Military subsidized child care: Child Care Financial Assistance for Military Families

New program to cut child care costs for military families coming to more states

A program aimed at reducing child care costs and providing options for military parents is coming to more states.

The Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood-Plus program will expand to the Miami-Dade County area in September, to Texas in October and to Colorado in November, said Gilbert Cisneros, Jr., undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness.

The program, which began in 2019 in Maryland and Virginia, expanded to Nevada in September 2021, and to Washington state in February.

“We’ll continue our concerted effort to educate states on what Military Child Care In Your Neighborhood-Plus can do and encourage their participation, especially in those states where our military families are stationed,” Cisneros said during the Military Child Education Coalition’s Global Summit Wednesday. “We are looking forward to more states joining us in the coming days.”

He said DoD officials are in discussions with officials in California, North Carolina and additional counties in Florida.

“It’s certainly no secret that in certain regions and installations around the country we have challenges in meeting the child care needs of some military parents, especially those who would prefer to get their children into child development centers where they know their children will receive expert care and wonderful developmental and early educational support,” he said.

The Military Child Care In Your Neighborhood-Plus initiative started in October 2019 as a two-year pilot program limited to Maryland and five regions of Virginia.

The current long-standing military fee assistance programs offset the cost of child care in the civilian community when child care isn’t available on the installation. It helps those in locations with long waiting lists for child care, as well as those in assignments that aren’t near a military installation.

The program is meant to bring parents’ child care costs in the community more in line with what they would pay for on-base child care. Child care fees on military installations are based on total family income, and the cost of child care is subsidized by DoD.

The ongoing military fee assistance programs pay the subsidy to nationally-accredited child care providers in the community as the first choice.

The difference in the MCCYN-Plus program is that it pays the subsidy to providers in locations where nationally accredited care isn’t available, to help include more centers and family child care providers. However, if they aren’t nationally accredited, the child care providers must participate in that state’s quality improvement program. That’s over and above required state licensing.

As Cisneros noted, the child care providers have to meet DoD’s “standards for quality, and ensure our military children are cared for in safe and supportive environments.”

The fee assistance subsidy for community-based child care is the difference between what the service member would pay for child care in DoD programs, and the community-based child care provider’s rate, up to a provider rate cap for full-time care.

In 2022, the monthly fee assistance provider rate cap is $1,500 per child per month. In fiscal 2023, all of the military service branches plan to increase the monthly provider rate cap to $1,700 per child per month.

The fee assistance programs can make a substantial difference for families.

For example, if a family is in category 5, making between $60,001 to $70,000 a year in total family income, their monthly fee would be $516 for full-time DoD child care. If their approved community child care provider charges more — up to $1,500 a month — the parent would pay $516, and the rest is subsidized by the military service branch in payments to the provider.

The MCCYN-Plus program means more child care centers and family child care providers could participate in the fee assistance program.

In Virginia, for example, MCCYN-Plus meant a possible expansion to more than 800 additional eligible child care centers in regions with military presence. In Maryland, there are more than 4,600 child care programs that can participate.

The fee assistance programs are administered by Child Care Aware, which also helps families find accredited community based child care providers as the first choice. The child care providers in the MCCYN-Plus program who have a quality level of three or higher in their state’s quality improvement program are made available to families as an alternative.

For more information on military child care fee assistance, families should visit ChildCareAware.org.

About Karen Jowers

Karen has covered military families, quality of life and consumer issues for Military Times for more than 30 years, and is co-author of a chapter on media coverage of military families in the book “A Battle Plan for Supporting Military Families.” She previously worked for newspapers in Guam, Norfolk, Jacksonville, Fla., and Athens, Ga.

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Who is Eligible for Military Child Care?

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Who is Eligible for Military Child Care?

Overview

There are three factors that determine who may receive military child care services and when they may access care: basic eligibility, priority, and participant age. These factors are described in detail below.

A child must be a dependent of an eligible sponsor in order to enroll in any military child care program. The sponsor is a person with DoD-affiliation (e.g., Active Duty military, DoD Civilian). The sponsor’s DoD-affiliated status makes his/her dependent children eligible for military child care services.

Basic Eligibility: Eligible Sponsors and Qualifying Children

ELIGIBLE SPONSORS

Eligible sponsors include:

• Child Development Program Staff
• Active Duty Combat-Related Wounded Warrior. Service members designated as combat-related wounded warrior in an Active Duty status require hospitalization, extensive rehabilitation, or significant care from a spouse or care provider and require full-time child care. This designation requires installation commander approval (this authority cannot be delegated).
• Active Duty Military/Active Duty Coast Guard Personnel
• Guard/Reserve on Active Duty or Inactive Duty Training Status
• DoD/Coast Guard Civilian
• Gold Star Spouse (Combat-Related). A Gold Star Spouse is the surviving spouse of a service member killed in a combat-related incident.
• DoD Contractor
• Deactivated Guard/Reserve Personnel
• Other Federal Employee
• Military Retiree

QUALIFYING CHILDREN

An eligible sponsor may only enroll a qualifying dependent in military child care. A qualifying child is defined as someone between birth and the age of 12 who has one of the following relationships with the eligible sponsor:

• A dependent or secondary dependent child who lives with the sponsor
• Any other child for whom the sponsor has legal guardianship and resides with the sponsor
• A foster child who lives with the sponsor
• A child who is living with a person acting “in loco parentis” on behalf of the child’s eligible sponsor, who must leave the area temporarily to fulfill a military obligation. An “in loco parentis” relationship is one in which a person takes on the role of a lawful parent by assuming the obligations and discharging the duties of a parent without formally becoming an adoptive parent or legal guardian. In these cases, the child must reside with and be supported by this person while their eligible sponsor is absent. A special power of attorney to act “in loco parentis” is required to be on file.

ELIGIBILITY FOR 24/7 CENTER CARE

24/7 Centers are designed to meet the needs of military watch standers and shift workers, and military personnel who are called for duty during non-traditional work hours (e.g., nights, weekends, Federal holidays, etc.). 24/7 Centers must first serve sponsors for whom 24/7 care was specifically designed, including:

• Shift workers: Shift workers are sponsors or spouses whose regular work schedule occurs outside of standard business hours such as weekends, evenings, or overnight shifts. Examples of shift work schedules include the following: a sponsor who works 2300–0700 Monday through Friday (overnight shift), a sponsor who works a rotating shift with two day shifts (0700–1530) and two afternoon/evening shifts (1500–2300) followed by three days off.
• Watch standers: Watch standers are those whose work schedules occasionally require child care outside of standard CYP operating hours. An example of a watch stander is a sponsor who is required to “stand duty” on an intermittent basis (e.g., twice a week for three months).

As such, 24/7 Centers must offer care to the first eligible family in sequence order whose work schedule meets the program’s available vacancy.

See Placement Activities for detailed instructions on the offer process for 24/7 care offered by 24/7 Centers.

Priority

The purpose of military child care is to support the mission of the DoD by serving DoD-affiliated families so that they may fulfill their military or DoD-related duties. Per DoDI 6060.02, military child care programs must serve the highest priority DoD families first to ensure the most mission-critical families receive access to military child care. DoD has assigned priorities to each military family type (defined below) to ensure that programs meet this requirement.

Military family type is the eligibility categorization for military child care that is comprised of the following elements:

1. Sponsor type (e.g., Active Duty Military, DoD Civilian, etc.), and
2. Spouse status (e.g., working spouse, student spouse, spouse seeking employment, non-working spouse), if applicable.

Families select their sponsor type and spouse status when they create an MCC household profile and update it, as needed, when there are changes to their sponsor type, marital status, or spouse status. MCC uses this information to create a military family type for the household that automatically ties to the appropriate DoD-assigned priority.

For a complete list of all priorities, refer to the see the Military Family Type tip sheet.

WAITLIST SEQUENCE

To help programs meet the DoD requirement to serve the most mission-critical families first, MCC generates an automated waitlist sequence for each request for care submitted. MCC uses the following aspects of a request to calculate waitlist sequence:

• DoD Priority Assigned to the Family’s Military Family Type
• RFC Date: The date the family placed their child on a program’s waitlist (i.e., the date a family submitted a request for care).

With few exceptions, program users must make offers for care in order of waitlist sequence. During the offer process, once you describe your program’s available space in MCC, the system generates a Make Offer/Request Interview screen that displays all requests that qualify for the space in order by waitlist sequence.

Since MCC uses military family type in its sequence calculation, a change in military family type could affect a request’s waitlist sequence.

NOTE: Since military family type is tied to DoD-determined priority for care, program users must verify a family’s sponsor type and spouse status before they may enroll a child in a military child care program to ensure the family has been prioritized correctly and offered care in the correct waitlist sequence. If the program user finds that the family’s sponsor type and/or spouse status was incorrect, and it affects the request’s waitlist sequence once the program corrects it in MCC (i.e., the family’s request is no longer first in sequence), the program user must withdraw the offer and offer care to the next request in sequence on the waitlist. See Manage Enrollment for instructions on what actions to take in MCC if the family’s military family type is incorrect.

SPACE AVAILABLE

Although eligible for military child care, families with DoD contractors, Other Federal Employees, or Military Retirees (including retired Wounded Warriors) as sponsor types, as well as any military family type with a non-working spouse may only access military child care on a space available basis, after all families with higher priority on the waitlist have been served.

WAITLIST EXCEPTIONS

MCC accommodates waitlist exceptions including (a) priority exceptions that modify waitlist sequencing; (b) family type exceptions that grant eligibility to otherwise ineligible families; and (c) locally managed exceptions that allow installations to authorize out of sequence offers based on local priorities.

To add a waitlist exception to MCC, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) or memorandum of agreement (MOA) must be submitted by the Service Representative. At a minimum, the MOU/MOA must contain the following:

• Installation(s) where the waitlist exception exists
• Description of family type and/or affiliation for which the exception exists
• Priority to which the family should be assigned, including spouse status (e.g., working spouse, spouse seeking employment, student spouse, spouse not working), if applicable to exception
• Relevant program type(s) (e.g., CDC, FCC, SAC)
• Expiration of MOA/MOU

Service Representatives should contact the Program Support Desk to request the creation of a waitlist exception in MCC and provide Support Desk staff with a copy of the MOU or MOA.

SUPPLANTING POLICY

Priorities are used for more than just placement from the waitlist; they also inform which families can be supplanted. To improve military members’ access to child care, the Office of the Secretary of Defense directed changes to policy that include supplanting lower priority patrons when necessary. Under the new policy, lower priority families enrolled at a facility-based program may receive written notification that their child will be disenrolled in 45 days to accommodate a higher priority family. If supplanted, families can reapply for care.

What family types can and cannot be supplanted?

Family types that cannot be supplanted include:

• Child Development Program Direct Care Staff
• Active Duty Combat-Related Wounded Warriors
• Single/Dual Active Duty Military/Coast Guard
• Single/Dual Guard/Reserve on Active Duty or Inactive Duty Training Status
• Active Duty Military/Coast Guard with Full-Time Working Spouse
• Guard/Reserve on Active Duty or Inactive Duty Training Status with Full-Time Working Spouse

Family types that may be supplanted include:

• Active Duty Military/Active Duty Coast Guard with a part-time working spouse, a spouse seeking employment, a student spouse, or a non-working spouse
• Guard/Reserve on Active Duty or Inactive Duty Training Status with a part-time working spouse, a spouse seeking employment, a student spouse, or a non-working spouse
• DoD/Coast Guard Civilians
• DoD Contractors
• Other eligible patrons (Deactivated Guard/Reserve Personnel, Other Federal Employees, and Military Retirees)

For more details about supplanting, review the Military Family Types and DoD Priority – Supplanting Matrix handout.

Participant Age

The table below presents the minimum and maximum ages for qualifying children to participate in military child care program by Branch of Service. Additionally, each program type provides services to a specific age range of children.

*Age eligibility for school age children can be extended to eighth grade at a specific installation with approval from the Service Branch HQ.

Last revised: 11 Jul 2022

Caring for Children and Retaining Families: The Gaps in Military Childcare

In 1989, the Military Child Care Act (MCCA) codified the military childcare system that exists today. This legislation was a direct response to sweeping failures across military installations that resulted in unsafe childcare facilities. The MCCA established $157 million in childcare funding (the equivalent of $356 million today), minimum safety and accreditation standards for military childcare centers, background checks for staff, and a standardized priority and fee structure. Over thirty years later, the military’s childcare system is considered a gold standard. It is safe, highly regulated, and affordable—but only if you can gain access. Military childcare is touted as a benefit for service members, but at most installations, small capacity and staffing shortages mean this benefit is fairly limited. As one Army officer with a physician spouse stated, “It’s not much of a benefit when there is no chance my child will get care.”

Childcare Needs

Since MCCA’s passage, military demographics have changed drastically. Since 1985, the number of active duty single parents in the military has increased by 67 percent, and the number of active duty dual-military families has more than doubled. In 2018, 37 percent of military families had at least one dependent child under the age of eighteen. Of those children, about 405,000 are under five years old. The proportion of female service members has more than doubled since the 1980s, and 33 percent of female service members report that childcare is their top concern. Mid-careerists are more likely to have children under five years old—childcare aged—than they were thirty years ago. Nearly one-third of military spouses who want to work report they can’t find childcare. National employment trends, along with evidence from Blue Star Families, indicate that up to 60 percent of those spouses either are employed or desire to work outside the home. Put it all together, and the demand for childcare is high.

In 2019, approximately two hundred thousand children were enrolled in some form of military childcare, including full-time childcare and school-age centers’ after-school programs for children ages six through twelve. But there were over eighteen thousand children on the wait lists, and nearly 75 percent of them were less than four years old. DoD uses a metric called the demand accommodation rate to measure childcare success, which represents “the percentage of child care needs met through military child care programs . . . and partnerships with local care providers. ” Consistently, this number hovers around 78 percent—meaning that 22 percent of military families who need childcare can’t access it. This figure is consistent with Blue Star Families’ 2020 Military Family Lifestyle Comprehensive Report, which showed that 23 percent of active duty families who have a childcare need were unable to find childcare.

When announcing updates to the Army’s parenthood, pregnancy, and postpartum-centric policies in April 2022, Chief of Staff of the Army General James McConville made it clear: “We recruit soldiers, but we retain families.” Simultaneously, one in five service members report they would consider leaving active duty service due to spousal employment issues. Investing in the military childcare system is perhaps one of the fastest and most impactful things the Department of Defense can do to improve retention.

Military childcare is a true capacity and accessibility issue being felt across the Army. At Fort Myer, Virginia, one dual-military couple was recently informed there were forty-one other dual-military and single-soldier families ahead of them on the wait list for a handful of infant care spots. At Fort Wainwright, Alaska, the Child and Youth Services director estimates that dual-military and single-soldier families will wait about twelve months from the date they require childcare before being offered a slot at the child development center (CDC). At Fort Bliss, Texas, a dual-military family got placement at the CDC only after the mother had to bring her infant twins to work with her. Her brigade commander intervened and secured childcare at the CDC. Her experience is reflective of many others: when CDCs are inaccessible, there are often no reasonable or affordable options.

For military families, this has been a significant source of stress. The mental and emotional labor of securing childcare at a new duty station is already high. Thanks to COVID-19, about 9 percent of the nation’s center-based childcare capacity and 10 percent of the nation’s in-home daycare capacity was lost due to permanent closures. As a result, wait lists at surviving facilities grew. Furthermore, many childcare providers raised fees significantly to make up for lost revenue and cover increased expenses.

Military families typically receive permanent change of station orders about one to six months before a move. By the time they’ve identified their new duty stations, it’s often already too late to find childcare. Military families are going to extraordinary measures to circumnavigate the system and secure childcare. In the autumn of 2021, one military spouse put her child on the wait list for every CDC at every base they might get orders to—for their move in summer 2023. Higher-income families may be able to absorb higher costs by using expensive centers, Montessori schools, and au pair or nanny services. Lower-income families—typically junior enlisted families—are being placed in even more difficult situations as those options may not be financially feasible. This is especially concerning, as 29 percent of junior enlisted families also reported food insecurity. These families often need a second income to achieve economic stability but face an uphill battle to secure childcare.

Recent updates to childcare policy, including 2020’s updated childcare priority levels, fail to address capacity issues. Instead, policies like these shift the burden from one family type to another. Current plans, like the one briefed by Acting Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy, and Environment J.E. “Jack” Surash to Congress in May 2021, cite a ten-year, construction-heavy plan that will bring CDC capacity nearly to the level it requires today. While important to improve physical capacity, building for today’s numbers over the next ten years fails to solve current problems.

Solving Military Childcare Gaps

The civilian sector has seen significant shifts in the labor market due to COVID-19, including a mass exodus of women in the workforce. To attract and retain quality talent, the military needs to ensure the military childcare system can meets its goal of “reduc[ing] the conflict between mission requirements and parental responsibilities,” as opposed to creating conflict and stress for families.

First, we need to provide a clear, predicable system that gives military families realistic expectations. The current system, and arguably the current marketing, do not give military families accurate and useful projections on childcare availability. The wait list is a black box algorithm. Inputs include factors such as family status and priority level, time on the wait list, child’s age, and requested care date—but no one can explain to families how they are prioritized and offered childcare spots. DoD’s official childcare website offers an estimated placement date. However, those placement dates are not precise (for example, “May to June 2022,” as opposed to a specific date), and are known for being incredibly inaccurate. Families often show up to a duty station expecting childcare, only to learn they were “bumped” back on the wait list and now have an indefinite wait.

DoD needs to adopt a more transparent way to manage wait lists. Families do not know where they fall on the wait list unless the installation’s Child and Youth Services (CYS) staff chooses to disclose that information. Further, CYS staff is not required to offer care to prospective families until six weeks after the date of requested care. Families are left in the dark, or at the mercy of CYS administration.

Using historical data and family information can create a more reliable model that predicts an individualized probability of receiving childcare at a given duty station. This would give families the necessary information to make informed decisions about housing, spousal employment, schools, and finding alternate childcare. A family that is told it has a 95 percent chance of receiving childcare by its requested date would make different choices than a family with a 20 percent chance. Providing a probability, as well as an exact location on the wait list, and making that information visible to families would be far more useful than the current date range. Families would be able to get real-time, accurate information to make informed decisions about work and childcare.

Second, we need to pay our childcare providers an adequate salary. This change has the potential to have an immediate impact on childcare capacity across DoD. Many installations, including those tagged for construction of new childcare facilities, are not using all the classrooms in current facilities due to staffing shortages. While staffing data is not publicly available, anecdotal evidence from military families across the country shows that many CDCs are understaffed. Increased staffing would immediately result in increased capacity, and likely remove a significant number of children from the wait lists. Adequate staffing not only increases CDC capacity, but also improves the quality of life for current staff. Better work conditions, including a higher wage, can contribute to higher job satisfaction and retention. Higher retention reduces turbulence for our military children, and allows CDC administrators to invest time in training and mentoring current staff, which can also help reduce turnover.

The physical, mental, and emotional investment of childcare workers needs to be met with adequate pay. The hourly rate for entry-level military childcare direct-care staff starts at $13.73 per hour, or $28,558.40 annually (before taxes, assuming a forty-hour work week). At mid-levels, it’s just $15.02 to16.86 per hour ($31,241.60 to $35,068.80 annually). In some high-cost areas, the pay is adjusted—but not very much. For example, the starting rate at CDCs around Washington, DC is $15.68. This is a 14 percent increase in taxable base pay, which is inadequate in a market where a service member’s tax-free basic allowance for housing (BAH) is double the base rate.

Low pay limits the pool of potentially qualified candidates from which military CDCs can draw. More notably, there is a good chance that a universal pre-K (which would not necessarily substitute for childcare for full-time working parents) could exacerbate staffing shortages across the United States. If DoD doesn’t get ahead of this issue, it could face even more severe staffing shortages in the next decade.

There are several ways DoD could support increased caregiver salaries. For example, fee charts could be expanded to better capture high-income families. The current fee system allows lower-income families to access care at a lower monthly cost. However, families in lower income brackets pay a higher percentage of household income. For example, a family earning between $30,001 and $40,000 pays up to almost 12 percent of household income for childcare for one child, versus less than 7 percent for those earning over $140,000 per year. A family of dual-military O-3s earns about $163,000 annually, while dual-military O-4s earn about $190,000. At that income level, a family is paying around 5 percent of annual income for childcare. The current fee system grossly under-charges higher-income families, often at the expense of junior enlisted soldiers.

I created a simple Monte Carlo simulation using the current fee chart and an income-revised fee chart. A Monte Carlo simulation is a mathematical technique that allows for simulation of an uncertain event. It provides a range of possible outcomes. In this case, the uncertain event was the fee level at which the patron paid. I modeled the fee level uniformly—meaning each fee level was equally likely to occur. Then, I simulated a CDC with ninety-one children enrolled, and allocated twenty-four direct-care staff to meet ratio guidelines based on various age groups. I ran two simulations: one with the current fee chart, and one with an updated fee chart that captured families earning up to $190,000 per year. After one thousand iterations each, the revised fee chart model resulted in a 14.5 percent increase in gross revenue. In my hypothetical scenario, this generates enough revenue to pay direct-care staff an extra $278 (low end) to $314 (high end) per month. Restructuring the fees charts to be more equitable and capture high-earning families could go a long way in funding increases in direct-care worker salaries.

Third, it’s time to cut the red tape from the Child Care Aware (CCA) military fee assistance programs. These programs exist to subsidize childcare for families who cannot obtain CDC spots, either due to a lack of space in CDCs or due to being stationed in a location where CDC care is not available. CCA fee assistance is the approved alternative when CDCs cannot meet demand but presents significant barriers for families. When my family lived in Boston without military bases nearby, we navigated the Army’s fee assistance program. It required a mountain of paperwork from both us and the daycare upfront; it took months to process; and the CCA program failed to provide status updates. Not only was the process cumbersome and bureaucratic, but the fee assistance we received seemed to fluctuate month to month.

The CCA fee assistance also fails to adjust for location. Patrons in low-cost areas are allocated the same amount of fee assistance as those in high-cost areas. A family at a low-cost duty station—such as Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri—could use CCA fee assistance for off-base care and pay the same rate as that of a military CDC. However, in a high-cost area like the National Capital Region, families pay two to three times as much for off-base care as they do at military CDCs. DoD adjusts BAH based on cost of living and provides a cost of living allowance (COLA) to offset increased costs of goods and services in high-cost areas. For the CCA system to be more equitable, the fee assistance rate needs to adjust in tandem with COLA and BAH.

The military can make significant strides in improving childcare access by creating a transparent wait list system, increasing and retaining staff through better pay, and overhauling the fee assistance program. As the authors of a Joint Force Quarterly article explained, “The implications for readiness suggest that the United States cannot afford to under-invest in childcare.” The military childcare landscape could dramatically change for the better—especially in high-cost, high-demand regions. Improving childcare access is one of the lowest-cost, but most impactful, things we can do for our military personnel and their families, and to improve military readiness and retain soldiers.

Maj. Erin Williams is an assistant professor in the Department of Systems Engineering at the United States Military Academy at West Point, a wife, and a mother of three young children. She spent a decade as an engineer officer, serving in the 20th Engineer Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, and the 101st Airborne Division before transitioning to the operations research/systems analysis functional area. She holds a master’s degree in data science from Harvard University, as well as degrees from Missouri University of Science and Technology and the United States Military Academy. She is a graduate of Sapper Leader Course, US Army Jumpmaster School, and Air Assault School. Her research interests include body size and body image among service members and quality-of-life issues, including military childcare.

The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense.

Image credit: Airman 1st Class Madelyn Yepez

Gazprombank improved mortgage terms – News from ERZ.RF

In the new issue of the project “ALL ABOUT CONSTRUCTION”, developers discussed the modernization of the construction industry. Experts reported what has changed as part of the introduction of new digital products and what IT solutions will be relevant in the near future.

On October 4, the next online round table of the project “ALL ABOUT CONSTRUCTION” was held, where experts discussed the topic: “Modernization of the construction industry.” The main questions of the air:

• whether developers are abandoning digitalization in the face of constant challenges and uncertainty;

• what will be new at the construction site in the next 2-3 years;

• what developers are reorienting their product to now;

• cases of optimization and modernization of developers.

Participants of the round table:

Andrey Erlikh , Finance and Investment Director of IYNO;

Konstantin Bulinsky , IT director of Talan company;

Alexander Filippov , executive director of the First Trust Group of Companies;

Mikhail Besfamilny , director and owner of Orso Group.

The broadcast was conducted by the director of the project Svetlana Opryshko (pictured).

Ether partner: IYNO (platform for construction management based on reliable BIM data). The project “ALL ABOUT CONSTRUCTION” is implemented with the support of the Ministry of Construction of Russia, the National Association of Builders (NOSTROY), NOTIM and VEB.RF. Information partners of the project: portal ERZ.RF, Stroitelnaya Gazeta, news agency Construction Business, Digital Construction publication.

While most Russian IT companies concentrate on the domestic market, IYNO has big plans for cooperation with foreign partners. Andrey Erlikh shared the details (pictured).

“The international agenda has remained in our company’s strategy, and we are actively looking to the East, namely the Middle East and North Africa regions,” he said. “We believe that the main driving force will be concentrated there, both from developers and property buyers. ”

The expert voiced a number of forecasts regarding transformational changes in the market.

“Due to the mobilization and migration consequences at the construction site, labor productivity will fall,” he noted. “Due to increased competition, customization of the final product will become an advantage in the fight for the client.”

Erlich believes that the White Box will be replaced by the Build-to-suit design, which involves the sale of a finished object, but not a standard solution, but a custom one, where the buyer changes the project for himself.

Another expert’s prediction is that working with data is a prerequisite for a developer’s survival in a changing market.

“Because we will be in conditions of uncertainty for a long time, making decisions based on experience and intuition becomes more and more difficult,” Erlich emphasized. “In order to make these decisions, you need to learn how to work with data, analyze and interpret it.”

Thus, the information received by developers from BI systems will help the management to calculate the risks and take the right steps to maintain and develop the business.

As part of his presentation, the expert demonstrated the reports that IYNO software generates for first-level managers. One of these reports is the manager’s dashboard, where you can see the current key indicators, collisions, summary information, as well as technical data for all sections of the project documentation.

Talan has already implemented a BI system in its company. Konstantin Bulinsky (pictured) told how software has affected business.

“When we started implementing the BI system, we not only learned how to work with data, but also put things in order in the primary sources where this data is generated,” he explained. “Due to the implementation, we began to take a balanced approach to numbers and order in business processes.”

Answering a question about the general level of digitalization of the industry, Bulinsky warned his colleagues against a chaotic approach to this process.

“Many developers, at the very least, need to move from spreadsheets in Excel to normal budgeting to see construction costs,” he said. — Only then can we talk about drones, TIM and other technologies — 99% of developers do not need it yet.”

The main recommendation of the expert is to implement basic functionality, clean up business processes and create a common data environment.

According to Bulinsky, it will be quite difficult to assess the economic effect of the introduction of digital tools.

“The fact is that there are a lot of unknown factors,” he said. “For example, how much time employees have saved, how many people are not hired due to digitalization, how much faster the right decisions have become made and how much money this will save us in the future.”

Due to uncertainty and constant change, many developers are delaying the start of digital projects. However, the First Trust Group of Companies does not deviate from the planned course and implements all the planned initiatives – Alexander Filippov (pictured) reported this.

“We are not adjusting our program yet and are moving forward within the framework of what we planned to digitize,” the expert said. “Now we are working on MDM systems so that all the company’s data from design decisions to the last write-off are completely online and are automatically distributed on the shelves.”

The developer is also preparing to introduce laser scanning on objects – the company’s IT team is looking for a solution that will fit into the existing architecture of the developer.

Filippov explained how digitalization helps developers in the current realities.

“IT solutions are about getting the data you need quickly, quickly analyzing and making quick management decisions,” he said. “Companies that have achieved certain results in the IT field are better prepared for a rapidly changing world and new challenges.”

Orso Group does not plan to introduce new technologies at the construction site in the near future – this was announced by Mikhail Besfamilny (pictured).

“As for the general order processes, we are not launching anything new, and due to constant changes, there is no particular desire yet,” he explained.

The expert also told how the events of September affected the company’s sales.

“As part of the entire volume of sales, about 20% of transactions “flew” with us,” said Besfamilny. “At the same time, some customers even registered a contract, but abandoned the purchase at the last moment due to general uncertainty.”

At the same time, the developer did not suspend activities on new projects – Orso Group recently acquired several new plots for the construction of a residential complex.

Recording of the October 4 episode is available at the following links:

• Watch the episode on Youtube;

• view the release on Rutube.

The theme of the next round table “ALL ABOUT CONSTRUCTION”: “Mandatory transition to TIM – the successes achieved and the problems that remain.” It will be held online on October 11 at 11:00 (MSK). Free registration for viewers is open on the project website.

We remind you that from mid-2024 TIM will become a prerequisite for work for the entire construction industry, so the upcoming broadcast will be relevant for everyone involved in the construction business. Join the round table to learn life hacks for a painless transition to TIM from market leaders.

Other publications on the topic:

Construction of the year for digitalization of construction in Moscow were visited by more than 200 developers from Russia and CIS

Marat Khusnullin: It is not yet possible to assess the impact of partial mobilization on the pace of construction in Russia

Construction industry leaders conducted tours of their facilities as part of the First Digital Urban Tour of Russia

Construction, grows with brick and concrete but decreasing by technology

Ministry of Construction: there are no obstacles to the planned transition of the industry to TIM from 2023. Developers of a different opinion

“I liked everything”: what services developers evaluated to improve sales at the round table “ALL ABOUT CONSTRUCTION”

Ready for import substitution, but it takes time by developers

Market leaders and their digital ecosystems: Samolet, Setl Group and Cowberry cases on air VSE ABOUT CONSTRUCTION

What surprised developers with drone ports. Domestic developers presented 11 products for digitalization at the battle of IT solutions

Women as a catalyst for economic growth. Turning an idea into reality

In April, Prime Minister Abe Shinzo announced an economic development strategy based on a more active role for working women. Labor expert and former commercial director of Shiseido Iwata Kimie discusses the three points of Abe’s plan and offers his own recipe for change in the Japanese economy.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzo made increasing the number of women in the labor force the cornerstone of his economic development strategy and a key element of the “three arrows of economic policy” known as Abenomics. This focus on working women is unprecedented in the Japanese government, and I sincerely welcome this innovation. So, how is Abe going to achieve his goal? 19On April 2013, the Prime Minister met with members of the press and the business community to unveil three initiatives to increase the role of women in the economically active population: addressing the shortage of child care facilities, increasing parental leave to three years, and setting a goal to use at least one a woman in a leadership position in every company.

I tried to think about the advantages and disadvantages of the government’s plan.

The main priority is kindergartens

The biggest problem that hinders the work of women and needs to be addressed immediately is the lack of state-subsidized pre-school institutions. The Prime Minister has set a goal of creating 400,000 additional places for children to eliminate the long queues for kindergarten that Japanese families constantly face. But 400,000 is clearly not enough to solve the problem, given that the Cabinet Secretariat estimated a gap between the provision of kindergartens and the potential demand for their services at 850,000 places a few years ago.

I note that just three years ago Yokohama had more children waiting for kindergarten than any other municipality in Japan. However, by the spring of this year, the queues were completely eliminated, thanks to the efforts of the local administration. If other large city governments follow Yokohama’s example and make increasing the role of women in the working population a top priority, the government’s goal could be achieved in as little as three years rather than five years (the time frame given by the government for the target).

So, the figure of 400 thousand and a period of 5 years will not satisfy the need for kindergartens, it is necessary to eliminate the critical shortage of places as soon as possible.

A Real Look at Parental Leave

Speaking to business leaders last April, Abe called on corporations to voluntarily extend parental leave to three years instead of the 12 months (maximum 18 months) required by law. Certainly, any changes that will empower women to choose the right time for them to return to work should be welcomed, especially given the current shortage of kindergartens. Three-year-old children are usually easier to arrange in the garden, more free places are provided for them. Having the opportunity to extend maternity leave to three years, no doubt, will have a positive effect on the woman’s mental balance. On the other hand, promoting three years of maternity leave as the norm could have the opposite, counter-productive effect of increasing women’s participation in the country’s workforce.

One of the problems with long maternity leave is its impact on a woman’s future career. The question is not only whether a woman will be able to return to the workplace after a long break, but also whether she will be able to continue her career with the possibility of promotion through the ranks. In the business world, allowing several years of leave is generally considered to be detrimental to an employee’s prospects. Retraining programs, if companies are willing to provide them, can only help get workers back on track and make up for lost time. Even at companies that still offer up to three years of maternity leave, very few women take it all the way; most return to work within a year out of legitimate concern for their future.

Another problem is the role of the father. Most young Japanese fathers today say they would like to be more involved in helping their wife during pregnancy, but few feel confident enough to take the parental leave they are legally entitled to. Instead of encouraging men to take advantage of such a position, Abe’s plan seems to take a reverse view of the problem, in which a woman stays at home and devotes herself entirely to raising children. Undoubtedly, this picture is caused by Prime Minister Abe’s recent slogan “3 years with a child.”

The best way to inspire women to become a full part of the economically active population is not to promote three-year child care, but to make kindergartens more equipped and accessible, especially for children under two years of age, for whom kindergartens are the least available.

Such measures will enable women to return to work as soon as they wish to do so. The government should focus on creating such conditions as soon as possible.

It’s time for action

The third idea of ​​administration for realizing the potential of women is quite straightforward and clear: at least one woman in a managerial position in every company. If companies make it their goal to appoint a woman to the board of directors, they will be able to better manage female employees in general, and the percentage of female managers will naturally increase.

27 years after the Equal Employment Opportunity Law went into effect, women still hold less than 10% of management positions throughout Japan. Even if companies provide equal opportunity under the law, women’s status at work is still incomparable to that of men. If we are not willing to wait forever to close the issue of gender inequality, we need more than legal guarantees of equal opportunity. To accelerate progress, we need special measures to actively promote gender equality among the economically active population.

I believe that companies need to become more active in order to overcome entrenched discrimination against women. This means working towards the quantitative indicators that should be set by each company according to its situation, such as the ratio of women hired and their percentage in management and director positions. To achieve these goals, companies will naturally need to offer flexible employment arrangements for working parents. In addition, businesses will need to provide both active career support through tailor-made courses, a fair evaluation system, and role models, i. e. women with experience in training female workers.

So, I urge the government to take the next step towards gender equality by requiring every company to have a clear action plan first.

Overhauling Japan’s work ethic

Prime Minister Abe’s plan lacks one more element needed to achieve the goal of increasing women’s employment – a radical change in the attitude towards women on the part of company employees in Japan. In Japan’s corporate culture, line workers tend to work long after the end of the day. They agree to be transferred to remote areas without question. This style of work is possible for a man whose wife is a housewife, but it is hardly practical for a woman with children. Not surprisingly, the majority of new mothers who do return to work are unable to maintain the work practices required of full-time employees and end up on the “mom career path.” By full participation, we mean something very different.

In order to increase the number of working women with children, including increasing their participation in middle and senior management, we must change the expectations of workers in Japan and create a style of work in which overwork is a forced exception, not the norm. Implementing such changes at the individual workplace level will be up to each company’s executives, but the government, for its part, can speed up the process through policy measures such as increasing overtime pay in the bylaws.

As readers can infer from the foregoing, Japanese society has a lot of work to do to achieve the full inclusion of women that Prime Minister Abe has placed at the heart of his economic development strategy. But not all of the problems I have pointed out can be resolved immediately.

In conclusion, I would like to reiterate what I think are two main priorities that the Japanese government needs to focus on first. This is a solution to the problem of shortage of kindergartens and an end to the practice of overtime work. I am sure that with the solution of these two problems, the role of women in the country’s economy will change dramatically.

( Originally written June 10, 2013 )

The crisis of social reproduction and the end of work

Helen Hester is Associate Professor of Media and Communications at the University of West London and Professor at King’s College London. Research interests: technology, social reproduction, the future of work; member of the international feminist group Laboria Cuboniks. Author of Beyond Explicit: Pornography and the Displacement of Sex (SUNY Press, 2014), Xenofeminism (Polity, 2018), After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2018, with Nick Srnicek) , as well as the Russian translation of The Xenofeminist Manifesto, Laboria Cuboniks, 2018)

Nick Srnicek teaches Digital Economics at King’s College London. Author of Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016) and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Labor (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams), and editor of The Speculative Turn (2011, with Levi Bryant and Graham Harman) . Co-authored with Helen Hester is a book on social reproduction and post-work politics, After Work: The Politics of Free Time (Verso, 2018).

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While a lot of attention has been focused on the crisis of work and the potential threats and opportunities posed by growing automation, much less attention has been paid specifically to the labor of caring. The article explores changes in the organization of social reproduction in high income societies and outlines the emerging crisis of care caused by the diminishing role of the state, stagnant wages, and an aging population. The article then sets out a post-labor vision of caring work that serves as a response to this crisis.

In recent years, the “crisis of work” has been surrounded by a lot of discussion. Both journalists and scientists have pointed to disturbing trends in the labor market. It is becoming increasingly clear that high-income countries are facing a decline in “good jobs” and an increase in low-wage, casual, precarious employment. Over the past 40 years, we have seen a sharp increase in economic inequality. Fewer people are employed in medium-paid jobs (which are often outsourced to parts of the world with low labor costs), the gap between the poor and the rich is growing, while the number of the former is constantly increasing, and the number of the latter is decreasing. Since the 2008 crisis, high-income countries have experienced high unemployment rates and a very slow recovery in employment growth. Now a new wave of technology threatens to automate a wide range of existing jobs, pushing even more people into unemployment and underemployment in the future. The result is a growing surplus of population that lacks both the means to survive outside of capitalism and the jobs to survive within it. This fact clearly causes serious concern, as can be seen from the many reports from think tanks, international symposiums and cross-party studies of the future of work.

While it is encouraging that these issues are becoming culturally visible and embedded on the political agenda, at the same time, this analysis of the work landscape tends to downplay the problem. A narrow understanding of work comes to the fore, and other activities (both paid and unpaid) are not taken into account in the discussion about the crisis and its possible solutions. Analysts too often fail to understand the systemic and complex nature of our current problems—the crisis of “work” is also a crisis of “at home” and vice versa. In this chapter, we will attempt to develop a deeper understanding of the current challenges facing working in high-income countries and suggest possible solutions to these challenges. To do this, we will focus on a complex, evolving, cross-border concept – care. Starting with the concept of social reproduction and an analysis of its role in modern work cultures, we will move on to the increasing importance of care for the countries of the Global North in the 21st century. In particular, following the latest trends and possible trajectories of the economy, we argue that care needs to be concretized and separated from the umbrella concept of service work (and service-based economies) and argue that the care economy is about to become dominant in high-income societies. . In conclusion, we will offer several possible solutions to help deal with the growing care crisis.

Three areas of reproductive labor

“Social reproduction” or “reproductive labor” are terms that define the activities of educating future workers, restoring the working capacity of the current workforce and caring for those who cannot work, that is, a set of tasks that together support and reproducing lives both daily and generationally.

Social reproduction in a broad sense consists in the direct care of oneself and others (care for children, the elderly, healthcare), the organization of physical space and the management of resources as part of the process of indirect care for oneself and others (shopping, cleaning, repair) and the reproduction of species (carrying children). Reproduction, in short, is the day-to-day tasks of both one’s own survival and the survival of others, traditionally performed by women for little or no pay. These forms of work are also often excluded from modern discussions about work. Being essentially the support and reproduction of workers, reproductive labor must be considered as the basis of global capitalism. As a theoretical framework, the analysis of social reproduction insists that the historically gendered labor of care is linked to the imperatives of capitalism in complex and intimate ways.

Traditionally, social reproduction has been positioned as a link between the reproductive (at home) and productive (at the workplace) spheres. The reproductive sphere was understood as a set of specific activities undertaken to reproduce the masculinized wage worker: cooking, cleaning, caring for children, etc. The productive sphere, on the contrary, represented the types of activities that produce goods and services: welding, programming, sewing, etc. Still, a distinction based solely on specific activities is not enough, given that the same activities can be assigned to different areas depending on the social context. A mother driving her children to school occupies a different structural position in capitalism compared to a nanny driving other people’s children to school, despite the fact that outwardly their actions are hardly distinguishable.

How then to distinguish between production and social reproduction? How do we understand the structural relationship between capitalism as a process of accumulation and social reproduction as a process of reproduction of wage earners? In answering these questions, we will build on the work of the Endnotes team, distinguishing between fields based on their position in relation to the market and capital accumulation. Perhaps the most significant difference lies in whether the market directly or indirectly controls one or another area. Activities directly controlled by the market (including domestic labor or the activity of reproducing labor in exchange for wages) are subject to capital accumulation imperatives: the compulsion to increase both the efficiency of the work process and the efficiency of converting an input into an end product, united by the premise that the activity must bring income. And everything is subject to the requirement that these types of activities also bring profit. The market has a direct impact on the organization and implementation of activities.

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Goods and services produced by a too slow labor process will be too expensive compared to competitors’ goods and services and will eventually be squeezed out of the market. But over activities that are indirectly regulated by the market, market logic and the imperative of capital accumulation do not prevail to such an extent. However, this area is not completely excluded from the above market logic; due to the time spent on unpaid reproductive labor, there is less and less time for wage work. Therefore, the imperatives of wage work can influence other activities, albeit indirectly. The organization of activities under indirect market control is also determined by such things as patriarchy, gender-based violence and, in the best situations, cooperation.

Essentially the support and reproduction of workers, reproductive labor must be seen as the foundation of global capitalism.

It is important to note, however, that a direct or indirect form of market control cannot by itself explain the dynamics of social reproduction in contemporary work cultures. As noted in the Endnotes, we must also consider the distinction between paid and unpaid work, a distinction that does not fit in with the categorical division between direct and indirect market control.

Public service is a key example: nurses in the British National Health Service (NHS) perform social reproduction tasks, receive wages, but are not directly linked to the logic of capital accumulation. Their work is the direct transformation of value into capital, formed from social service taxes and wages. We are definitely talking about an area outside the direct market logic (which is therefore under indirect market control), but which also relies on wage work (as opposed to the activities we do for our families or with which we keep our own homes in order).

In light of this, Endnotes concludes that there are three areas: direct market control, paid indirect market control, and unpaid indirect market control. We will designate these three spheres of social reproduction as the three Ps: privatized reproductive labor (direct market control), public (paid indirect market control) or personal (unpaid indirect market control). Such categories run the risk of blurring further divisions, such as between the formal and informal labor markets, and hence further clarification of the text of the chapter will be required from time to time.

However, using this terminological framework, we hope that a wider range of reproductive labor will be taken into account and included in the analysis of the future of work. After all, the current crisis will affect more than one area or form of work.

Reproductive labor in crisis

Since the middle of the 20th century, there has been a dramatic shift in the organization of social reproduction in high-income societies. Keynesian capitalism was characterized by the predominance of the heterosexual nuclear family (rather as a desirable ideal than an objective reality) and the family wage as the norm. Under this model, round-the-clock reproductive labor was expected from a financially dependent wife. Most liberal and corporatist welfare states had little support for reproductive labor at the time and, as a result, tended to be heavily dependent on the traditional family structure.

Only social democratic regimes began to engage in social reproduction, using the taxation of social surplus as a way to move some elements of reproductive labor into the public sphere. This included the partial nationalization of non-tradable services such as education and childcare, a move that helped bring more women into the labor force (although it should be noted that many working-class women—particularly non-whites—have long been forced into wage labor outside the home. ). However, even social democratic states were heavily dependent on the devalued domestic labor of women – something that feminists of the period sought to draw attention to.

From 1970 onwards, this approach to social reproduction was significantly transformed under neoliberal capitalism. The inspiring family wage rate has in most cases disappeared from this system and has become available only to a privileged minority. In many high-income societies, real wages have fallen (indeed, as far as wage growth is concerned, the UK is experiencing its worst decade since the Napoleonic Wars). Changes like these will inevitably entail the need to spend more time at work to provide for oneself, support the household, and provide ongoing financial support to addicts.

In addition, we have seen how the state has drastically hit social reproduction by leaving reproductive labor unsupported and at the same time forcing the unpaid workers who normally do it into the labor market. The result was a crisis of care that engulfed both public and private reproductive labor. People turned out to be unable to support dependent loved ones themselves (due to the exhaustion of financial, emotional, mental and / or temporal resources), or to receive adequate support from the state.

The answer has been—for those who can afford it—a shift to market-driven exchange. A growing share of domestic labor is bought directly as goods and services and indirectly through privatized reproductive labor. Some elements of social reproduction are increasingly being delegated to the hyper-exploited class of cleaners, nannies, care workers (women themselves often become links in the global chain of care exploitation).

The result is a dual approach to social reproduction where the rich can afford the services of private individuals and the low-income people increasingly provide these services. In the absence of adequate social security, social reproduction finds itself in a privatized or private sphere, acquiring a deep connection with economic inequality. While the complex job crisis we have described is clearly a mass problem, its effects vary by race, gender, and class. Poor women are (usually) the brunt of these changes.

In short, a significant part of the activity of social reproduction was privatized and then rooted in the personal sphere (which it never completely left) as a result of the rollback of the provision of social forms of reproductive labor. We see a growing need for support due to the fact that more and more people need to work longer hours to survive, and also due to an increase in personal expenses for this support, since social reproduction is regulated more by the market than by the state.

In addition, the supply of reproductive labor is often quite volatile, given the high turnover of staff, the inevitable result of care workers facing disastrous wages, job insecurity, poor conditions, and often their own complex care responsibilities. Caring is a job (whether privatized, public or private) and plays a key role in the complex and systemic issues of the moment. This role becomes clear when we begin to explore the implications of reproductive labor for today’s high-income economies. As we shall see, they will be dominated by care, maintenance and reproduction work, both in terms of employment and in terms of GDP – two limited, conditional, but culturally marked means of assessing social significance and value.

Toward the economics of caring

Generally, when people think about the economy, they imagine a factory—maybe a car factory—and then construct their everyday understanding around that image. Or perhaps after the era of deindustrialization, people are increasingly imagining a service economy and an office worker at a computer. However, services are a broad and disparate category, including a banker who earns millions in investment deals, a teacher who works long hours, a hairdresser who barely makes ends meet, and an immigrant janitor who earns a tiny amount from a few jobs.

Certainly the service sector is a category so clumsy that it loses its descriptive function, but it may be better to analyze the economy as a spectrum of different services rather than as an unbroken chain of sectors. Having done this, we will see that a significant and growing proportion of welfare economies are oriented towards and centered around reproductive labor. Take, for example, healthcare; it is a large and growing sector in the wage labor market.

In the US, the health care share is a whopping 17.8% of GDP, while in Western Europe it is still an astounding 10.4% on average. Also, healthcare spending has outpaced inflation in high-income economies, causing more and more personal funds to be spent on these services. Interestingly, this is also typical for developing economies: between 19Health care spending in China increased 50-fold between 80 and 2005 and is projected to increase another 20-fold by 2050. It is worth noting that healthcare is also a significant source of jobs, both in the public and private sectors. Thus, the UK National Health Service is one of the largest employers in the world; as of 2017, about 1.9 million people worked there (directly and indirectly). It is important to note that these numbers will only grow. Reviewing the US government’s projections for job growth by 2024, one journalist recently noted that “9 of the 12 fastest growing graphs are different job titles for ‘nursing’.” Thus, the healthcare sector is huge both in terms of employment and in terms of its share of GDP.

Child care is also a significant and growing share in the private sector of the economy, due in part to the crisis of social reproduction described in the previous chapter. Although childcare is often carried out in the personal, informal and unpaid (usually by parents or extended family members), there is an increasing share of formal (day care, preschool) and informal (babysitting) paid work. A similar trend is observed in education and social care (here it refers to palliative care, home care, assisted living for the elderly and provision of personal care).

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If we calculate the expenditures for each of these areas – excluding some aspects such as laundry, cleaning, sex work and home repairs, for which there is little or no data – we will see that social reproduction occupies a large part of the developed capitalist economics. As shown in Figure 1, spending by wealthy G7 countries ranges from 15% of Italy’s GDP to nearly 25% of America’s. Simply put, social reproduction is a large and growing sector of the market.

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Perhaps the clearest realization that care is increasingly dominating our economy comes when we consider social reproduction work in health care, education, food processing, housing, and social work in the context of what percentage it is of the total number of paid workers. Over the past 50 years, their role has increased dramatically. A growing percentage of the population earns a living through social reproduction—as Figure 2 shows, it is currently between 23% and 28% of the labor force. On the contrary, at 1960th in America, 30% of the labor force was employed in the manufacturing sector.

If we once spoke of large-scale industries, today we must speak in terms of economies centralized around the reproduction of their workers. In addition, as evidenced by data on expanding sectors of the American labor market in the period 2014-2024, these trends will continue. Data analysis shows that the vast majority of these growing sectors (including the top four) are jobs related to paid social reproduction. You can find similar data for the UK, where we estimate that 47% of total job growth will take place in social reproduction sectors. This data suggests that we are seeing a rise in the care economy.

Resolving the crisis

What to do in this case? If social reproduction is increasingly in crisis—demand for services rises as unpaid workers enter the labor market, paid workers face extremely low wages and appalling working conditions, and governments cut public provision—then how, without aggravating existing hierarchies of class, race and gender can this reproduction be supported? One of the theorists who has paid much attention to this issue is Nancy Fraser, who proposes three ideal type models to solve these problems. In each of the models, care is organized differently and has a different impact on ideas of gender justice and equality.

Fraser calls the first model the “universal breadwinner model” , and perhaps the closest approach to the implementation of this model came in European countries with a high level of female participation in the labor market (although ideologically the closest is in the United States). With this approach, the total family wage of the post-war era is replaced by the fact that each individual supports itself with the help of wage labor. However, this approach requires proper government support, as families need appropriate social conditions to enable them to enter the labor market without harming children and other dependents. Such conditions may include, for example, full parental leave, state-subsidized childcare, and/or tax credits that allow families to offset expensive private childcare. The absence of such conditions puts severe restrictions on equal participation in paid work (as, for example, in the United States since 2000), and the absence of paid parental leave leads to the stagnation of women’s participation in the labor force.

This model also requires care workers to be paid in a way that guarantees a decent standard of living. As is usually the case, all too often care workers are left in poverty and face long hours in a desperate effort to make ends meet. In general, the “universal breadwinner model” can reduce poverty, but only by making everyone work longer and idealizing the “male” world of wage labor as the only respectable option.

The second approach is the “equal care model” in which the current unpaid informal work done mainly by women is, on the contrary, highly valued and properly supported. This model does not involve sending these workers to the formal labor market, but recognizing the value of both activities and facilitating any transitions between the privatized and personal spheres. For this to be possible, it is necessary to provide state support for individual work on social reproduction. It may include, for example, benefits for care workers, which will not only legitimize this type of activity, but also help pay for the care of children and the sick. Support could also include the emergence of both part-time jobs and flexible work arrangements for caregivers, as well as legal provisions against discrimination based on the possibility of pregnancy.

As Fraser points out, while the first model aims to push social reproduction entirely into the market-mediated realm, this model attempts to push it into the state-supported private realm. However, again, this model runs the risk of restricting women to the home and does not include measures to reduce the amount of work they do.

The last approach that Fraser discusses is the “universal guardian model” . Instead of making women more like men (by attracting them to the labor market) or leaving women and men in segregated areas (supporting only domestic work), this approach invites men to take on more work in the traditional female field. As men take over some of the work of social reproduction done at home, the burden of labor will be more evenly distributed and gender hierarchies in the economy will be loosened.

In such a world, what is considered a characteristic rhythm of women’s lives – the transition between paid and unpaid work – will become the norm that determines social policy. States will seek to introduce measures that allow easy movement between the two states indicated above, for example, the elimination of fines in the workplace for part-time jobs and flexible hours, the introduction of state or community child care systems in which every member of the community could participate .

The advantage of this model is a significant reduction in the gender nature of the current division of labor and a parallel reduction in part of the overall workload. But is this enough?

We believe that a more appropriate approach, which is consistent with the growing changes in automation and the growing demand for labor care, would be what we call the post-labor model . This approach explicitly aims to reduce work and our dependence on wage labor (it is worth recalling that in ancient times, work as we know it today was seen as “wage slavery” – because of its ability to make a person dependent on the employer for their own survival) . Most post-labor models of the future are presented to us as a world in which robots take over factories, and sometimes even offices. But the world of care work, oddly enough, falls out of these imaginary utopias. However, the post-labor response to the crisis of care argues that post-labor principles can be applied to both paid and unpaid work. This approach has at least three key goals.

First, we must not dismiss the potential of automation. Opening up to automate some types of reproductive labor is a refusal to naturalize that labor—in other words, dismissing it as if it were not work at all but an expression of a (gendered) self or a personal pastime. And although the robotization of social reproduction should not be thoughtlessly praised, the critical technopolitics of the home and other spaces of social reproduction can provide a real improvement in the quality of such labor.

Are there problems that technology could solve without negatively impacting these spaces? Home technology has not had much practical success; While few of us would be willing to give up our washing machines, it is clear that most of the gadgets that find their way into our homes are completely unnecessary and a by-product of the commodification of our lifestyle – brilliant, but often highly specialized and not particularly easy machines (spiral graters , drinks freezers, etc. e).

The tech home concept needs to be actively rethought and the tech design culture actively challenged

However, we must remember that we have yet to get the home appliance we truly deserve. As Judy Weitzman notes, most home gadgets came to us retrospectively: they were originally conceived for military or industrial use – for example, a microwave oven and a washing machine, a vacuum cleaner and a refrigerator. These technologies have been transferred to our private homes from the public sphere. She writes: “Given that many home technologies come from a variety of backgrounds and are not originally designed to save time in the household, it is not surprising that their impact on domestic work has been mixed.”

In summary, using the “home” metaphor, we should not splash water with the baby: the concept of the tech home should be actively rethought and the culture of tech design actively challenged. Home automation can be seen as an ally in the search for temporary autonomy – although this is obviously not possible without a much broader program of progressive political change. We also need to think about what technologies we want to include in the home automation area. How about assistive technology? Will we think differently about caregiver robots than assistive walking and weight lifting devices? Where do these different kinds of feelings come from, and how many of them can arise from ignorance of the moral value of the labor of caring – a moral value that, by the way, has been associated from the very beginning with ideas about the gendered / biased private sphere? Do we consider a mobile phone, a home computer, a bicycle, or a birth control pill as a household appliance?

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What we’re trying to get across here is that instead of ignoring home automation in all its forms, we should promote clearer criteria for it—those that take into account the nuances of specific technologies, issues of accessibility, ownership, and design, and how ideas genders and jobs are embedded in the affects we associate with technology.

The second goal is that we must lower our living standards. Some ideas associated with post-labor society suggest that reproductive labor is a source of inexhaustible personal satisfaction when workers are not interested in lowering their own expectations. Indeed, it is interesting to note how often high (i.e., extremely labor-intensive) domestic standards are mentioned in so-called post-work theories.

The German Krisis Group says the labor involved in “cooking delicious food” will never be eradicated; leftist anti-labor theorist André Gortz talks about “taking care of the house and decorating it, preparing good food, entertaining guests”, etc. While cooking, providing hospitality, etc. can be a source of great pleasure for many (if it happens on its own initiative), placing these things at the center of an imagined future social order allows the concept of work to present itself to us in a hitherto unknown form.

For those of us who want to manage our time in other ways than cooking, cleaning and caring, it would be better to come down from heaven to earth and think less about the heights of domestic splendor that we all aspire to and more about how change and make available social welfare standards such as cleanliness.

The work of feminists such as Ellen Lupton, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, and Judy Weitzman taught us that one of the reasons time spent on housework did not decrease after the spread of household appliances in the twentieth century was that that as labor-saving devices became more common, labor standards shot up. Cleaning was supposed to be more thorough and more frequent; that educational activities that needed to be done with children would be more frequent and focused on giving them a competitive advantage; cooking is more complex and labor-intensive; lawns will be flawless, without weeds and with perfectly even stripes.

Again, while this activity should not be excluded from those who enjoy it, repressive social expectations should not be allowed to affect reproductive labor. We must continue to build activism around gender and work under temporary sovereignty—the ability to manage our time as we please.

Finally, we must rethink the conditions of life. How to structure “family life” differently? How can this affect changes in the structure of wage work, as well as contribute to the spread of post-labor ideas to the seemingly inviolable space of the home?

Moving away from one dwelling per family—perhaps for groups of 10-12 instead of 1-4—could mean a more sustainable and energy-efficient lifestyle, as well as reduced labor costs for basic maintenance. Shared kitchens, laundries, and workshops can reduce labor. The fact that the resources of a shared household are used by more people than in a typical home may mean that there are opportunities for greater investment in tools and technologies, including those needed to keep clean.

Reimagining housing space can go beyond simple relief; it can also be positive developments, such as high-tech public libraries, studios, media packages, laboratories, vegetable gardens, and mutual medical institutions. What would a house organized differently be like?

The current household (usually in the form of the nuclear family – in popular culture, if not in reality) arose largely from changes in working relationships. Expectations about what a “family” is really play a decisive role in determining factors such as wages, working hours and public services. The official poverty line in the United States was set on the basis that every household must have a housewife who acts as a smart home manager, makes careful purchases, cooks skillfully and does it at home. The reality is that many households have never had access to that fantastic resource of social reproduction, the full-time economist, because the cost of living is actually much higher.

We must rethink the conditions of life. How to structure “family life” differently?

Leaving aside the essentialist discourses about “the private sphere” and “family”, it becomes painfully obvious how unsatisfactory the home is as a place of work and how many domestic workers would benefit from resistance or agitation against this type of work. Viewing the home from this angle also encourages us to recognize where and how spatial patterns and work methods can contribute to the visibility and appreciation of reproductive labor and how rarely attempts are made to solve the problem of hard domestic work. The presentation of various forms of social relations based on the domestic sphere is also very encouraging. those of us who may be suffering from strained, unhappy, or even abusive relationships in our blood families. This problem is much more typical for queer people. If we imagine households outside the family category, we must imagine the formation of independent groups living together – a mixture of relatives, friends, comrades, lovers. These new kinds of families may be based on intimacy, affection, and a shared world view, rather than something as fragile as mere genetic coincidence.

And what is the result? If we understand that something can and should be done to mitigate the effects of current structures of oppression, does it make sense to link our struggle against gender oppression (including unequal distribution of free time and heavy domestic work) with the struggle against work?

Indeed, in many ways, a queer struggle is required – a struggle against the myth of essential “female” or “male” traits and the single binary gender system that shapes the division of labor; a struggle that is based on the understanding that efforts to redistribute work—to create a more egalitarian division of labor and opportunity—will inevitably be limited until our ideas about gender are discarded.