Title: Part time for All: A Care Manifesto
Date: Monday, January 27, 2025
Description: Jennifer Nedelsky (Professor of Law, Osgoode) introduces the main argument of the book, Part time for All: A Care Manifesto. Everyone should routinely engage in unpaid care, averaging 22 hours a week, to learn essential skills from the experience. To make this possible, paid work should be limited to 30 hours a week. Nedelsky discusses the many benefits of this change and briefly explain why it is feasible.
Podcast:
Transcript:
[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.]
Well. Hello everyone. It's wonderful to be here together on this, beautiful January day.
And, just before coming here, the three of us were enjoying, a meal at Justin's house just down the lake.
And as we were driving here, we were commenting on how beautiful the lake looks right now.
with, kind of jagged ice coming out of it.
And parts of it are open and flowing. And I have this book here with me,
called conversations with the Kagawa River and something that Jenny and Jess and
I have been thinking a lot about together is this question of how do we listen?
How do we listen? And I think that question can be asked how do we listen to one another as people?
but this book and kind of what we're interested in too, is how do we listen across species?
you know, and we have these quite fundamental differences to ourselves.
And I wanted to read a few words in Anishinaabe Merwin,
from this book to kind of get us grounded in this space here where we're gathering in Anishinaabe territories,
Shared with Haudenosaunee Confederacy territories.
And so I invite you for a moment.
You can close your eyes, you can sit back, relax, and, just kind of let some of these land based, water based words wash over you.
[reading in Anishinaabe]
Mackay. Mother Earth. Thank you.
so I want to say just a few words to introduce our honoured guests here, Professor Jenny Nadal ski.
And, Jenny is someone who I think kind of defies introductions.
I want to introduce her first as someone who is uniquely humble in her curiosity for the world.
she always seems to.
Kind of approach questions from a place of being totally open to moving herself from one place into another place by the time the conversation ends.
And it reminds me kind of of being around a child where you can really, kind of see them forming themselves.
And I think that it's one of the most phenomenal things to witness, in someone.
And I really admire and appreciate that, Jenny has held teaching positions, professorships at the University of Toronto, at Osgoode.
She's been at Princeton, a year at Dalhousie for a spell as well.
So she's been across these sort of institutional spaces as well as disciplinary spaces.
She's someone who who's, very grounded in constitutional law,
comparative constitutional law, feminist legal theory, care ethics, labour studies.
She is, increasingly interested in, I think, questions of, ecology and, and how this intersects with her work.
And I'm excited to see, where her work continues to grow.
And it's an honour to be here together today for this conversation on part time for all.
so we'll pass it over to you.
Thank you for that lovely introduction.
And indeed, I'm now working on a project, inspired by a workshop that these two set up on more than human constitutionalism.
And there was a moment when I thought, well, you know, my interests are really shifting.
I finished that part time for our book, and now I'm going back to rethinking the meaning of property as care for the land and more than human.
But actually, even though this book is very focussed on the relation between work and care,
it's really more and more clear to me that care matters to all of us,
that we aren't going to figure out how to relate well to all our relations, unless we can do it with a caring spirit.
So, I want to start with, some quotes from the preface to the book.
One of the most important insights I got from having my children was the importance
of routine physical caretaking for forming the basic bonds of connection.
That initial insight broadened into a belief that physical caretaking is part of what roots us in the world,
and permits us to feel a connection with the material foundations of life,
from the care of the earth requires to respect for the labour that permits us to live as we do.
The dominant culture of North America, treats virtually all forms of physical caretaking with contempt.
Until there is a shift in this basic stance. Those who do the caretaking will be treated with contempt.
They will be paid little and defined as unsuccessful.
If caretaking were actually valued, there would be a revolution in the structure of our society.
So I wrote those sentences in 1998. And now, together with Tom Allison, I offer a path to that transformation.
Our book is about new norms that could restructure our lives so that everyone, no matter how important their work,
experiences, the joy and connection of caregiving, both physical and emotional.
The norm that we propose would be that all who are able provide roughly 20 to 25 hours of unpaid care every week,
an amount sufficient for them to acquire the knowledge and connection that care brings.
The need to learn from care grounds are argument that everyone needs to do it.
And this, of course, is one of the most contentious arguments in the book.
And so I'm sure we'll have a chance to talk more about it, and I'll come back to it at the very end.
In addition, roughly 30 hours a week would be the upper end of the norm for paid work.
We think these profound changes could have vitally important impacts,
ending the unsustainable stress on families and the gross inequality for those who provide care.
It would ensure that high level decision makers know something about care, and those who know something about care could become policymakers.
Even if caregivers were respected and well compensated.
If one group of people makes the policy in both corporations and government,
and a different group provides the care, we'll continue to have dangerously ignorant policymakers.
Hard time for all could end the long standing degradation of care and those who do it,
as well as the policy distortions that flow from failing to recognise the value of care.
Now, as we were completing this book, the global pandemic struck.
Covid 19 should have made it brutally obvious that people cannot get their work done unless somebody is available to provide care.
And even though that fact somehow never really sunk in at the level of the policy world,
I still think that there's no better time than now to propose pose the fundamental
question what happens to care when the demands of the workplace ignore the need for care?
Getting people back to work as we knew it, which was the mantra for some time?
Well, not address this vital question.
Work relies on care, but care is becoming unsustainable because of the structure of work and the ongoing failure to value care.
Who's supposed to provide care for those who need it. When the ideal worker is still someone whose top priority is work.
Better publicly funded care for children, the elderly and people with disabilities is urgently needed.
But none of that will solve the underlying problems of workplace demands that are incompatible with care.
And with a pervasive degradation of care and those who do it, it will not solve the problem of policymakers ignorant about care.
This book presents the argument that the problems of care,
its low status and its unequal distribution cannot be fixed without changing the structure of work.
By reducing work hours across the board, with no exceptions for important jobs at the top.
Individuals, families and societies will reap the benefits of a re-evaluation of care and of a population,
all of whom has learned the joys, the skills and the dispositions of care by doing it.
Now, I just want to note that I think this conversation about rethinking care and work,
restructuring it, seeing that the two always go together and both have to be changed.
That is a conversation that should happen everywhere in the world.
But the particular solution that we're proposing here is aimed at wealthy countries.
So we're not claiming that it would work immediately, in countries with high levels of poverty.
So now I'm going to give you a very brief, summary of the book.
First, I'll just note that the terms work and care are essential to the structure of the argument.
How do we do both of them? But at some level, those terms are arbitrary, right?
Anyone who does care work, know care, knows it involves work.
And if you think about it, good work should involve care. So the terms are necessary but at some level arbitrary.
And we think the more these norms would take hold, the more those the distinctions would become fuzzy.
It would be hard to tell what counts as which. So there are many vital issues confronting contemporary societies.
Our book is focussed on four specific but interlocking problems.
The first is that of stressed families.
In other words, the unsustainable structure of work and family life that puts enormous stress on families and forces.
Many people particularly, but not exclusively women, into untenable choices between work and family.
Bridget. Shorty. really interesting journalist who's written a great book on these issues,
has poignantly described the widespread feeling he's talking about women who are trying to both run families and work, sometimes from the workplace.
I mean, it's from the home as being constantly overwhelmed of always doing more than one thing at a time,
what she calls fractured time and how disorienting and destructive of that.
And I've always been behind and always late.
And I think increasingly this is something everyone recognises, not just people who are at working and taking care of young children.
A second major problem is that of inequality. The provision of care is organised around hierarchical lines.
The most obvious category which cares organised is around, of course, gender.
But increasingly it's obvious that gender intersects with other categories such as race, class, and citizenship status.
Those on top. Rich white men do very little care.
The key point here is that as long as care remains stigmatised, as long as powerful men do very little of it and poor women do the bulk of it,
society will continue to be profoundly unequal in terms of status and economic well-being.
And in some audiences, I say, you know, even if you don't care about family or gender equality,
even if you do, you just think you're interested in equality. You can't get an equal society if you don't fix this problem.
A third problem is what we refer to as the care policy divide.
The thing that I think is the least talked about in the care literature generally.
And that is,
those in top policymaking positions in government or business are almost always people with very little concrete experience of the demands,
satisfactions and importance of caregiving. This means that policymakers are, for the most part, ignorant of a core dimension of human life.
This basically renders them unfit for the job.
We should no more consider electing someone without substantial experience in caregiving to public office, or appointing them CEO of a corporation.
Then why would someone who had never held a job? Our claim is that the knowledge of care is essential to good policymaking in all spheres,
not just, you know, childcare, but housing, transportation, education.
The necessary knowledge can only be acquired by doing a substantial amount of hands on caregiving.
The final problem, which intersects with all of the above, is that of time scarcity.
Just one statistic across the OECD. 17% of men work over 50 hours per week.
In Europe, the average woman in a couple with children works a massive 71 hours each week when you include her unpaid care work.
The roots of these four problems are, of course, complex, but there are two fundamental causes.
The first is the dominant norms of who is expected to do care and who gets a pass.
That's Joan Toronto's terms from this core human responsibility.
Who are the people who nobody even thinks ought to be doing it?
The second is the economic system, which, particularly in neoliberal countries, generates widespread economic insecurity.
The only real path to economic security is becoming an ideal worker, someone willing to work full time,
and who can displace family and care obligations to the margins of their life, or onto the shoulders of others.
Our book is aimed at the kind of fundamental change that could actually address these deep, systemic problems at their roots.
Our proposal is part time for all. In essence, our proposal is that we need a dramatic change in the dominant norms of who does care work.
And second, we need a complementary set of changes to our workplaces in order to foster and facilitate a more equitable distribution of care.
So let me say a few words about both sides of the proposal.
We think the heart of the solution must be new norms that everyone is responsible for providing care.
Our proposal is that all capable adults should be expected to perform significant amounts of care work.
No matter who you are or how important your work is. Even if you're a pre-eminent surgeon or all star athlete or senior executive,
everyone should be doing substantial care and likewise, everyone should work part time.
That is no more than 30 hours a week.
I should say that in the book, we take some time to explain that there are many jobs that require periods of intensity.
So if you're a lawyer and you're on a big case, there may be a stretch of time.
It could even be months where you can't meet these commitments or you're doing overseas aid work.
But when you come back, whenever that particular assignment is over, you make that time up in care.
So it's not that we say we can get rid of all of this intensity.
You just have to build in compensation. And our argument is also that practically everyone is capable of learning how to provide decent quality care.
There are lots of different ways of providing care, and moreover,
everyone needs to experience substantial amounts of care work in order to reap the benefits that come from it.
So the project is to radically change the norms of who does care.
People would encourage one another to resist the pressure of taking on more work and support, and appreciate the care that they do.
Now while we advocate support, not shame.
We do expect that if these norms took hold, announcing the failure to meet the norms, say, by working long hours or refusing to participate in care,
if you were just tell somebody that it would generate the sort of concerned disapproval, embarrassment, pity,
or unease that would currently arise if a competent adult male announced at a party that he had never held a job.
The concept of the workaholic, which has become actually, a term of pride in some contexts, would actually be treated as the disease that it is.
As with current gender norms, people would feel some pressure to conform.
But these are norms, not laws. There would be no bureaucracy, measured care.
No one would go to jail for working more than 30 hours or be fined for failing to change their fair share of diapers.
On this model. The responsibility of care for care is lifelong.
It does not follow the current arc of life stages in tents.
When children are young or parents are elderly, it continues over your whole life.
So when you're in those periods when your kids don't require as intense care, your parents are still healthy.
Then we envision we have a whole chunk of explanation about this that people create communities of care relatively small.
Somewhere between 15, 15 and 50 people will form long term serious commitments to mutual care.
And we also have a section, short in this book.
Longer and future things to come that care for the Earth is an important part of these obligations,
and for similar reasons that we think that you can't learn what you need to know about the ways
in which we receive care from the earth and therefore have a mutual obligation to provide care.
You can't get that knowledge except experientially.
Now for part time for all to be feasible. The central economic requirement is that everyone has to have access to good part time jobs.
By this we mean jobs that are secure, flexible and high quality, high quality,
meaning that they provide decent pay and benefits that are proportional to what is now, traditional full time work and good jobs.
In particular for part time work to be at all attractive to people.
It needs to be reinforced by economic security.
One way of thinking about that is a living wage, defined as what one, what one person and a child can comfortably live on at 30 hours a week.
Guaranteed annual income could play a role in the end.
Tom and I had slightly different views on this, and we realised that different countries will handle the problem of economic security differently.
And so this book doesn't plonk down for one particular path, but recognises that without it,
the whole project will only be available to people who already have a reasonable level of economic security.
And I should say, it's increasingly obvious that.
The solution to the housing crisis is going to have to be part of this picture of living off of 30 hours a week,
but that is outside what the book tries to do. Now, none of these things fully exist in the Anglo world.
But the kinds of economic structures that it requires are not at all utopian.
Many of the elements already exist in various countries, particularly western northern Europe.
For example, in the Netherlands, a massive 47% of the labour force is engaged in part time work.
It's the world's first part time economy, and this includes high level jobs of management law.
It is, however, highly gendered. Still, a disproportionate number of women constitute that 47%.
And we have good reason to believe that it's possible to provide robust economic security.
In Denmark, a single mother working 30 hours per week on minimum wage would earn about €22,000, whereas a living wage is only €14,000.
This, of course, does not hold for New York City or Toronto.
In sum, we argue that a society of part time for all could be viably built on four main pillars quality, part time work,
flexibility, what we prefer to call time sovereignty, economic security, and fully care friendly policies.
Such a society does not currently exist anywhere in the world, but we demonstrate in the book that each and every one of the components do.
We know that each pillar is feasible as it already exists in some form, and there's no reason why the pillars could not be combined?
This is the essential realism of what is often thought of as a utopian project.
We are not advocating institutions that are unknown or untried.
If we can overcome the standard but very real political difficulties of electing care friendly governments.
I'm saying the world does not seem to be going in that direction. Part Time for all is an entirely practical project.
It's institutionally sound, economically affordable, ecologically sustainable, and capable of withstanding the pressures of globalisation.
So now I just have some closing remarks that put this, particularly in the context of law and of, other high status long hours professions.
So first, the distinction between work and care is arbitrary, as I mentioned.
I think this is particularly important for lawyers to be thinking about the way in which care should be part of their work,
including mentoring for clients and, care for themselves.
Second, the point that I mentioned at the outset everyone needs to do care in order to learn from care.
And one of the things just to note, one of the things that people do learn from doing care is the capacity to take the perspectives of others,
because you cannot care well for anyone if you can't take their perspective.
And this perspective taking is very important for judgement, which of course is central to law.
And I just want to know one thing when I'm around the anxiety.
But why does everyone have to do that? Why? What if you know care just isn't your thing?
And I realise that nobody in our culture says, well, you know, work is not my thing.
You know, I don't like taking orders. I don't I don't like having to be somewhere every day.
I shouldn't, you know, really not my kind of thing. Nobody takes that seriously now.
Maybe we should take it a little more seriously. You know, some of the guaranteed income for all people really want the libertarian vision,
but that what's really we have to bear in mind is we think this.
Oh, but it's not my personal style and preference and temperament.
Works for the care. Why? I shouldn't have to do any of that in ways that is completely not transferable to arguments about work.
But every society needs what we sometimes called reproductive labour, the care work of the world, and productive labour.
We every society needs both. We should all be doing both.
The division of labour has been destructive. So reasonable hours.
This is important thing to say to, lawyers and, future lawyers, probably.
And sadly, academics too, these days.
It's possible. In all these fields. There are two very good books.
I don't have the details here, but they're in the in the cited in the book,
about how you can design law firms around reasonable hours, even though many lawyers will tell you that this is simply not possible.
And many people in all these high status fields will say, oh, but excellence would be sacrificed if people didn't pump out these long hours.
And really, I want to say from personal experience, I just retired for the second time.
And, and so I have been, working I, I, I think almost part time.
but these norms, I like my work.
I enjoy it so much more. And I think it's better and more creative.
I, I absolutely believe that this, the gruelling long hours is not a path to creativity.
We have actually quite a bit of evidence of that. and it's not a path to what actually should count as excellence.
So it is true that one of the things that's built into this is a redefinition of excellence and success.
And that's what makes people so anxious,
is that they can tell that this is a this model is a threat to what currently counts as excellence and excess,
but we should not accept those definitions. So last point here is that the high status, of many profession exasperates a more general issue.
Part of the way we're all trained to think that work is more important than care.
Is that in our culture? The scope and scale of the impact of what we do is in an inverse relation to intimate relations and direct care.
So if you're a CEO, even of a really good NGO, you're not actually doing the on the ground work, but you are more important.
You are seen to be having higher impact. And in Western societies, success is almost always coded as being higher up a hierarchy of power and impact.
And care is the opposite. Care is small scale.
It won't have the kind of large scale impact.
And I think this is part of why some people are resistant to the proposal part time for all to limit paid work to a maximum of 30 hours a week,
and not to let even activism interfere with a core commitment of 22 hours a week of direct care.
I think it looks to them like too much important high impact work or its excellence would be sacrificed to low impact, small scale care.
But I think most humans thrive best and learn what they need to know to support good values in their communities.
If they're regularly involved in both direct care and in activities at larger scales where they can feel their contribution on a wider scale.
Under our current structures of work and degradation of care, people are forced into a choice between those.
Part time for all would go a long way to address that.
It would also put us on a path to a deeper change, one necessary to address climate change and more generally, for good government.
I believe we need an overarching change in stance toward life that connects the issues of scale,
care, and relationship with the tasks of collective cooperation.
Good collective decision making is not likely to be fostered by a norm of tension and stress.
For those delegated to do this work, either in the daily form of carrying out policies or adjudicating disputes,
or deciding on the laws, policies or norms that are to organise collective life.
The dominant picture of the busy important person must give way to forms of human interaction that are slow enough, reflective enough,
relationally connected enough to foster not only clear creative thinking,
but a stance of care and compassion toward one's co-workers and towards those who will be affected by one's decisions.
Part time for all which can be advocated for right now will lead us in that direction.
Thank you. Thank you.