Abolish Housework

Photo by Teodor Kuduschiev on Unsplash

Technological innovation has led to massive gains in workplace efficiency and exponential increases in the wealth of global economies. Office workers, warehouse workers, construction workers, and workers in many other sectors are far more productive than their counterparts of 50 years ago. Doctors are able to see more patients than ever, administrators can handle a much higher task load, construction work is no longer solely restricted to those with the strongest backs. These efficiency gains do come partially at the cost of micromanagement of staff (efficiency gains brought about in this manner, by making people piss in bottles in order to reduce their bathroom breaks should not be counted as legitimate productivity gains, that's merely tyranny), but largely, they come from technological change. The transition from paper to computer filing, from mail to fax and then email, and from hand work to an increase in the use of sophisticated machinery and tools (i.e. dark factories), have increased productivity exponentially.

              In the past 50 years, nearly all global economies have benefitted enormously from workplace efficiency gains. But we have not seen comparable efficiency gains in the housework sphere in this same half century.

              Half a century ago, a group of radical feminists championed a movement called Wages for Housework. Largely dismissed due to the personalities of those associated with it,[1] the idea remains extremely thought-provoking. If wage workers had gained a larger share of the economy during the immediate post-war period, why wasn’t that pie being split evenly within their families? Housework was put forward as unwaged labor on which the productivity gains of the postwar period depended.

              Likely because the second wave of feminism was focused mainly on boosting women’s participation in formal, waged labor, the idea behind the Wages for Housework movement never got the serious attention it deserved. Decades later, women still had to contend with the issues that Wages for Housework brought up, which was that women had a larger share of unwaged work that they were required to do than men, partially due to unalterable facts of biology (giving birth is called labor after all) and partially cultural. In agricultural times, both men and women worked “inside the home” pretty much 24/7, and though there was sexual division of types of labor performed, they both suffered pretty much equally. A husband and wife could provide understanding, ease, and respite to each other in the face of this unavoidable suffering. In the 1980s and 1990s, women looked to the men in their lives and felt like, why were they working like a dog all the time while their man got to clock out and then wash his hands of everything that smacked of work? In conjunction with new laws regarding divorce, divorces rose among couples with children, and to this day, divorces tended to be initiated more often by women than by men, and many of them pointed to a feeling of inequality in the home as being a big factor.[2] This story still plays out all the time in the present day as well, with endless articles being written about marriages and families being broken up for exactly this same reason.

              We are very close to housework being once again recognized solely as labor (though the waters are muddied by the broad misuse of terms such as “emotional labor”). Though it is being brought to the center stage once again as unavoidable labor that we must perform, the solutions being brought to bear frequently advise equality in division of this labor. Charts and tables are created showing the average hours of chores that a husband does versus a wife, and people are being coached in how to even the score (ideas like chore play spring to mind). On the other side of the spectrum, believing such work is unavoidable, some women desire to lighten their load and weekly total hours of labor by finding a man rich enough to relieve her of a day job, freeing up her time so she can solely labor at home.

              But why do we need to spend so many hours laboring at home at all? It would be a miserable relationship with another person, who, after both clocking out, fight with each other about who picks up Tilly from aftercare, who cooks the dinner, who goes to drop off groceries at grandma’s place since she can’t get them on her own anymore, who gets to go the gym today, who stays home to watch Tilly, who cleans the floor. But why are we just resigned to doing these things ourselves, and bickering about who does them? So far, proposed solutions involve the recreation of a “village” of adults in similar situations so that labor can be pooled, resulting in greater net free time. Tips are also given on how to squeeze blood from the stone, such as ice plunges, morning runs, energy drinks, special watches, productivity trackers, smart fridges, etc. Another common solution in many countries is having people from lower cost of living countries who are willing to perform the household labor at a fraction of the cost: Philippina nannies in Hong Kong, Malaysian domestic servants in Singapore. Groceries can be ordered online and someone else will deliver them for a high additional cost to save a trip to the supermarket. A dystopian idea that disturbs people is the imagined use of humanoid robots to do the job, an idea which crops up every once in a while in news about elder centers in Japan, petting robotic seals.

              In all of these solutions, the same labor is still being performed, just by different configurations of people (and imaginary robots). It’s been a long time since “labor saving” devices or true technological development were presented as the solution out of this housework problem. If a factory producing textiles today operated with the same equipment and the same processes as a factory producing textiles in the 1950s, it would be considered a failure, it wouldn’t be profitable, and it would probably eventually have to shut down. If the solution that the owners of this imaginary factory came up with was to move to a lower cost of living country and hire ever cheaper labor, this would be considered a stop gap at best and not a long-term strategy. Eventually, they would need to face the reality that they must upgrade their equipment or get out of the game.

But in our homes, we are operating with the same equipment and same processes as 50 years ago. When I cook a meal, I cook it in basically the same way my grandmother cooked it (she did tend to favor casseroles). It takes the same amount of time. When I clean my house, I clean it the same way my grandmother and mother cleaned it, with brooms, mops, rags, and bleach. When I go grocery shopping, I do it exactly the same way my mother did it. When I do laundry, I use a washer and dryer the same way my mother did. Folding clothes takes me the same amount of time that it took them. Cleaning the toilet still requires me to get my face pretty close to the bowl to scrub it and to get on my knees.

             For three generations, there have been no innovations. While my grandmother could imagine her grandmother’s youth, washing clothes by hand (rarely, probably just wearing mostly dirty clothes for weeks on end), and could look at her life as a great improvement on that, can we really say the same thing for our lives? In the realm of housework, there have been no innovations in my lifetime that have saved labor. Paying someone else to clean your house doesn’t save labor, it just shifts it onto someone else. But inventions of the past centuries drastically cut down on the sheer time and effort it took to do housework: the washer and dryer, the vacuum cleaner, the electric / gas stove, indoor plumbing, the refrigerator, the microwave, the pressure cooker. None of these were invented in my lifetime. I strained my poor brain to the breaking point looking for an exception, and the one labor saving invention that I can think of that was invented in my lifetime is the robot vacuum, but I don’t know a single person who uses one, which is a clear indication that they don’t work. If the robot vacuum worked, companies wouldn’t hire cleaners to clean the floors of their offices, but I've never seen one professionally managed building using robot vacuums. In contrast, I don’t know a single person who says that washing machines don’t work, so they prefer to wash their clothes by hand (well, I’m sure, as a single person, this eccentric exists, but not in large enough amounts to challenge my point).

              Other than this novelty robot, no labor saving device has come out that has reduced our need to do housework. While the workplace has enjoyed continuous decades of exponential productivity gains, with AI and quantum computing promising ever more, the time requirements of the manual labor of housework has remained frozen. At this point, I'm not considering the why of it (enough articles have been written about this), although it may have something to do with the enduring cheapness of labor, but I look forward to seeing a series of revolutionary innovations to reduce the stress and time constraints of maintaining a decent standard of living (a hygienic environment, cooked food, old relatives who can be comfortable and mobile and do more stuff on their own, children who can do more on their own). When the domestic sphere can share in the productivity gains that the workplace has enjoyed, prosperity will be something that we feel and experience, rather than just numbers on a balance sheet that doesn’t seem to translate into a direct improvement in day to day life.

[1] See Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor by Emily Callaci (2025) for a treatment of this history.

[2] “Divorce nowadays is accepted because women have made it acceptable. It is clear that it is not the individual man who is involved. There are too many divorces for that. When a woman gets divorced, although it takes the form of a struggle with an individual man, it is an act opposing the whole way of life men and women must lead in our day. Women fight the role that men play in the home. This has nothing to do with how much a husband helps his wife or how good he is to the children. No matter how much a husband tries to understand the woman's problems, no matter how well they get along, women fight the way they are forced to live and want to establish a new way of life.”  The power of women and the subversion of the community - Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James