It’s been a long day, and a long week. Had two good sections of first-year comp today, and we got a lot of productive work done; I also had a morning meeting and and evening meeting and a couple hours’ work at the library, and didn’t leave campus until nearly half past eight. Despite the fact that I’m working on my annual fall cold, I’m feeling OK. Add-drop is over, my two sections are stable, and the students are learning the ropes: things feel like they’re working well, although I did get a comment today that things move so fast as to be pretty confusing. That’s something I’ll need to work on — while, as I’ve said before, I value the back-and-forth and varied activities, I understand how the cycling from whiteboard to screen to discussion to typing and back again during a single class can be incredibly disorienting.
Did some re-visiting tonight of economics texts I’d seen before, and found some useful stuff. Duncan Ironmonger’s excellent essay “Counting Outputs, Capital Inputs and Caring Labor: Estimating Gross Household Product” (Feminist Economics 2[3], 1996, 37-64) performs a wonderfully insightful (and firmly grounded) analysis of how many non-market economic activities are simply ignored by mainstream economic statisticians. According to Ironmonger, “In everyday language we have come to use the word ‘work’ to refer only to paid work. Thus, when people are challenged to consider everyday household chores they tend to think of these activities as ‘nonwork’ time, done in free time without the constraints of a work contract. People often say household chores are not work because they enjoy minding children, cooking or gardening; this enjoyment is a process benefit from the activity which cannot be transferred to another person. One coutner to this argument is to say that not all household tasks provide enjoyment and ask, ‘How many people enjoy cleaning the toilet?’ The point can also be made that, for many people, much of the time spent working in paid work is enjoyable. The level of enjoyment of the person working is not the criterion to distinguish between work and leisure. Meal preparation, whether in the household or in the restaurant, is valuable work because of the meals provided, not because of the pleasure the cook obtains through the act of cooking. The meals are the outcome benefits that are transferred to those that eat them” (40, emphasis in original). So too with housework, and Ironmonger makes substantial employment of time-use studies of household industries versus market industries and concrete valuations of household labor to draw the rather startling conclusion that Australia’s Gross Household Product is at least equal in size to Australia’s Gross Market Product. In other words, the household economy — the sum total of all household labor and production — is at least as large as the market economy. Yeah: yow.
Ironmonger’s startling re-seeing of household labor as economic activity in itself makes the article worth reading, particularly in that it complicates the traditional and reductive binary of “work” as economic activity versus “leisure” as non-economic activity. As Ironmonger notes, Margaret Reid’s “third-person criterion has been used to draw the household production boundary between work and leisure” (39); a criterion that argues that “If a third person could be paid to do the unpaid activity of a household member, then it is ‘work’; so clearly cooking, child care, laundry, cleaning and gardening are all work, as a household servant could be hired to perform these activities. On the other hand, it would not be sensible to hire someone to watch a movie, play tennis, read a book, or eat a meal for you, as the benefits of the activity would accrue to the servant, the third person, not the hirer” (40). Now, I think there’s a shifting line here, as more and more activity gets contracted outside the home and subsumed by the market economy, but that’s a discussion for another day. The leisure / non-leisure economic distinction is troubling for another reason, which I’m sure you saw coming a mile away.
So here it is: what happens when you apply the third-person criterion to education? Certainly, some students have already done so, in purchasing essays from the online paper mills to turn in to their composition instructors for the exchange value of a grade. As I’ve noted before, Bruce Horner does a wonderfully careful examination of some of the economic nuances of the transactions of the composition classroom. And composition teachers are aware that students are performing productive labor in writing their papers. The question might then be: where does the value of that labor come from, and to whom does it accrue? And I think it depends in large part upon the degree to which one perceives college as an institution whose purposes lie primarily in credentialing, in training, or in education. Ironmonger notes that “The time spend in education by attending classes, studying and doing homework could quite properly be regarded as a productive investment in skills” and points out that education is not something that “you could usefully pay someone to do for you,” but also that it’s “clearly not leisure” (42). And maybe this is another indicator to me of why I’m finding my economic examinations of the production and consumption performed in the composition classroom to be so confounding: the labor of students is neither wholly productive nor wholly consumptive, neither wholly economic nor wholly non-economic.
I wonder if I can perform this dissertation as a complicated and recursive (but surprisingly banal) series of equivocations.
Oh, my head hurts.
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