work outside the home is extremely easy to value; as there is a wage attached to it…[/quote]
This is precisely the problem. Since wage-earning is easy to value by default, since one’s paycheck shows the perceived value of the work, there is no dispute that it is “work.”
OTOH, we rarely compute the work that caretakers do if they are working within their own homes or for their own families. How much would you have to pay for someone to be there for your children 24/7? How much to make all the appointments and shuttle people to these appointments and manage all the follow-up? How much to manage a family’s finances — including bill paying, negotiating contracts and doing due diligence on service providers, doing investment research and allocating financial resources? How about a family’s financial/legal business like estate planning, insurance, home purchases, etc…especially if that tends to be managed by one spouse? And even though the subject is taboo, what value do we place on having biological children who will carry our last name…should the person who facilitates this do it for free, especially when they risk their health, their bodies, and reduce their value to future potential suitors?
Is any of this “work”? If so, how should we value it? Because it’s traditionally been done by women (who were owned by men, much like slaves…does a slave’s work have value, even if he/she was not paid?), should we assume that this work has no value?[/quote]
when lawyers donate their time, they don’t get to deduct it from their taxes. because that’s not considered work, i suppose? obviously it has more than zero value, i suppose. maybe. but it’s not “work”
volunteer work is, well, volunteer. to say otherwise would allow the volunteer to put whatever value he or she wanted on the work…and who would say what it was worth? certainly not any marketplace? the voluteer could say it is worth millions, billions.
and the recipient might not have even wanted any of the volunteer work to have been done. and work, on behalf of an employer, by its very definition, is something the employer, not the employee, wants done. there may be overlap, but it is the direction of the employer that drives the effort. is that what it comes down to? spouses are employees working at the direction of their employers?
this is not to say that it is valueless. just that it is wrong to go down the road of ascribing a wage to things we volunteer or want to do.
