The labor market subordinate women by reinforcing the “Breadwinner” model, where men work to support their families. This portrays women as dependent on their husbands and devalues domestic work, which reinforces the patriarchy

The freedom not to be employed runs counter to the direction of much recent public policy and political rhetoric (especially in Anglo-American countries, though the policies are international), and this makes stakeholding more palatable than basic income in the current political climate. The effect of such policies and rhetoric is to draw even tighter the long-standing link between employment and citizenship, at the very time when a reassessment has been made possible by changing circumstances. The institution of employment is a barrier to democratic freedom and citizenship in two ways. First, economic enterprises have an undemocratic structure, a point that I shall not pursue here.23 Second, as feminist scholars have demonstrated, the relationship between the institutions of marriage, employment, and citizenship has meant that the standing of wives as citizens has always been, and remains, problematic. The Anglo-American social insurance system was constructed on the assumption that wives not only were their husbands’economic dependents but lesser citizens whose entitlement to benefits depended on their private status, not on their citizenship. Male “breadwinners,” who made a contribution from their earnings to “insure” that they received benefits in the event of unemployment or sickness, and in their old age, were the primary citizens. Their employment was treated as the contribution that a citizen could make to the well-being of the community. Ackerman and Alstott acknowledge this in their criticism of “workplace justice,”24 and their recognition that unconditional retirement pensions would be particularly important for the many older women whose benefits still largely derive from their husbands’ employment record.25 That is to say, only paid employment has been seen as “work,” as involving the tasks that are the mark of a productive citizen and contributor to the polity. Other contributions, notably all the work required to reproduce and maintain a healthy population and care for infants, the elderly, the sick, and infirm—the caring tasks, most of which are not paid for and are undertaken by women—have been seen as irrelevant to citizenship.