Permutation double bind – either the alt can overcome the links or it can’t overcome status quo conditions.

Gendered Division of Labor Let us consider now the impact of UBI on gender justice (see also Katada 2012; Robeyns 2000; 2001; 2008). In this section, I will confine myself to considering only the gendered division of labor in the household. Consider four distributive options as responses to gendered housework: 1) wages for housework; 2) capitalist welfare state; 3) equality of opportunity; and 4) universal basic income. Let us address them as distributive “ideal-types”, in order to assess their possible impacts on the division of labor. 1) Wages for houseworkers. A classic distributive response to the gendered division of labor is to give wages for housework (Federici 1975; Fortunati 1981). The proposal was first suggested by the Italian feminist Silvia Federici, giving rise to a social movement in the 70s. While today the proposal is no longer accepted by most feminist movements, the critical efforts as part of the proposal have left us with useful critical resources, acknowledged as such by many contemporary scholars today (see Weeks 2011). This line of thought, in fact, has contributed to the birth of “social reproduction theory”, which seeks to conceptualize the sphere of life traditionally conceived as lying outside of the official economy, consisting of care and housework, as producing value itself, even though within the ‘unofficial economy’ of the household (Federici 1975; Bhattacharya 2017)63. Despite the critical relevance of the proposal in that historical period, which usefully contributed to raising awareness of the problem in the public arena, it would not by itself stop the contributive subordination of women, being a merely distributive remedy to the gendered division of housework. Rather, it would perpetuate their contributive segregation because it would continue to cast housework as a ‘woman’s problem’, without making changes to the gendered division of labor – which would likely be made worse. 2) Welfare state. As effectively highlighted by Nancy Fraser (2016), with the advent of the “second shift” of women and two-earner households, the conflict between work in the official economy and reproductive labor has been exacerbated. Lack of investment in public and support services have combined with the massive recruitment of women into the labor force to externalize carework to nannies and caregivers. The resulting situation is “a new, dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it and privatized for those who cannot, as some in the second category provide carework in return for (low) wages for those in the first” (Fraser 2016a). If they want to maintain the double-earners model, without confining women to the household or asking them to work part-time, families are thus forced to outsource housework to other women, thereby displacing the problem on a global scale within the so-called “global chains of care” (Hochschild 2000; see also Yeates 2004; 2005; 2009; Casalini 2012). Shallee Colen (1986) has called this phenomenon “stratified reproduction”. On the whole, the welfare state model tends to rely upon the provision of informal carework, without guaranteeing equal access to private caregiving, while at the same time disinvesting 63 These theories are grounded in a reconceptualization of Marx’s notion of “exploitation” that could include spheres outside of the industrial unit, by analogy with the expropriation of resources under colonialism. See for example Fraser 2016b. 116 from public provisions. It does not help make the gendered division of labor fairer, but rather indirectly exacerbates it. 3) Equality of opportunity. What would the principle of “equal opportunity” mean for women with kids who take most responsibility for carework? In Rawls’ account, “fair equality of opportunity” is mostly aimed at preventing social class from being an impediment. It relies on the distribution of money and human capital (education). But money and education would not, by themselves, lighten women’s burdens or necessarily result in a situation where carework is more fairly shared. The gendered division of labor does not concern only people in poverty, for by its nature it fundamentally exceeds the economic dimension. At most, wealthy families can afford to outsource carework to other women, who are often migrants coming from the Global South. The “care drain” solution would reproduce the “global chains of care” (Hochschild 2000) and “stratified reproduction” (Colen 1986) would merely displace the problem. In Roemer’s account, “equality of opportunity” means that all should receive a valuable education and have access to social dividends (i.e. equal shares of profits). In neither case would the labor burdens of women (which Arlie Hochschild has called “the extra month per year” that women devote to carework) be lightened or shared in a fairer way. There is no necessary connection between money redistribution, equal opportunities through education, and the way in which we share tasks. As for free occupational choice, once they have kids, women with care responsibilities cannot simply choose to “quit their job” as mothers. Thus they would be likely to have less choice then men in the labor market. Outside of the household, responsibilities for carework would significantly restrict their options. They would be more likely to take part-time jobs, for instance. This is, once again, unless they externalize carework, which clearly has costs, both affective and economic. Free occupational choice means that no one should be forced into an occupation against their will. But casting the normative perspective on work no further than to the act of “free choice” and abstracting away from the constraints that are actually responsible for reducing the options of such choice, does not help to put us in a position of contributing to society as peers. Consider, for instance, that women taking most charge of carework do declare in interviews that they would like to get more help from their husbands (when applicable), but in most cases this rarely happens. Thus, even if they “freely choose” their work because no legal or formal constraint is at play, they nonetheless must choose between maintaining their relationships with their disengaged partners, or these responsibilities will be fairly shared at the cost of conflict or even divorce (see the illuminating work of Arlie Hochschild 2012b). The normative scope of freedom of choice is too narrow; it does not sufficiently affect by itself the contributive subordination of women. 4) Universal basic income. As for UBI’s “exit choice”, one may ask: can women simply “exit” from carework? This appears to be almost a nonsensical idea. However, the unconditional character of UBI would widen their options by providing a form of material security that would encourage flexibility and wider choice. Indeed, UBI may also lessen women’s dependency on intermittent public help and on their partners (the “male breadwinner”); moreover, by unconditionally providing women with a secure source of income, it could indirectly facilitate some processes of emancipation from gender segregated labor in the market. Given the universal character of UBI, no doubt it is far preferable to the idea of wages for housework and to the welfare state, 117 insofar as it avoids fostering status segregation. But UBI does not by itself suffice to make the division of labor fairer. While intervening on class subordination, it doesn’t address irreducible inequalities and heteronomies rooted in the division of labor. For childrearing and housework, there would still be the problem of who should perform them. According to some authors, UBI would have some effects on unpaid family work in that it would help to give it recognition (Walter 1989; Withorn 1990). However, it may well have the opposite result: that housework becomes even less visible and thus less recognized. By providing equal amounts of money to all, institutions may think of themselves as being “absolved” from the responsibility of providing concrete help through public investments. If there is no specific concern for women’s carework and thus it is far from clear how the contributions of women would be recognized. Other authors believe that UBI would help women to achieve greater equality in the labor market by enhancing their bargaining power and making it more sustainable to work part-time, also leading men to share in domestic work (Standing 1992); other authors believe that UBI would have a highly positive impact on women’s autonomy (Walter 1989). However, these are mere conjectures that, in the absence of empirical research, cannot be validated. What we can say is that nothing in UBI as such entails that men will share in domestic work (supposing the heterosexual family as a model for all families, which should not be assumed64) – this seems to be quite an arbitrary presumption. Indeed, UBI may entail a quite opposite effect, leading institutions and collectivities to disengage from investing in public provisions for carework, and thereby exacerbating existing inequalities. My claim is that injustice in labor cannot be met by distribution alone; it requires a response which rethinks our contributive patterns (see also Schouten 2016). In this case, for example, an egalitarian remedy would be to equally share housework with other members of the family and, more broadly, include institutions and the collective in the responsibility for socially necessary reproductive labor. Understood this way, gender would be a category characterized by multifaceted injustice: not merely class and status injustice, but also more specifically contributive injustice. Feminist contemporary reflections have addressed this kind of labor injustice by using terms like “social-reproductive injustice” or “family justice”. In my view, this should be considered as a particular, status-based case of a larger form of injustice: contributive injustice, which reserves certain kinds of tasks and work for some people, while exempting others65. 3.3.3. Conclusion Both heteromation and the gendered division of labor are cases of contributive inequality. Of course, they are different problems, in that heteromation concerns the tasks that companies outsource to crowdworkers in order to fill in the gaps of technological work, whereas carework concerns the socially necessary tasks performed in the household that society tends to reserve for women. In both cases, the contributive pattern is an unequal one, since crowdworkers and women are not allowed to contribute to social cooperation as peers. In this framework, distributive justice – in the form of UBI – may certainly alleviate in some form the material constraints that exacerbate contributive issues, but it would not make, as such, 64 Significantly, recent research has shown that same-sex couples with children tend to have similar problems of unequal division of labor in the household as heterosexual ones (see for example Cain Miller 2018). 65 On the idea of exploitation of women based on gendered housework, see Delphy 1992; 2003. 118 the division of labor fairer. The limitations of the derivative and external justice theses are still there