payment,
duration, eligibility, and workplace norms.
[7] European Commission, A European Care Strategy, COM(2022) 440 final;
Council Recommendation of 8 December 2022 on access to affordable high-quality
long-term care, 2022/C 476/01.
[8] World Health Organization, Framework for Countries to Achieve an
Integrated Continuum of Long-Term Care (Geneva: WHO, 2021); Convention on the
Rights of Persons with Disabilities, arts. 16, 19, and 25.
[9] Tronto, Caring Democracy; UN Committee on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities, General Comment No. 5 on Living Independently and Being
Included in the Community, CRPD/C/GC/5 (2017).
[10] OECD, The Future of Social Protection (Paris: OECD Publishing,
2018); International Labour Organization, Working Time and Work-Life Balance
Around the World (Geneva: ILO, 2022). Treat the listed reforms as distinct
policy options requiring separate evaluation.
[11] United Nations Statistics Division, Guide to Producing Statistics
on Time Use (New York: United Nations, 2005); Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart
(New York: New Press, 2001).
[12] Nancy Folbre, The Invisible Heart; Susan Himmelweit, ‘The Discovery
of “Unpaid Work”,’ Feminist Economics 1, no. 2 (1995): 1–19.
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