Family, Welfare, and the State. Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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disaffection—e.g., absenteeism at work, the tendency for workers to retire earlier, to cycle through jobs—has been discussed by economists as the “feminization” of male workers’ behavior. The social struggles of women on the terrain of reproduction in the ’60s and ’70s have certainly been an important factor in breaking the balance between production and reproduction on which the Keynesian plan was founded. The continuous increase of female-headed households, the concurrent increase of divorces, and the sudden population decline during the 1970s, are only several of the most immediately obvious indicators of the limits of the presuppositions on which the cycle of postwar development was founded.
We have now come to a general recognition in political and economic areas that the forms of “social security” created by the New Deal are responsible for a set of expectations that is no longer compatible with the productivity and competitiveness of American capital. Indeed, the industrial restructuring that the Reagan administration has put into action has faced no real obstacles. At its center lies the end of mass industrial production, and with it, the end of a certain kind of working class, enabled by a certain kind of wage structure. The sectors of economic development that have been the strongest since the postwar period (auto, steel, rubber, construction), and which were producers not only of mass goods but also of more homogeneous mass wages, are experiencing a historical decline that verges on crisis. These manufacturing sectors are being replaced by a pyramidal production and wage system. At the top of this new system are the hightech sectors: energy, computer science, and biogenetics. At the bottom is the magnum sea of the service sector, in which reproduction services have become a large part (food services, health care, etc.). Many areas of domestic work are moved out of the house and reorganized into waged positions. There is also a vast “industrial black market,” in industries ranging from textiles to electronics, maintained by the labor of migrant workers and women.
Cuts to public spending on reproduction, the programmed absenteeism of the state with respect to planning in this area, and industrial restructuring are all closely linked. Reproduction, so to speak, is left to “free initiative” in the sense that everyone is empowered individually outside of a social plan. Despite Reagan’s rhetoric on the importance of family, there is no family policy. The housing crisis, and the building crisis more generally, are signs of this. Today, we take for granted that the American dream—that is, having one’s own home—is no longer possible for most people. What we are seeing is a real attack on state investment in working-class reproduction. Mass unemployment is the prerequisite for a compression of the expectations of women and men forced into fierce competition in the labor market. Meanwhile, the deindustrialization of the United States, advocated by the liberal-democratic wing of the American Establishment (the left, trade unions, certain sections of the Democratic Party), does not really seem to be able to offer any capitalist alternative to the mass devaluation of the working class. Indeed, the new wage structure not only produces much deeper differences and hierarchies within the working class but also foresees a general lowering of the standard of living.
ONE
MASS PRODUCTION AND THE NEW URBAN FAMILY ORDER
THE CRISIS OF 1929 SIGNALLED, for the first time in U.S. history, a breakdown in the relationship between employment and unemployment. This breakdown, however, would not seem definitive to American capitalists, or to the Rooseveltian state that would march into war with the illusion of a lasting solution to the problem of employment. But except for the absorption that took place during the war, unemployment would prove to be an endemic fact in the U.S. economy.
With the sudden explosion of mass unemployment in 1929, the reproduction of labor power also went into crisis, and therefore, so did the “generality” of family structure that was attained for the first time in 1914 with Henry Ford’s landmark “Five-Dollar Day” (FDD) strategy.1 By instituting a policy in his factories, which has since become a famous argument for efficiency management, Ford indirectly defined the quantity and quality of domestic work necessary to sustain the productivity of factory labor.
Between 1914 and 1924, the state significantly curbed immigration, primarily as a reactionary response to workers’ struggles that developed in the first decade of the century and to the militant activity of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).2 This forestalled the possibility of the aggressive encouragement of immigration that had characterized the previous period of productive development. Increasingly, the quantitative and qualitative reproduction of labor power would become a problem that would have to be solved internally.
The shift in perspective on wages reflected by Ford’s policy reveals a certain awareness of the necessity of providing reproductive support to workers in the most rationalized sectors. That is, to working-class families dependent upon, on the one hand, the man’s ability to earn a wage capable of supporting a wife and a home,3 and on the other, the working-class housewife whose job must become, more and more exclusively, the production and reproduction of labor power.4
It is important to emphasize that not only did the level of the new wage implemented by Ford express a capitalist response to the costs of reproducing labor power,5 but this increase was accompanied by an apparatus of control over family management, and thus over reproduction itself. The Five-Dollar Day—which wasn’t paid to workers who had been on the job for less than six months, or to young people under twenty-one years of age, or to women—was still portrayed as a “benefit” one might not qualify for or which could be taken away if one didn’t lead a “moral” or hygienic life. The wage could be withheld or revoked, for example, if one kept bad company, had family quarrels, faced an imminent divorce or had already filed for one, or if one was prone to gambling, the use of tobacco, alcohol, etc. As H. Beynon notes, this era marked the beginning of cooperation between university-trained experts (sociologists, psychologists, psychotechnicians) and employers.6 Ford used a “sociology department” and a corps of inspectors and controllers whose task was to enter the homes of workers, investigate their lives, and how they spent their pay. The “benefit” of the FDD could, in fact, be denied to any workers whose conduct was such that this wage level was deemed a handicap rather than an incentive for moral rectitude.7
Women were not amongst the beneficiaries of the FDD because according to Ford’s declared hopes, they should get married. The Fordian wage was supposed to be managed by the housewife, who would be relieved by the industrial production of necessary goods (i.e., necessary for the reconstitution of the labor force) of the many old tasks that previously burdened her. Now these goods were available for purchase in the form of commodities. Therefore, they would no longer be acquired through a woman’s ability to supply them directly, but rather through her ability to manage wages.8
In the overall effort of rationalization that characterized the beginning of the century, the revaluation of the housewife, and more specifically, the redefinition of her duties, met the need to re-establish the institution of the family which had been greatly weakened as an agent of social reproduction in the previous century.9 The beginning of the twentieth century marked the discovery of domestic work as work, but much of the feminist movement was co-opted by the forces that drove the moral valorization of housework. “The Movement for Domestic Science” reflects the intersection of feminism and reformism. In correspondence with rationalization in the factory, the rationalization of domestic work—that is, of the process of reproduction of labor power—sought maximum results with minimum expenditure.
In the attempt to Americanize immigrant communities, this directive would be given to women by social workers’ and a method of control of workers’ wages would be directly established.10 These efforts would not be put into effect everywhere in the same way however. Ford, hoping that compulsive Americanization would bring about a more immediate productivity of the worker at the factory, interpreted Americanization more brutally and, hence, with shorter breadth. The International Institute was established in 1911 as a division of the YWCA to assist immigrant women. Together with social workers, local chapters of the International Institute developed programs dedicated to the recovery of community, a central theme in the social sciences and in the social progressivism of the Protestant tradition. In this way, they were able to facilitate a less violent, and therefore