--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> the big change in the labor force participation
rate
> during the last 5
> decades or so has been the shift of women from
> producing use-values at
> home to producing exchange-values in market-oriented
> businesses. The
> former work does not get counted as part of the
> labor force, but the
> latter does not.
That is a good thing, no? Unremunerated housework to reproduce labor power is a form of slavery, no? At least when this work is being sold on the market it is not only paid for, but the terms of its delivery can be negotiated and regulated. That is seldom the case in unremunerated housework.
As to "proving" I agree it is too strong a word in this context. "Is consistent with Brad's argument" would be a better choice. This, however, is far from being a mere statistical coincidence either, as there are good theoretical reason why restrictions on layoffs keep unemployment rates high. First there is already "internal unemployment" within a firm i.e. employees working below their capacity during the downturns of business cycles - so the firm can simply increase their workload instead of hiring new people when business picks up. Second, hiring new people in that situation carries additional risk and cost during downturns - so the firms have an incentive to hire as few new people as it can get away with. That leads to a prediction of higher unempleyment rates, and that predicition is consistent with, or at least not contradicted by the data.
As I said before, we can argue whether higher employment rate is always a good thing - in some situations (e.g. retirees having to work) it clearly is not. But there are many situations when it is a good thing - especially when it comes to women. There is a good reason why the "original" feminists (as opposed to the pomo multi-culti variety) struggled for the women's right to work. Earning income increases women's social status and power in the household, and makes women independent of men's will - and these are definitely good things. In fact, women participation in labor force in the US is higher than in most EU countries (except Scandinavia) - and it is no coincidence that Europeans often perceive US women as having "too much power." If lower employment rates in EU welfare states mean women staying home as housewives, I'd rather keep the US-style neo-liberalism where they "have to" work.
Wojtek
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