Search the archive.

In practice, a single-payer system would cost more than the most efficient and effective programs that exist today, all while compromising access and, over time, quality.

Let's look at three of the myths around this approach and why, if tried, it would be doomed to fail.

Inflation and gas prices might be driving domestic political news, but for vulnerable communities hit hardest by diseases such as Alzheimer’s, health care is always top of mind. That concern rapidly can turn to frustration and anger when dealing with Medicare coverage — especially when promising new treatments are stifled by mismanagement in government bureaucracies.

If the Biden administration’s goal is to upset seniors — a key constituency in a pivotal election year — it is certainly succeeding. Despite inflating seniors’ Medicare Part B premiums to account for new drug costs that have not materialized, the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) recently announced it won’t lower premiums again until next year, and perhaps not even then. The comedy of errors that led to this announcement is, in fact, a tragedy for seniors hoping to access Alzheimer’s treatments.

We should heed the example of the U.K. and Canada, where single-payer is a disaster.

Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist who is the new chairman of the Senate Health, Education, and Labor Committee, has one great goal left at age 81. He will be spending most of his time trying to convince Congress to enact a single-payer system and eliminate private health insurance.

Medicaid’s reported improper payment rate declined in the 2022 report to 15.6 percent, which is an artificially low figure due to CMS’s decision to reduce eligibility audits. Medicaid now provides coverage to about one in four Americans.[10] Such rapid expansion and high rate of improper payments are indicators that taxpayers are suffering from poor government policy and program management.

A poorly run Medicaid program also harms the truly needy by misallocating resources.[11] The recent, drastic growth in improper payments has coincided with the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA’s) Medicaid expansion. Medicaid was originally designed to assist the most vulnerable Americans, such as low-income pregnant women, children, seniors, and individuals with disabilities. However, the ACA expanded Medicaid to able-bodied adults by enticing states with generous financial incentives. Much of the improper payment problem in Medicaid results from the enhanced federal reimbursement rate for the ACA expansion population. The enhanced reimbursement rate creates a significant incentive for states to enroll people under the expansion criteria even if those people would have been eligible to be enrolled under the prior criteria and thus at the lower reimbursement rate.

The argument for universal Medicare basically comes down to three key claims: (1) Medicare gets lower prices; (2) Medicare’s administrative costs are lower; and (3) greater spending does not mean better health. Each of these deserves closer attention.

Prices. Consider first the argument that Medicare has lower prices. This happens because the government, as the largest purchaser of health care, can demand lower payments for services compared to private insurers. In fact, because Medicare is the only payer for people aged 65 and older, it can quote take-it-or-leave-it prices, and choosing to leave it means providers can’t treat 40 million of the sickest Americans. That is a lot of market power; indeed, economists have a word for it: monopsony.

Americans won't give up their private insurance unless the government option is better. And that won't be cheap.

The conventional wisdom these days is that the major Democratic presidential candidates for 2020 will end up endorsing some version of single-payer health care. Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to introduce his Medicare for All bill this week, with a considerable number of co-sponsors. This political posturing, however, is far from a practical proposal.

What Are the Possible Negatives? A system that sounds too good to be true usually comes with some issues.

This system would replace all private health insurances. This could have a significant impact on the economy. In 2020, the health insurance industry had $31 billion in net earnings and an increase in their profit margin by 3.8% (National Association of Insurance Commissioners, 2021). Eliminating these plans would also eliminate jobs. The health and medical insurance industry employed almost 600,000 people in 2022 (IBISWorld, 2022), so losing these jobs would have a huge impact. It’s possible Medicare for All could create replacement jobs, but to what degree is unknown.

Ailsa McKay (2005) has made the case that a universal basic income could address the gender inequality around care. Unlike traditional welfare systems it would not separate out women’s work. The benefit of a basic income is that it would break the link between income and work. Paid work would not be the criterion of inclusion; instead, there would be a basic right to livelihood through money distribution. The benefit of a basic income is that it would not just apply to care work but would be available to everyone. It would be universal and unconditional. As Annie Miller (2016) argues, a basic income ‘provides a foundation for a different type of society, which values the individual, helping [them] him or her to meet material needs and offering choices and the opportunity to develop and flourish’ (2016: 174). The choice a basic income would open up is not just payment for care work; it could also reduce dependence on earning money. This might enable (and encourage) men to participate in unpaid provisioning work. Caitlin McLean (2016) sees ethical, economic and political benefits and problems for a basic income. Ethically it could encourage individual freedom but might limit reciprocity and collective endeavour. Economically it could address inequality and provide a means of livelihood, but traditional economic thinking raises questions of economic feasibility and impact on employment incentives. Political implementation would not be easy given the neoliberal attack on the welfare state and challenge to existing welfare benefits. However, there are some contemporary examples. Iran and the state of Alaska in the US have a form of basic income (2016: 182). Hanlon et al. (2010) also report examples of money distribution in South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico, although these are not universal as they are targeted to alleviate poverty. Paradoxically, the economic crisis and market failures of neoliberalism have opened up the potential for a basic income, with countries such as Finland and The Netherlands conducting experiments.

At the end of The Problem with Work, Weeks’ argument drives towards the notion of a basic income and a call for shorter working hours. Calls for basic income have circulated since the sixteenth century,Footnote5 and in the contemporary period arguments about uncoupling income from the wage system have been part of national debate since the 1960’s in the U.S., and the 1980’s in Northern Europe. The idea behind the basic income is that a universal basic payment is made for participation in the production of value, above and beyond what wages can measure and reward. Weeks’ real innovation, however, which she mentions in the closing pages of the book, and therefore remains an intriguing opening rather than a fully worked through theory, is to rethink the common production of value, and substitute for value the common reproduction of life. The ‘life’ that Weeks substitutes for ‘value’ is the life alluded to in the colloquial phrase ‘get a life’. She acknowledges that ‘life’ does not lie outside of biopower, and is neither exterior to work, nor captured by the notion of life that proliferates in vitalist philosophies that emerge from a Spinozist tradition of thought. Rather ‘life’ refers to the notion of striving for a ‘full life’ that is ‘common to and shared with others without being the same as others’ (Weeks Citation2011, 232). A ‘full life’ would include, but not be subsumed by reproduction or work. By considering life as a counterpoint to value, she suggests a political project that might frame the antiwork critiques and postwork imaginaries represented by demands for basic income and shorter hours:

Perhaps more important from the point of view of my argument, the collective effort to get a life can serve as a way both to contest the existing terms of the work society and to struggle to build something new. (Weeks Citation2011, 233)

My aim here is to open up the notion of the ‘postmaternal’ through bringing it into some kind of proximity with Weeks’ (Citation2011) concept ‘postwork’. ‘Postwork’ is a rather different attempt to respond to some of the same problematics that Stephens identifies in the ways work and care (or social reproduction) have become so separated from one another, and draws on 1970s Marxist feminist texts about wages for housework to reanimate a utopian demand for a postwork politics. In bringing these two terms into relation with one another I’m seeking to think with and against the postmaternal, by suggesting, with Weeks, that there is a strategic need for making certain demands in the name of both social reproduction and work, that go beyond the neomaternalism (albeit a feminist one) that underpins Stephens’ analysis of the postmaternal discourses that surely do surround us. However, the thrust of my argument is that we also need to continue to prize open the implications of using mothering to signify the tripartite conjunction of care, nurture and the management of states of dependency when we make arguments about work and care in public life. Mothering may include practices of care and nurturance, but it also concerns the daily management and experience, for those who mother, of hatred, aggression, guilt, fear, frustration, violence and despair, that have some relation, even if a retroactive and indirect one, to early experiences of being mothered (Kraemer Citation1996; Lewis Citation2009; Parker Citation1995; Stone Citation2011). I aim, therefore, to track across psychoanalytic and social theory, trying to keep open the meanings of ‘the maternal’, not simply in order to de-gender or denaturalise care, but to remind ourselves of the implications of ‘forgetting’ that love and hate are always bound up with one another. If we think about the maternal as a principle or model in social and psychic life that speaks to this impossibility of love without hate, an impossibility that has the potential to mobilise guilt, gratitude, and reparative wishes (if we follow Melanie Klein’s thinking about early object relations), then we might instigate a pathway from a social analysis of the ‘unmothering’ of society, to a more nuanced understanding of both motherhood, and broader ideas about the social good. Weeks seeks to address the problem of waged labour, and its implications for social reproduction by exploring the notion of a basic income for the common production of value. ‘Postwork’ undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’ (Weeks Citation2011, 230). Weeks’ appeal to sharing the responsibility for reproducing ‘life’ rather than value maintains a relation between work and reproduction that is neither maternalist, nor occludes the possibility of such labour emanating from a demand for a form of reparation, understood both in the sense of financial recompense and in the sense of ‘repair’. This may provide us with a more radical model for rethinking a feminist maternalism that includes, but is not subsumed by, a politics of care. One element of my argument is that whilst the notion of sharing the reproduction of ‘life’ may serve us well as a figuration of the maternal that allows care to circulate as everybody’s business, we need to make sure that such a project also entails an engagement with what works against life, the ‘hostility to life’, as Derrida (Citation1995) puts it, or in Freud’s terms, simply the death drive.

The idea at the heart of proposals for a Universal Basic Income is that the state provides all citizens, regardless of their financial situation, with a guaranteed income on an ongoing basis that they may spend as they wish. The idea of a UBI, or something approximating it, is not new. John Lanchester points towards Thomas More’s Utopia, published in 1516, as offering an early instance, and something like the idea was “very much alive in the early second half of the twentieth century,” in the work of figures as disparate as Martin Luther King Jr. and the Chicago School neoliberal Friedrich Hayek (Lanchester 2019; Bidadanure 2019, 482). It was considered by the Black Panther Party as a way to address racial discrimination in the USA (challenging the power of the “malfare” states Threadcraft describes) and by feminists involved in the Wages for Housework movement who discussed an income separate from labour as a way of challenging the hegemony of the male breadwinner model (Threadcraft 2016, 156; Dalla Costa and James 1975). Normative discussions of 7 The Politics of Holding 207 UBI took shape in the early 1990s, and in recent years, the concept has been of interest to post-Marxist scholars concerned with the futures of work and care (Parijs 1992; Weeks 2011). In recent years, there have been trials of UBI around the world, including recent plans for a pilot scheme in Wales focusing on care leavers (Goodman et al. 2021; Morris 2021). Whilst there are many different arguments for UBI, and debates about the relationship between the provision of UBI and public services (Parijs 1992; Lanchester 2019; Stronge 2020), I want to focus on developing a perspective that centralises the psychosocial meanings and theorises the potential psychic effects of this kind of provision, whilst at the same time keeping the relationship between these factors and political economy, anti-capitalism and social change in view. The idea of a UBI, that all citizens should receive a specific sum of money from the state regardless of their means, may in fact constitute a “holding” form of care very different from contemporary welfare regimes. As was discussed in Chapter 4, the post-war welfare state was designed to offer protection against the “five great evils” of society, namely want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. It recognised the effects of insecurity, acknowledging and meeting needs for dependence and support. As discussed in Chapter 6, in more recent decades, however, under the auspices of neoliberal thinking, the welfare state has been reconceived through the lens of an ideology of personal responsibility, eschewing public responsibility for care and exhibiting a hatred for dependency (Hoggett 2000). There have been hand ups not hand outs, and the production of subjects fit for work. Welfare has been conceived in terms of an exchange; support is given on the expectation that something will be received in return, namely productivity. Help is not provided simply because need exists, and dependence implies the need for care. Contrastingly, Hoggett points to the fact that UBI “is non-conditional.” He continues: There is no means-testing nor any set of obligations attached to it. Van Parijs argues that as such it maximises the possibilities for ‘real freedom,’ a society in which each individual has the greatest opportunity to do whatever she might want to do including, in his by now famous example, the opportunity to spend every day surfing if this is what she wished. In 208 J. Kellond other words a citizen’s income assumes the form of a gift that seeks no return. (2000, 206) Conceptualising UBI in this way, as a gift that seeks no return, evokes the psychosocial meanings of the post-war welfare state described by Steedman, a form of public and collective concern capable of producing confidence in one’s right to exist (1986, 121–22). UBI, like the postwar welfare state, involves the recognition and meeting of need. Richard Norman defines need in terms of “deficiencies in respect to well-being” (1992, 141). UBI provides the means to satisfy the basic needs that most impede well-being, the five great evils identified by the welfare state. Recently, Guy Standing has cast UBI in similar but updated terms, positioning it as a response to Battling Eight Giants of contemporary society: inequality, insecurity, debt, stress, precarity, automation, populism and extinction (2020). As a response to need that seeks nothing in return, UBI constitutes a form of holding-care that evokes, whilst also transcending, the ethos of the post-war welfare state. UBI eschews the responsibilising demands of an insurance or assetbased welfare system, which make care conditional, restricting it to those who have contributed “enough” (an implicitly anti-immigrant position) or dependent on forms of self-management and economic advantage not available to all. It also departs from the punitive and invasive approaches to assessing claims for support that have become the norm since the imposition of austerity policies (Gentleman 2011). Lanchester points to the fact that for Van Parijs, one of the key figures in debates about the normative basis for introducing a UBI, the initiative offers “freedom from anxiety, from the often humiliating and chaotic process of applying for means-tested benefits in a welfare state, from the need to take demeaning or exhausting or damagingly precarious work” (2019). The freedom from anxiety that UBI could offer evokes its capacity to function as a means of holding-care. By providing a form of holding, UBI mitigates the experience of anxiety and facilitates going-on-being. This, in turn, has the capacity to support psychic growth. To restate Groarke’s articulation on this, “growth depends on ‘the actual mother’ being in a position to meet the absolute dependence of ‘the actual infant’ at the beginning; in which case a sense of inner security arises based on the 7 The Politics of Holding 209 reliability of ‘holding’” (2014, 18). Though citizens are not babies, UBI would involve the state in meeting needs for dependence both in adult citizens and in the children and others they may care for. Offering a form of non-intrusive support that meets needs for dependence and enables the continuity of being, UBI could well provide a context more amenable to psychological growth than existing forms of provision. As Groarke highlights, spontaneity flourishes when the framework holds up. Lisa Baraitser notes that UBI occupies an important place within a post-work politics that appreciates the disciplinary function of waged work and its historical role in the privatisation of caring and reproductive labour (Baraitser 2016; Weeks 2011). “Postwork,” Baraitser glosses, “undoes the relation between wage and labour through an analysis of social reproduction in neoliberal conditions, calling not just for the common production of value but for a basic income for the common reproduction of ‘life’” (2016, 395). Emphasising that the idea of a UBI “allows care to circulate as everybody’s business,” Baraitser also highlights the psychic dimension of the reproduction of life that such a strategy would foreground (396). “A postwork notion of care requires not just the reorganisation of the social reproduction of ‘life,’” she writes, “but the time it takes to live out the complexities of caring relations, and the development of capacities that may enable the reparation of psychic life” (396). This is a formulation that evokes the holding character of UBI as capable of bringing about psychic change, potentially repairing damaged experience. In a slightly different formulation, Baraitser reiterates the time it takes “for the emergence of the capacity for reparation in psychic life” (406). Here, the emphasis falls on the need to acknowledge the time of unfolding, the time of relationships and intersubjective exchange through which the capacity for what Klein calls reparation, and Winnicott concern, characterised by the spontaneous reparative gesture, develops. This is also the capacity that Hollway describes as central to being able to care, and as key to the cultivation of a form of relational autonomy. Both of these formulations represent avenues for thinking through the psychosocial justification for, and implications of, the kind of holding that provisions like UBI might offer. Certainly, the implementation of UBI would loosen the imperatives of waged work and provide increased opportunities to devote more time to 210 J. Kellond caring. It also has the capacity to shift the balance of power in favour of employees, who would no longer be completely beholden to their employers for the means to sustain their own lives. However, I want to explore the capacity for what could be conceptualised as the holding environment of post-work care, or UBI, to produce psychic change in citizens. The previous chapter explored how the inequalities characteristic of neoliberal capitalism affect the development of capacities, and I emphasised how contemporary social formations erode and distort capacities that are central to psychic resistance and the fending off of compliance—namely the capacities for spontaneity, creativity, care and autonomy. Such an approach is vulnerable to the criticism that it offers no way out because the capacity for resistance is conceived to be so fundamentally eroded by the environments of late capitalism. Winnicott himself draws attention to the potentially catastrophic effects of deprivation and oppression. Thinking freedom in relation to the concepts of health and creativity, he writes that “no one is independent of the environment, and there are environmental conditions which destroy the feeling of freedom even in those who have enjoyed it” (1986b, 232). Though he asserts that “it is probably wrong to think of creativity as something that can be destroyed utterly,” he goes on to discuss the situation of those who are “dominated at home, or spending their lives in concentration camps or under lifelong persecution because of a cruel political régime.” In these situations, he contends, “one feels that it is only a few of the victims who remain creative.” The rest “have lost the characteristic that makes them human, so that they no longer see the world creatively” (1991a, 68). Being able to see the world creatively, a capacity that develops through the experience of intuitive management, means being able to create and recreate the world, to exercise the powers of imagination in order to think up, that is to invent, the phenomena that meet a need. Winnicott suggests that this capacity probably cannot be completely destroyed, but it can be seriously impeded by environmental conditions. This is an idea that evokes Nussbaum’s distinction between the basic capabilities of human existence and the level of capability characteristic of human flourishing, discussed in Chapter 5 (1995). Capitalism does not (necessarily) destroy the human as such, but rather reduces it to a base level of existence that does not constitute flourishing. 7 The Politics of Holding 211 Writing of the relationship between childhood and social reproduction, Susan Ferguson sets out how “the fundamental demands of capital for a renewable supply of labour power exert strong pressures for certain (privatised) forms, (disciplining) practices, and (alienated) states of being to emerge. At the same time, they generate forces that obstruct the likelihood that other (communal, open-ended, integrated) childhoods will develop” (2017, 113). The focus falls here on the reproduction of the worker, rather than the facilitation of healthy, caring forms of subjectivity. However, there are many ways in which the creative capacity might be awoken or maintained: through the experience of holding associated with psychoanalytic psychotherapy, aesthetic experience, or progressive forms of social provision.

Centrally funded permanent job guarantee programs at a living wage, where anybody can obtain a job with benefits, is a very different approach to full employment than a goal of full employment based on demand-management (Tcherneva 2012). Guaranteed jobs based on community driven non-profit-oriented activities that improve people's lives and the environment, provide a way to improve conditions for people, communities, and workers across sectors, and can help stabilize prices (Forstater 2004;Mitchell 2017, 65-68; Tcherneva 2020). Democratic locally driven participation, as opposed to "privatized community" (Champlin 1998) are central (Kolokotronis 2018; Zalewski 2018; Democratizing Work Manifesto 2021).

To better understand how Job Guarantee is not an extension to the logic of the capitalist wage system based on investment, highly relevant are Veblen's theory of human development and insights regarding workmanship [work] (1898, [1904] 2005, [1914] 1964, and 1923). Work is a different concept than commodified labor - a central institution of capitalism. Veblen's "irksomeness of labor" has to do with the conditions and control over work, and not with innate human preference to leisure. Veblen's workmanship [working] is important for human development and psychological well-being. Although, capitalism permeates the whole life process and employs creativity and workmanship for salesmanship and various forms of sabotage. Those important elements of Veblen's theory help to understand better the potential and meaning of Job Guarantee - just one of many desired public undertakings (e.g., around housing and food systems).

The COVID- 19 pandemic has cast the crisis of care into particularly stark relief. Caregivers, both waged and unwaged, have endured the most of underinvestment in public health and public caregiving. Health care workers have been stretched thin responding to waves of infection and have themselves been disproportionately subject to COVID- 19 infection.32 The closure of schools and daycares, meanwhile, has driven millions of women, particularly working- class women and women of color, to drop out of the labor force in order to meet family caregiving needs.33 The pandemic has also served to highlight the importance of a political project that can tackle the crisis of care and the climate crisis at the same time— particularly since climate change itself will drive the emergence of new diseases as wildlife habitation and migration patterns change and intersect with human activities in new ways. Industrial agriculture, too, is a major source of novel pathogens: preventing future pandemics thus requires not only attending to public health but improving animal welfare and making farming more ecologically sustainable.34 More generally, climate change is likely to increase the need for care in response to climate- fueled disasters and deteriorating environmental conditions. Yet while the need for such projects may be clearer than ever, we should not underestimate the political challenges they will face. A Green New Deal that expands access to care would represent a reversal of the trends of the past several decades. As Cedric Johnson points out, what was “exceptional” about the New Deal is that “capital was forced to take responsibility for the costs of social reproduction of labor.”35 But today, after decades of neoliberal decimation of the welfare state, even its relatively mild goals seem radical. Even the moderate welfare state of social democracy instituted by the New Deal was ultimately deemed unaffordable. The decline of living standards in the past few decades is the direct result of increased global competition that has forced corporations to drive down prices and wages. Under these circumstances, forcing capital to pay for the reproduction even of its own workers will be challenging enough; forcing capital to pay for ways of living that do not serve capital directly— for universal public services and ecological care— will be even more difficult. Where will the leverage to command such major concessions come from? The scale of transformation that the Green New Deal represents will require a broader social base than extractive industry workers alone. Workers performing the work of social and ecological reproduction are workers who can form part of the political coalition for the Green New Deal— and they can bring the communities they serve with them. These workers have already begun to organize their workplaces and the broader communities in which they are embedded. Workers in the fields of care and education have been among the most militant in recent years: in 2018 the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported twenty “major work stoppages” involving 485,000 workers, with education, health care, and “social assistance” industries accounting for over 90 percent of workers on strike. The Bureau also reports that “between 2009 and 2018 the educational services and health care and social assistance industries accounted for nearly one half of all major work stoppages.”36 Many of these strikes have also taken on a distinctive form. As Jane McAlevey argues, unions win when they do “whole- worker organizing”— organizing that sees workers as connected to broader communities and that organizes communities alongside them.37 These kinds of organizing are particularly crucial in fields where workers who strike are often charged with harming their students or patients: bosses win when they can pit the public against workers. So using a framework known as “Bargaining for the Common Good,” teachers and nurses have rejected the division between workplace and community, organizing with and alongside students, parents, and community members to win victories around both community and teacher demands (for more, see chapter 14 by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in this volume). As one Chicago Teachers Union slogan puts it, “Our working conditions are their learning conditions.” Amid the 2018 wave of teachers’ strikes known as #REDforED, teachers in Los Angeles and Arizona brought thousands of community members into the streets to support teachers’ action in the workplace. Workers in these sectors have organized alongside movements pushing for the decommodification of social services and insisting that industries that have long offloaded their environmental costs onto the public finally pay what they owe. In New York City such coalitions have produced free pre- K for all; the Chicago Teacher’s Union fought former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school closures. In places like West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, meanwhile, teachers have fought to make the fossil fuel industry pay more in taxes to fund schools and teachers’ salaries.38 As Sarah Jaffe writes, teachers in West Virginia echo the struggles of coal miners before them in “demanding that the energy barons who have so much power in the state government as well as in its economy— the governor is a second- generation coal billionaire— pay more to those they have exploited.”39 Organizing beyond the workplace is also important for winning struggles within it; at the same time, the workplace can serve as an anchor for organizing broader political struggles and building working- class power. Such expansive approaches to organizing are essential for addressing climate change: climate change is embedded in the patterns of daily life, and class struggle must be, too. Many of the signal political struggles of the contemporary moment, from Standing Rock to Fight for $15, from Black Lives Matter to RED for ED, have combined critiques of economic and racial inequality with attention to the conditions of life both within and beyond the workplace. The uprisings following the police murder of George Floyd represent the most recent set of struggles around the conditions of life itself— and Black life in particular. Activists have outlined a divest- invest platform that calls for defunding police and funding crucial social services: the 8toAbolition platform, for example, calls for “building up life- sustaining systems that reduce, prevent, and better address harm” by, among other things, investing in “care, not cops.” 40 Such calls are entirely compatible with the vision of a Green New Deal for Care that I have outlined here and suggest the potential for new forms of solidarity. The Green New Deal for Care suggests that we need to change more than our energy sources. The desire for such transformation is already latent in contemporary struggles— in demands for Medicare for All and public childcare, in struggles to improve wages and working conditions for care workers, in calls for “care not cops.” A Green New Deal for Care can help bring these struggles together, demanding a new way of organizing both social and ecological reproduction in service of a future where everyone has what they need to live a healthy and fulfilling life on a habitable planet.

Like the work of social reproduction, the “life support systems” of planet earth— the carbon cycle, water purification, soil fertility, and many other processes often referred to as “ecosystem services”— have often been treated as background conditions against which the formal economy can function. But they are crucial to maintaining a habitable planet and a livable human future on it. Our understanding of the crisis of care, then, should encompass the multispecies relationships necessary for sustaining life on earth. The web of life on which we depend is breaking down: it needs care, repair, and maintenance. We need to support and expand forms of work oriented toward caring for the ecosystems that keep the earth habitable. The New Deal’s Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) is one potential model of a green jobs program focused on care for the earth and reveals both possibilities and challenges. CCC workers performed a wide array of tasks, including forest and soil conservation, the construction of hiking trails and recreational facilities, flood control, and disaster relief. This work, too, was deeply gendered: the CCC was all male, and the work itself— mostly manual labor, often aimed as much at transforming ecosystems as maintaining them— was understood as ruggedly masculine, explicitly intended to make unemployed boys into strapping and independent men. (One slogan declared “The CCC- A Builder of Men.”28) Its militaristic inspiration was reflected in the description of the program as a “corps” and those who participated as “soil soldiers”; workers lived in barracks and obeyed military discipline. Meanwhile, a short- lived women’s CCC, championed by Eleanor Roosevelt and known informally as the “She- She- She,” met with resistance from those who thought women should not work outdoors and was ultimately deemed too expensive to continue. Even the male CCC members, however, were expected to work on the cheap: Franklin Roosevelt told Congress that “more important . . . than the material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.” Pay was lower than the standard union wage, garnering criticism from labor leaders; like other New Deal– era jobs programs, it was temporary. A renewed, permanent version of the CCC could create new hiking trails, campgrounds, and nature reserves in rural areas. In places like West Virginia and Wyoming, former coal miners could turn abandoned coal mines into national parks dedicated to labor and environmental history. In cities, CCC workers could support the creation and maintenance of new city parks and community gardens; they could plant trees to combat the effect of concrete “heat islands” and make cities more livable even in the face of rising temperatures. Workers could restore areas that have long been damaged by fossil fuel extraction and subjected to the costs of industrial production, attacking the long legacy of environmental racism. Yet today most conservation work is still done on the cheap, often by young people on service years, as in the California Conservation Corps (motto: “hard work, low pay, miserable conditions, and more!”). National parks currently employ only about 20,000 paid workers while using 315,000 volunteers annually.29 Incarcerated people also frequently serve as a lowcost source of ecological labor: they make up one- third of California’s firefighting force and perform other conservation tasks like clearing brush and fallen trees, maintaining parks, and undertaking reforestation. For these kinds of work to be viable livelihoods, they, too, would have to be better paid and treated as necessary and permanent jobs rather than stopgaps. Another promising sector for ecological care work is agriculture, which is deeply dependent on ecological processes under threat from climate change. But contemporary American agriculture does not take much care for the earth, nor for those who work it. Instead, industrial agriculture aims to produce as much as possible as cheaply as possible, pushing both workers and soil to exhaustion. Integrating care for the earth into the American agricultural system will thus require reckoning with the exploitation of farmworkers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants. The National Agricultural Workers Survey, conducted by the Department of Labor, suggests that nearly 75 percent of farmworkers are immigrants, mostly from Central America; an estimated 49 percent are undocumented.30 Their immigration status renders farmworkers vulnerable to intense exploitation: farmworkers are among the most exploited workers in the country, working brutally long hours for low pay, and are still excluded from many forms of labor protections. Beyond a small number of conservation jobs, ecological care work is not a recognized or paid form of work in the contemporary American economy. Programs for ecological restoration and maintenance will have to be intentionally created and should draw on the insight of Indigenous communities who have long performed the labor of ecological stewardship. As Indigenous scholar Nick Estes argues, “the relationship Indigenous caretakers have with the land, water, air, and nonhuman world is typically not viewed as productive. . . . Like unwaged caregiving work, land defense and water protection are undervalued but necessary for the continuation of life on a planet teetering on collapse.”31

People need jobs, and there is much work to be done to transition our economy away from carbon. The THRIVE Agenda, for example, calls for creating fifteen million new jobs to repair the country’s infrastructure, build clean public transit, replace lead pipes, expand solar and wind power, protect and restore wetlands and forests, and expand clean manufacturing technologies. University of Massachusetts economists estimate that the THRIVE Agenda would create over fifteen million jobs in a range of sectors, including indirect job creation in related industries.22 But given the deterioration in the quality of work, it is not enough just to focus on job creation. Work itself needs to change in many ways, and since the exploration of imaginative reinventions of work is possible through a public workers program in a way that it is not through the private sphere, proponents of the Green New Deal ought to be envisioning both more work and better work. Here are at least four specific ways that should happen. Take Care of One Another The Green New Deal is about environmental sustainability, but it should also be about sustaining human life. Environmental scientist Eli Dueker points out, “This [crisis] isn’t about ‘saving the planet.’ The planet will survive in the end. We need to focus on learning to take care of each other. And if we do that, if we start to prioritize collective care, it will also have positive side- effects for the planet.”23 Green New Deal proposals focus on creating jobs to save the planet and workers’ livelihoods, but we also need jobs to save ourselves from alienation and to take care of another. A Green New Deal should create care jobs. A growing number of commentators, such as Alyssa Battistoni (chapter 4, this volume) and Naomi Klein, are calling to expand our definition of “green jobs” to include the kinds of work that service the whole range of human need: social reproduction, health care, education, and social work.24 We need to take care of the sick and the elderly, counsel those suffering climate depression and trauma, and rebuild our communities. Care work is also an effective way to think about job creation. Some cities and states have begun to pass variations of “green” legislation that focus on construction work. For example, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo pushed a version of his Green New Deal, which would provide $1.5 billion for funding to support large solar, wind, and energy storage projects in the state. This is projected to provide renewable energy for 550,000 homes and create 2,600 short- and long- term jobs.25 New York City, under former Mayor Bill de Blasio, passed a bill that mandates environmental retrofitting of all private sector buildings occupying over 25,000 square feet over the next ten years. This is expected to create over 26,000 jobs.26 This is a good start. But compare these 2,600 construction jobs created by the New York State Green New Deal and the 26,000 in New York City with the job needs in the care sector. There are almost 880,000 jobs in the state’s care sector (including health and education) where the median wage is less than $40,000 annually. And in many of these jobs, even the wage for experienced workers is less than $40,000 annually. At the national level, there are over 11 million workers in low- wage care occupations (see table 5.1). Home health care is the fastest- growing occupation in the country, and according to the National Employment Law Project, almost half of the workers in this occupation rely on public assistance to survive.27 The Green New Deal should have an expansive definition of sustainability and the kinds of jobs needed to deal with climate crisis and human need. We should demand higher wages for personal care workers, home health aides, teacher assistants, and childcare workers. We should also demand investment to greatly increase the number of workers in these occupations. In Search of Fulfilling Work Work should be about serving the collective need, but work should also be fulfilling. Work should be a place to develop human capacity. One of Marx’s main critiques of work under capitalism is that it deforms human beings. He argued that capitalism produces not a rich human being but an impoverished one, that “the more value he creates, the more worthless he becomes; the more his product is shaped, the more misshapen the worker.”28 Workers should have freedom not just from want but from soul crushing, deforming labor. As economist Michael Lebowitz argues, work should be about producing the goods and services we need to survive but also about developing ourselves.29 How do we foster this? Our goal should be to de- commodify work. People should not have to depend on a paycheck to survive. We must find ways so people have more choice over how they spend their time, choice about how to develop their capacity. This won’t be easy, but there are steps we can take to move in that direction. The pandemic lockdown gave a glimmer of an alternative. First, millions of people stepped up, looking to help. Whether it is because they are now unemployed and have more time on their hands or because, as Rebecca Solnit has observed, assisting others gives them joy, we are seeing people all over the world participate in mutual aid networks and solidaristic activities in their communities.30 Of course, others retreated from community and turned on their neighbors, but early studies show an increase in volunteering overall during the pandemic, which is consistent with findings from other times of crisis.31 Second, the lockdown brought to light the enormous creativity and skill set that already exists among us. Bakers, gardeners, computer programmers, lawyers, house cleaners, teachers, and more all stepped up to offer their services to those in need. Others quickly learned new skills: with more time to spare in lockdown, they could pursue interests that seemed impossible only months earlier. People taught one another, and our collective skill set grew. This means some people have a moment to pursue meaningful work— if not for a paycheck, then in the service of our collective human development.32 Instead of a system that deforms us, we are enriched through pursuing our passions. Of course, it isn’t just in a pandemic that people are creative. Scratch the surface in any workplace and you will learn the incredible range of hobbies and skills that workers have off the job. In her recent memoir of her time as a steelworker, Eliese Colette Goldbach wrote, “Many of my coworkers possessed a creative side. . . . There was a man who made stained- glass windows, and there was a woman who made jewelry out of animal bones. Some people built furniture and gazebos for their families, and there was one crane operator who made elaborate sculptures out of recycled silverware.”33 Finally, the pandemic exposed the reality of “essential work”: what we really need to do in society to take care of ourselves. We need food and shelter, health care, education, and social work. This includes service work as well as construction, manufacturing, and transit. And taking care of ourselves includes recreation, music, and arts. We need purpose, and we need space and time to pursue our passions. Many of the workers who serve our basic needs, such as farmworkers, grocery store workers, nurse’s aides, home care workers, delivery workers, and emergency medical technicians are not rewarded by a capitalist labor market, leaving them to rely on charity or public services to make ends meet. In a differently organized society, we could start with making sure these kinds of jobs are adequately staffed and that those who do them are treated justly. And “essential work” is also that which allows us to develop our collective human capacity. All workers are essential, but under capitalism the only real essential work is that which makes a profit. For work to become a way to help one another, to pursue our passions, and to build our communities, it must be decommodified. There are a number of ways to move in this direction. By reducing living expenses, people become less desperate to take any job and are able to afford more choice in work. This could be done through programs including Medicare for All, expanded affordable housing, universal child tax credits, and free or reduced fare public transit. The child tax credit attached to the 2021 American Rescue Plan was a good start, but it only lasted a year, ending December 31, 2021; it should be restored indefinitely. Another proposal is a universal basic income (UBI), which would provide a cash grant to all adults. The UBI concept can be easily co- opted by conservative forces using it to cut social programs and advance individualism. In Finland, the center- right government launched a modified UBI experiment in 2017 on the hopes of getting unemployed people into jobs. That did not work, although participants did report an increase in life satisfaction and mental well- being.34 Critics note that the Finnish experiment was flawed to begin with for a variety of reasons, including the low grant level. The U.S. federal government gave out a number of cash grants as part of the pandemic stimulus packages in 2020 and 2021 but so far has failed to pass any structural reforms that alter the balance of power toward workers, such as the PRO Act or Biden’s Jobs Act. A true UBI, progressive advocates argue, would be given to everyone— not just unemployed people. Rather than a tool to improve work ethic, a properly designed UBI would allow people to choose a job based on what they found interesting or rewarding rather than what they needed to do to survive. One advantage of a UBI is that it is a collective solution to a collective problem as it pools resources and redistributes to all. Reduce and Localize Work A growing number of analysts have been raising alarms about the future of work given developments in technology— particularly artificial intelligence. Take, for example, a recent Brookings Institute report that found 25 percent of jobs will face “high exposure to automation,” and another 36 percent will face medium exposure in coming decades.35 These alarmist projections are misleading in part because, under capitalism, jobs are always under threat of mechanization. Textile workers were fighting new technologies in the 1700s, and we have seen employers attempt to mechanize and replace workers ever since.36 The type of automation and technology takes new forms, but it does not change the underlying power struggle between employers and workers about how new technologies are introduced. Also unhelpful are the ways in which analysts pose technology as a threat to workers. Technology could make work safer and more interesting. We could use it to allow for a shorter workday or workweek, periods off for education, or early retirement. We should use new technologies to bring true flexibility to work schedules (not neoliberal employer- driven “flexibility.”) New technologies might reduce our carbon emissions directly— and indirectly— if it results in fewer hours worked per week and more conscious decisions about what kind of work we do. We can, and must, cut back on the kinds of jobs capitalism requires for profit maximization but harm the environment and do nothing for meeting human needs. We can no longer afford a world in which people drive an hour each way to produce or sell things we don’t need. One way to do that is to abandon the commitment to a forty- hour workweek. Sociologist Leah Vosko argues that the whole concept of the “standard workweek”—five days a week, forty hours of work— never worked well for many workers, particularly women and those with care duties.37 The 9- to- 5 workday is not compatible with school schedules, and for many parents work locations are far from school or daycare locations. In countries with strong unions, retail workers were able to win strong protections on their workday. Shops were open limited hours and closed on Sundays. While this model was good for retail workers, it made it almost impossible for a family with two working parents to get groceries. The system relied on having either a stay- at- home “housewife” or hiring a domestic worker (commodifying more of the household labor). A shorter workweek allows people to do errands without 24/7 commerce. A growing number of countries and companies are experimenting or discussing a four- day workweek, and the Spanish government agreed to launch a small pilot program by providing grants to two hundred companies that agree to implement a four- day, thirty- two- hour workweek for three years.38 The pandemic lockdown also showed us that it might not be necessary for so many people to commute to work each day. Working from home might not be the answer for all kinds of work or all people. (In fact, it can dangerously offload the costs of office upkeep onto employees and extend work hours.) But clearly there is room for more flexibility and creative work arrangements, which could benefit the environment as well as work/life balance. The Green New Deal pushes us to get smarter about not just our commutes but our jobs themselves. As Michael Goodwin writes in his comic on climate economics, “Yes, we need to find greener ways to commute, but we also need to ask where we’re all going every morning.”39 Educate and Train for Liberation Another way to create the conditions so people can develop human capacity has to do with education and training. Some Green New Deal proposals promote vocational training for those people who work in fossil fuel industries to help them train to make the transition to new jobs. And, further, some training is oriented toward bringing underemployed and unemployed communities into renewable energy sectors: giving skills to get jobs. Some versions of the Green New Deal call for free higher education. But here is another tension— a possible danger. In capitalist labor markets, employers use credentials and notions of skill to divide workers. Workers might accept this credentialing and skilling because it is one of the few sources of power they have. “Skilled work” is a socially constructed concept. All work is skilled, but some skills (and credentials) are more scarce than others or take longer to acquire. The skills we pay more for are those that are more necessary for profit making— not necessarily for meeting human need. And often the skilled work we pay more for are in fields where some groups of workers have won enough power to keep other workers out. We want to demand access to training and education, but the goal is not to access credentials in order to find wage labor and survive. Many supposedly progressive platforms focus on increasing opportunities for more people to earn a credential, which is misplaced. The goal is lifelong learning, which would include access to noncredit and nondegree education as well. People should have the chance to learn throughout their lifetime— to have access to education and training that interests them. This is a component of the Latin American concept of buen vivir. According to one of the foundational thinkers, Eduardo Gudynas, “Buen vivir wouldn’t design education programmes as forms of investment in human capital, but rather it would design them so that people become more illustrados [enlightened].” 40 In addition, we cannot treat education and training as a tool for individuals to get ahead. Developing human capacity is actually a collective project. Again from Gudynas: “With buen vivir, the subject of wellbeing is not [about the] individual, but the individual in the social context of their community and in a unique environmental situation.” 41 The goal is harmonious, collective development. This requires us to develop the skills of collective problem- solving, decision- making, and governance.42 We must find spaces to promote training in cooperation: how to work together, make decisions together, function collectively. Education and training must be tools for liberation rather than for exacerbating inequality.

What would a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet look like?

Respondent 4: One important aspect of a policy response to the pandemic rooted in an ethic of care for people and the planet is recognising and valuing emotional labour and care work (which are both unpaid and gendered). Very simply put, we need to care about care because our futures depend on it – caring about each other and caring for the planet. Another critical aspect of a policy response rooted in an ethic of care is to ensure that the policy response is both diverse and inclusive of marginalised communities, as well as informed by an intersectional feminist perspective. These two, together, are important because it is not simply about adding more women or people of colour, then stirring; it is about increasing diversity from within whilst also integrating an intersectional perspective.

Respondent 5: An intersectional gender analysis can help ensure, for example, that the Green New Deal’s emphasis on shifting to renewable energy and creating new jobs simultaneously addresses the following questions: What are the programmes and policies that will create those jobs? Who sits in those power structures right now? Who’s going to be affected by those shifts? How are they intersectionally gendered? What are the divisions across socioeconomic classes that will affect the distribution of benefits from a Green New Deal? Across race? If those questions are not integrated into our policy solutions, what it means is we have the potential of reproducing the same inequalities that we have in our energy systems right now, not just from the perspective of who has the jobs, but who owns the energy that we produce. It is the same in policies around transportation, and agriculture, and everything else; we must always understand the gendered impacts of who has power and access and voice. It is critical to developing the policy … But beyond that, it’s because we know that if you don’t include multiple views and multiple understandings of what communities are facing, it’s like trying to read a book where every other word is missing. You’re just having a totally incomplete story. And so, things need to be community based and they need to be based on the experiences of what people do in their everyday life. It is easy to envision policies being created that don’t centre the question of, for example, what does caregiving look like? What does this mean from the perspective of teachers, of health-care workers, of people who are in the business of food creation. A lot of this just comes down to ensuring that the design of policies equitably reflect the needs of communities.

Respondent 1: We know that COVID-19 is having a disproportionate impact on women – 70 per cent of health-care workers worldwide are women. They are on the frontlines during this public health pandemic, providing care while also putting their own health at risk. We have also seen how mothers are bearing a greater burden for caregiving with school closures and there has been a drastic rise in gender-based, domestic violence as people have been sheltering in place. These aren’t one-time incidents: when climate disasters hit, we see many of the same statistics. Crises exacerbate gender-based violence and inequity, and this must be addressed in any just recovery or just transition policies.

So, I think we need to ask what work does living well within planetary boundaries require? So we argue that it’s critical to think more broadly about green jobs, to think beyond you know, the kind of typical energy and infrastructure—important as those are, to also take into account work that’s oriented towards sustaining and improving life both human and non-human, and low-carbon waste. So, that in particular we think includes things like care work and education work, centering work that provides care for people, communities, and environment. To reference Sophie’s presentation, I think this is actually an important project of overcoming the family as the site of the only access to care and resources. We need access to care that doesn’t rely on getting married to access healthcare or having children who can take care of you when you’re old.

But as Sophie also points out care can also be brutal, including and especially for those who provide it. And so, care work is both the fastest-growing sector in the country, but also are among the worst-paid, least regulated, done overwhelmingly by women, particularly women of color and particularly by immigrant women. So, it’s hard work even if it sounds nice. It’s like we like care and it’s deeply exploited so you know, we need to improve that work, we need to protect people doing that work and organizing around that work as we’re thinking about building the no-carbon economy and adjusting a division of labor that gives women and people of color the worst-paid and lowest-status jobs.

These interviews reveal a collective understanding of the Feminist Green New Deal initiative and its applicability and potential contribution to not only policy discourses, but also overarching narratives of societal transformation. While many topical insights about the content of policy proposals could be extracted from these responses there are also three ontological themes that emerge. First, the feminist valuation of intersectional analysis – assumed by these activists as the tool de rigeur – corresponds to the ways in which knowledge in the Coalition is created, ordered, reified, and prioritised. Secondly, the collection of ideas points towards an overarching policy solution, reorienting the economy towards one centred on care and regeneration. Such a perspective reflects the trajectory of feminist thought, erected on decades of feminist economic analysis, that rejects the inimical framing of environmental problems being addressed through reductive, singular measures focused on treating the outputs of toxic processes instead of redesigning the processes. Lastly, the advocates demonstrate an undeterred investment in collective action, rooted in solidarity and rights, equal exchange, and mutual learning, as the most effective approach to movement building, indicating such an approach has emerged rightfully from the history of organising for justice.

Intersectional analysis as a key tool

These critiques provide a much-needed reminder that feminist aims can be thwarted when they are taken up within the spaces of global governance, as well as a useful counter-narrative to claims that the current approach to gender and development policy constitutes a victory for feminist alternatives when so clearly it is not. But the way that capitalism is presented in these critiques – as a priori determining all outcomes and bending all agendas to its will – makes it difficult to imagine development otherwise. The bulk of feminist criticism of current gender and development policy may therefore give too much power to the capitalist economy, even as these critics acknowledge the existence and value of a diversity of economic practices and motivations outside of it (Gibson-Graham 2006). But what if instead of seeing capitalism as an impenetrable system that determines the course of everything – including the messy business of gender and development – we could imagine these glimmers of economic difference in policy as ‘cracks’ of opportunity for challenging the capitalist neo-liberal order? John Holloway provides an opening to such reimagining in his book Crack Capitalism, which argues that social change can be fostered by the creation of ‘cracks’ and fissures in the supposed logic of capitalism that allow us to move beyond it to a more just world (Holloway 2010, p. 11). Holloway’s idea of cracking open the ‘world that presents itself as closed’ (Holloway 2010, p. 9) can be extended to the knowledge and practice of gender and development. The ‘business case’ approach, as presented by both its champions and its critics, views the world as a closed capitalist system to which all non-capitalist activities and motivations function only as resources for capitalism. An alternative reading could identify the glimmers of alternative economic and social practices that might emerge from the ‘cracks’ of economic diversity in gender and development – rather than presenting them in terms of a closure that gives capitalism a social cohesion and is difficult to break (Holloway 2010, p. 52). Of course not all resistances will create post-capitalist possibilities, and in fact invocations of ‘community’ and ‘care’ and ‘participation’ and ‘women’s empowerment’ and the like may very well be integrated into projects to sustain capitalism, as the critics suggest. But when development is seen as only doing the work of global capitalism, it is itself presented as a unified force rather than a multivocal site of contestation over political projects (Ferguson 2009). Thus we cannot know in advance the effect of these openings, as they occupy the contradictory space between resistance and integration that cannot be entirely co-opted or contained by the state and capitalist system (Holloway 2010; Dinerstein 2012). The question remains, then, as to how these glimmers and openings might allow for activities and motivations that are at odds with the ‘business case’ being pursued by development institutions. By refusing to define capitalism as a determining force, could we be open to imagining ways to take these openings and cultivate economic subjects-in-becoming who are guided by motivations of care, collectivity and ethical concern (Graham and Amariglio 2006)? Might we look to recent shifts in gender and development for spaces to foster projects that decentre neo-liberal subjectification in favour of emerging motivations of solidarity and care through which new conceptions of the self can be created (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxv), or what Holloway (2010) might identify as a ‘crack’ or interstitial moment of resistance? Knowing there are no guarantees, we might still consider letting go of totalising stories and adopting an approach that ‘tolerates “not knowing”’ (Gibson-Graham 2006, p. xxxi) and an orientation towards possibility.