User:GreenPlaid692/sandbox

The Non-monetary economy represents work such as household labor, care giving and civic activity that does not have a monetary value but remains a vitally important part of the economy. With respect to the current economic situation labor that results in monetary compensation becomes more highly valued than unpaid labor. Yet nearly half of American productive work goes on outside of the market economy and is not represented in production measures such as the GDP (Gross Domestic Product).

The non-monetary economy seeks to reward and value work that benefits society (whether through producing services, products, or making investments) that the monetary economy does not recognize. An economic as well as a social imperative drives the work done in this economy. This method of valuing work would challenge ways in which unemployment and the labor force are all currently measured and generally restructure the way in which labor and work are constructed in America.

The non-monetary economy also works to make the labor market more inclusive by valuing previously ignored forms of work. Some acknowledge the non-monetary economy as having a moral or socially conscious philosophy that attempts to end social exclusion by including poor and unemployed individuals economic opportunities and access to services and goods. Such community based and grassroots movements encourage the community to be more participatory, thus providing a more democratic economic structures.

Much of non-monetary work is categorized as either civic work or housework. These two types of work are critical to the operation of daily life and are largely taken for granted and undervalued. Both of these categories encompass many different types of work and are discussed below.

It is important to point the microscope on these two areas because only certain people are very civically engaged and very frequently a certain group of people tend to do housework. Non-monetary economic systems hope to make community members more active, thus more democratic with more balanced representation, and to value housework that is commonly done by women and less valued.

Civic Economy
Father of the time bank, Edgar S. Cahn identifies two concepts as integral to the development of successful community systems: collective efficacy and specialization.

Collective efficacy: The effectiveness of informal mechanisms by which residents themselves achieve public order. More specifically, this is the shared vision or fusion of shared willingness of residents to intervene and create social trust (the sense of engagement and ownership of public spaces). An example may be the willingness of residents to intervene in the lives of other residents to counter crime, increase voting, or encourage residents to recycle.

Specialization (division of labor in the market economy) versus Do-it-yourself (in the core economy): The do-it-yourself model builds self-esteem and voluntary interdependence. This model purports to reduce and/or eliminate the involuntary dependence that comes with the market economies strict division of labor.

Both collective efficacy and specialization are cornerstones to two very successful forms of civic based, non-monetary economies: time banks and local exchange trading systems (LETS). These work systems provide alternative forms of currency that are gained through time spent in the community through community gardening, recycling, repairing leaky faucets, babysitting, and other forms of work. These units of time can be used to ask other members of work systems to do jobs they need or may act as a forum in which special jobs or needs can be communicated and traded. These systems operate to a large degree outside of the monetary economy but do not negate the importance of a monetary economy or ask to a return to bartering systems.

Household Economy
In 1998 non-profit organization Redefining Progress estimated that housework amounted to $1.911 trillion dollars, roughly a fourth of the U.S. GDP that year. As of 2010, the Bureau of Economic Analysis found that household work would increase GDP by 26%. More than a decade later, household work continues to provide a key source of foundational support to the domestic economy. Such household work includes includes cleaning, cooking, care giving, and educating children among others.

The household economy may incite the idea of an intimate group of individuals that benefit from the work done in the home, a closed household economy. One can argue in numerous ways that the household economy where goods can be traded and services can be shared or traded. This type of economy exists today and benefits the community at large.

In extreme cases of survival the open nature of the household economy is most evident. Sharing of foods, clothes items, toiletries, and basic necessities were often shared or exchanged amongst war-torn, impoverished families in East Europe post-communism. Cooking, cleaning, clothes-making, and forms of work may seem to be intuitively thought of as work. Not all work done within the home is seen as work. When labor is enjoyable such as watching movie with one’s children, exercising, or entertaining the activities may not readily be seen as work. Yet an estimated 380 million hours are spent on these types of unpaid activities (work) and 272 million hours per week are spent doing paid work as found in 1992 from a sample of research participants in Australia (these hours are the aggregate hours of all Australians).

A large portion of these hours can be attributed to nurturing. Nurturing can take two forms in terms of raising children and cursing the sick, elderly, and infirm both kinds of which both types of work are still moderately gendered types of work. Children represent not only a product of a household but an asset to the community as a whole. In the home, kids may provide help in the form of chores and so are an asset to other members of the household. However, a larger argument can be made that children are a public good. Children are an investment in which time, energy, and money are spent on children so that they can become stable adults who contribute to reducing national debt and contributing to Social Security, thus a public good. Children not only act as economic investments but also have great utility to society as plumbers, mathematicians, sociologists, botanists, postal workers, and whatever profession or products they produce in the future.

The products and services produced within a home are open to the non-market economy at large. Society as a whole benefits from this unpaid work whether in a tangible manner or a more abstract, macro scale. The other form of nurturing done within the home, caregiving, also serves as a benefit to society as a whole.

Care Giving
Care giving refers to providing assistance for those who are elderly, disabled, suffer terminal illness, chronic illness, or are generally frail or in need of assistance. Someone who cares for someone in any of these positions is a caregiver. This kind of assistance is largely unpaid and conducted by friends and/or family of the patient.

Care giving often exceeds the nursing tasks that come with caring for someone who is ill or recovering from surgery. Often, caregivers also must clean the occupancy of the patient, provide meals, and speak with medical providers, doctors, among other responsibilities. To put the extent of work performed in the non-monetary economy into context, nearly 80% of labor that keeps seniors out of nursing homes is unpaid labor by families.

In 1997, estimates predicted that the value of work produced by caregivers amounted to $196 billion. Current estimates put the value of work at $375 billion for 2007. At the time, only $32 billion spent on formal health care and $83 billion spent on nursing home care by the federal government. According to these statistics, only half as much money is spent on nursing and home health care as is necessary. These numbers do not take into account the financial burden as well as emotion work that is an inescapable part of this work.

The same research estimated that in 1997, caregivers would have received $8.18 as the hourly wage by averaging the national minimum wage and the median was for Home Health Aides. As of May 2013, the hourly wage can be estimated at $9.14 when averaging the minimum wage in Florida and the median wage for Home Health Aides. . Caregiving requires a large dedication, as much as 22 to 70 hours a week. Most incredible is the number of people performing this work, an estimated 25.8 million people as of 1997.

It is also important to note that caregiving has a disproportionate affect on women and white households. The cost of caregiving is exorbitant, nearly 5 times what Medicaid would have spent on long term care, meaning only wealthy families can afford to do this type of in-home care. The intersection of class and race in this phenomenon is an important place to explore as less advantaged families will have to rely on government care, potentially at the risk of having less quality care. These statistics also highlight a differential effect on women, showing that women disproportionately do caregiving work.

Understanding the non-monetary economy is important for a number of reasons. Valuing all work changes perceptions of valuable work. Acknowledging a non-monetary economy may potentially change the ways in which the unemployed, poor, women, and other stigmatized persons’ work is valued. It can allow citizens to see their community as a more cohesive, intertwined system that deserves their time and energy. Exploring this economy also exposes numerous areas of help that do not have enough support from the public and private sectors. Education and caregiving in particular highlight were assistance is needed and often not provided.