Care Work Must be Valued by Carmen Leong

“Huh? Your friend wants to be a nurse? Nurses don’t earn money though… How about being a doctor?” 

As a young person in Singapore, this is not an uncommon response to receive when conversing with my relatives about the future. Substitute the word ‘teacher’, ‘social worker’ or ‘therapist’ for ‘nurse’ and one would likely be met with the same answer. Despite the dissatisfaction I might feel with their dismissive attitude toward these forms of care work, I must admit that they aren’t wrong. Care work, defined as ‘the work of caring for others, including unpaid care for family members and friends, as well as paid care for others’, has long been undervalued and overlooked globally, in both economic and social terms. It is no different in my country. The physical, emotional and mental work that goes into care labour has been historically disregarded, ever since caregiving was ‘sentimentalized and naturalized’ and framed as something to be ‘performed for the sake of “love” and “virtue,” as opposed to money’, according to American critical theorist and feminist Nancy Fraser. I see this trivialisation of care labour as the largest challenge facing women and girls in Singapore because of the fact that care work is predominantly carried out by them. If caregiving is not taken up in the public sphere as paid work, then it is probably carried out at home as unpaid labour for the majority of Singaporean women. 

A 2018 study conducted by the International Labour Organisation found that women in Asia and the Pacific spent 4.1 times more time on unpaid labour than men. Unpaid labour includes domestic caregiving duties, which are oftentimes delegated to the woman in a modern Singaporean household. This could be due to the enforcement of traditional gender expectations by other female figures in the family who belong to the older generation of Asians, brought up during a time where women stayed home while men went out to work. Yet, huge progress has been made since that conservative period — in 2020, the literacy rate for girls in Singapore was recorded at 95.8 percent while women’s participation in the labour force was documented at 41.22 percent. So, in homes where the burden of work is shared between husband and wife, how is it fair that the caregiving role is not correspondingly halved? If caregiving in the family is truly performed out of “love”, should it not be executed by both mother and father? By expecting working mothers to take on the bulk of domestic caregiving after a long work day, are we not overburdening them? 

Unfortunately, as far as overworking goes, it manifests even more clearly in the lives of the women who are paid to perform care labour. Registered nurses in Singapore, for example, are 91.8 percent women. They have reported a decline in mental health and higher rates of anxiety, depression and burnouts as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic putting a toll on the country’s healthcare system. Yet, what they receive are mere ‘thank-you’ cards from the public, which are trivial in the face of the institutional lack of support for the mental and physical health of these care workers. The societal exploitation of care workers is also apparent in the low wages paid to female domestic workers in Singapore. In 2016, it was found that their average salary was a meagre $597, despite many of them often engaging in round-the-clock work since there are no regulations of working hours from the Ministry of Manpower. Both these case studies prove that Singapore’s system is insufficient in its protective policies towards paid caregivers, reflecting the society’s undervaluation of care work; the fact that care work is gendered relates this state of affairs to the marginalisation of the women in our country. 

As we move towards the future, the women working as paid care labourers should receive fairer wages and improved working conditions. Meanwhile, unpaid caregiving duties can be shared by both the men and women at home, instead of solely being loaded on the latter. For the young girls of today who aspire to be the nurses, teachers and social workers of tomorrow, we must ensure that care work is systemically and societally recognised for its value.