Unpaid housework and super-exploitation of labor: a suggested model and empirical evidence from Mexico and Colombia

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to suggest a mathematical model of unpaid housework and empirically test its main predictions using data from Mexico (2014) and Colombia (2017) time-use surveys. The model, based upon the Marxist-feminist approach, suggests that the magnitude of unpaid housework is determined by the super-exploitation of labor, i.e. the gap between wages and the value of labor-power. The outcome is an equation that relates positively the magnitude of unpaid housework with the super-exploitation of labor. The parametric and nonparametric regression estimates applied in both countries show preliminary empirical support for the theoretical model. The theoretical and empirical findings have several implications for Marxist-feminist literature as well as for empirical research on unpaid housework.

KEYWORDS:

• Unpaid housework
• super-exploitation of labor
• Colombia
• Mexico

JEL Codes:

• D13
• J31
• B51
• E11

Acknowledgements

I have benefitted from comments from two anonymous referees of this journal. I gratefully acknowledge, without implicating in any way for the content of this paper, comments and suggestions provided by Sergio Cámara Izquierdo, and Owen Eli Ceballos in the Autonomous Metropolitan University (México) as well as Samuel Jaramillo Gonzalez in the University of the Andes (Colombia).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in Mendeley Data at https://doi.org/10.17632/dym3nfbpnm.3

Notes

1 Intuitively, a and b can also be considered as kinds or groups of means of subsistence rather than only two means of subsistence.

2 In turn, this implies a high degree of the commodification of domestic and care services that tend to be the general case in capitalist economies.

3 This brief theoretical discussion on housework distribution only seeks to clarify the theoretical scope of our model (centered in the magnitude of unpaid housework) and, therefore, it is not followed up in the empirical section. 

4 We identify as outliers 261 households for Mexico (3.3% of the sample) and 413 households for Colombia (2.8% of the sample).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carlos Alberto Duque Garcia

Carlos Alberto Duque Garcia Ph.D. Student in Economic Sciences at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM) in Mexico City. Master in Economics from National University of Colombia (Bogotá).