The value of domestic work
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 3 May 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Housework and caring - is technology about to transform this essential but overlooked part of the economy?
Manuela Saragosa speaks to Ai-Jen Poo, director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance in the US about why workers in the home still aren't valued, and to Megan Stack, author of Woman's Work, about the power employers have over domestic help. Professor Diane Coyle from the University of Cambridge explains why domestic work often isn't included in GDP figures.
(Photo credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I don't recall hearing any sound, but as you lift off, the vibration was intense. |
| 0:07.7 | I don't believe anybody ever told me it was supposed to shake this hard. |
| 0:11.6 | And my thoughts are, I hope this thing holds together. |
| 0:14.3 | 13 minutes to the moon from the BBC World Service coming soon. |
| 0:23.3 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. |
| 0:25.8 | Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:28.7 | Coming up, doing the dishes, mopping floors and wiping bottoms. |
| 0:33.1 | Why do these domestic chores count so little in economics? |
| 0:36.9 | Most of these jobs are still poverty wage jobs. |
| 0:40.1 | So the people we're counting on to take care of our loved ones can't take care of their |
| 0:44.7 | own families doing this work. |
| 0:47.2 | And we'll hear why that might have to change. |
| 0:50.3 | Technology is changing the boundary between what people do for money and what people do in their own home, blurring that line between what we pay for in a market that gets recorded in GDP. |
| 1:01.0 | Between home and economy. |
| 1:02.1 | Between home and economy, yeah. |
| 1:03.9 | Making housework count. |
| 1:05.8 | That's coming up here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:11.8 | Mary Rose Tibursio, |
| 1:14.3 | Ariane Palanas Lozano, Marika Valtes Archeola. |
| 1:18.6 | They were all domestic workers from the Philippines working in Cyprus. |
| 1:22.1 | Last month, a Greek Cypriot army officer confessed to murdering all of them and their children. |
| 1:27.6 | The case has left the European island reeling and exposed an exploitative system that allows |
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