Nyamagaga R. Gondwe, The Tax-Invisible Labor Problem: Care Work, Kinship, and Income Security Programs in the Internal Revenue Code, 102 B.U. L. REV. 2389 (2022).
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, American financial assistance programs have increasingly shifted to require evidence of labor market participation as a criteria for eligibility. This shift signals a change from previous welfare programs that were distributed principally based on unmet material need.
The shift from need-based to income-tested income security programs has been lauded for increasing labor force participation. But in this shift, income security programs have failed to account for the labor of non-market care workers. These care workers, whose household production is a fundamental component of market life, experience both economic insolvency and tax-invisibility in the face of assistance systems that do not recognize care work as eligible labor. Because care work disproportionately falls to women in American homes, income-tested financial assistance programs place an outsized strain women's economic lives.
In this Article, I argue that income security programs that fail to recognize non-market care labor undermine women's economic autonomy by constraining women's personal labor choices. In addition, by locating income security programs in the income tax system, policymakers increase the gendered impact of racial capitalism.
I propose that if financial assistance programs continue to require evidence of labor, then those programs should account for non-market labor as having equal status with market-based labor. Policymakers can use time-use surveys that record women's time spent on household production as a way to recognize household production labor in administering tax-based income security programs.
