Decent Societies Must Recognize the Value of Care Work

In an interview with C.J. Polychroniou, PERI’s Nancy Folbre discusses her new book “Making Care Work,” which makes an argument for structural reforms in the care economy and highlights strategies for organizing care workers. Folbre notes that care work is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the US economy, while “adults spend, on average, about as much time in unpaid work as they do on paid work,”

She argues that a “crass, self-serving elite wants us to define economic success by the growth of stock market indices and cryptocurrency. They couldn’t care less about our health or the long-run sustainability of our national prosperity.”