Devaluation and unequal exchange

As the ‘poverty of children’ argument underlines, families that value their children for their labour power are the most destitute, while those that make no economic demands on their children fare vastly better. As argued in Section 2, the major difference lies in the redistributive state policies that compensate families for forgoing the work contribution of nurtured children.

Both in the south and the north, employers bear the costs of reproduction by paying adult workers family wages that allow them to maintain their children in school and keep them outside the labour market. But, as dis-cussed, this situation is far from common and is not the whole story. If we accept that nurturing children are creators of wealth and that to contribute to intergenerational exchange they must consent to this wealth being partly siphoned off through negative reciprocity, we must ask the question to what extent nurturing children subsidize nurtured childhood. Here I want to suggest that nurtured and nurturing childhood may be seen as opposite poles of a global sociological field of childhood in which the positive pole hood as producer of wealth) transmits wealth to the negative one (child-hood as a repository of wealth). I put forward the hypothesis that this wealth comes in the form of subsidies from the south to nurtured childhood in urban middle-class areas both in the north and in the south itself.

Some of these subsidies are evident, as in the case of the sport shoes made by women and children in South and Southeast Asia that are sold at very affordable prices to middle-class child consumers. The main part of the pro-duction of shoes sold under brands owned by multinational corporations is outsourced to factories in the south. The children and women who make the shoes can barely subsist on the wages they receive: in Lahore, for instance, workers earn about 50 per cent of the minimum wage and one-seventh of the estimated living wage for a single person (Clean Clothes Cam-paign, 2004, p. 2). Sub-subsistence wages can of course, as I have contended above, only be paid because workers have other sources of income on which to subsist. These sources are generally in kind, in the form of goods and ser-vices obtained from household members who do not engage in paid work.

In this sense, unpaid work can be considered a form of subsidy that accrues unevenly to local entrepreneurs and consumers and multinational corpora-tions and consumers in the north.

Crucially, this subsidy is instrumental in reducing the cost of labour below the subsistence minimum because it is not accounted for. When children 178 Studies in Modern Childhood

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perform unpaid work, treating it as enjoyment, socialization or training is evidently an expedient way of justifying that it is not attributed a market value. That this is pure fiction may become clear when one considers the price differential between the local production cost of a shoe and its final price. The local production cost of a US$100 sports shoe of an unnamed brand made in Lahore, is only US$5. The rest accrues mainly to the company in the form of profits (15.5 per cent) and brand name (33 per cent) and to the store where the shoe is sold (50 per cent) (Clean Clothes Campaign, 2004, p. 2).

But there are also more circuitous if not entirely invisible ways of wealth transmission that escape international attention for child labour. The example of the ‘nanny chain’ is significant. In rich countries such as the USA and Canada immigration policies simultaneously admit lone women workers, thus ensuring a continuous supply of cheap domestic labour including nannies and childminders from the south, and prevent their families from joining them (Katz, 2001, p. 713; Hochschild, 2000; Rose, 1993). For Katz, the difference between the cost of a nanny and the market income of a working mother should be considered a subsidy of employers and wealthier women by women of the south, whose children are left behind with relatives (Katz, 2001, p. 713).

But it would be too limited to think of the subsidy as being generated by the undeniably lowly remunerated immigrant women’s work alone. In reality, every woman leaves a void behind which other caretakers have to fill. This generates a chain of increasingly low-valued care work. Selling her own care work allows the migrant nanny to earn cash which she will remit to the family at home to be used (in part) to hire a local nanny to look after her own children. The locally-hired nanny, in her turn, cannot buy care with her earnings and must leave her small children with elders and older sib-lings. When the elders of the local nanny are turned into free childminders, the intergenerational debt is cancelled: these elders not only no longer receive care but must provide care in exchange for food. The situation is mitigated by the presence of older children, who may provide care for younger siblings and support for the elderly. As their mother is likely to receive only a fraction of what the migrant nanny receives, their work con-tribution at home, as well as that of the elderly, goes largely unrecognized.

In this way the devaluation of care work is passed down to the lower end of the chain. In Hochschild’s words:

If it is true that attention, solicitude, and love itself can be ‘displaced’

from one child (let’s say Vicky Diaz’s son Alfredo, back in the Philippines) onto another child (let’s say Tommy, the son of her employers in Beverly Hills), then the important observation to make here is that this dis-placement is often upward in wealth and power. This, in turn, raises the question of the equitable distribution of care. It makes us wonder, is there The Wealth of Children 179 1403_939330_11_cha10.qxd 6/30/2005 8:30 AM Page 179

– in the realm of love – an analogue to what Marx calls ‘surplus value,’

something skimmed off from the poor for the benefit of the rich?

(Hochschild, 2000, p. 33) The above examples suggest that intergenerational wealth resulting from children’s unpaid work plays an under-researched role in the complex web of transfers from the global south towards the north. Why experts of global development institutions would belittle, ignore, naturalize or apologize for children’s unpaid work – by far the most common type of activity that chil-dren undertake – while at the same time underscoring, as in the ‘poverty of children’ argument, its vital role in generating economic growth, is partic-ularly intriguing. In view of my argument here, an explanation could be that the devaluation of nurturing children’s contribution in the realization of intergenerational wealth is a crucial element of negative reciprocity not only locally but also globally. Generating a powerful political and popular rhetoric to stir up a global simulacrum of child uselessness while at the same time reserving the public and private means to effectuate the conditions of a nurtured childhood to a minority, seems a seminal ingredient of what is understood under economic growth. In other words, the canon of children’s uselessness, apparently a protective measure against the abuse of little chil-dren in a globalizing world, may well turn out to be a wolf in sheep’s cloth-ing, cloaking the parasitic drainage of intergenerational flows of wealth on a global scale.

To conclude, I suggest that overcoming the political and theoretical dead-lock of the child labour debate will critically depend on recognizing chil-dren as agents in the creation and transmission of intergenerational wealth.

The analysis must take issue against the belief that nurturing children’s unpaid work would be safe and even desirable and acknowledge that it can be highly exploitative when performed in the context of unequal power rela-tionships. Children do what they do because they are active reproducers of social relationships and cannot partake in intergenerational reciprocity without also partaking in negative reciprocity which reproduces exploita-tive power relationships. The conclusion is however not that working children are caught in a vicious circle of self-exploitation, which they them-selves reproduce in order to earn a place in the intergenerational order and guarantee their livelihood.³Children are not simply reproducers of a culture of domination to which they submit without questioning in order to find their place in society. Recognizing children’s agency means understanding that to get what they need, children must be cunning and be able to manipulate even a highly oppressive situation to their own advantage and that this may involve trying to improve their situation by looking for opportunities outside the family or neighbourhood (see also Nieuwenhuys, 2003). Of course these children are particularly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation, but at the same time they are also strong, for they often show 180 Studies in Modern Childhood

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remarkable resilience and resourcefulness in facing unknown situations. So, it is not a matter of ‘either . . . or’, and Bourdieu’s notion of practical reason could be helpful to grasp the dynamics by which children’s practical expe-riences – however painful – add to their body of knowledge for everyday decision-making. Rather than seeing in them either broken lives or virtuous sons and daughters, working children who have experienced prostitution, drug trafficking, war and violence should be acknowledged for having pre-cious real-life knowledge that will help them face whatever new difficulties come their way later in life.

Notes

1. For useful comments and suggestions I am grateful to Michel Bonnet, Erica Burman, Yvan Droz, Mohini Gulrajani, Karl Hanson, Allison James, Yuko Kitada, Marie-France Lange, Michael Lavalette, Deborah Levison, Claude Meillassoux, Per Miljeteg, Graciela Paillet, Jens Qvortrup, Pamela Reynolds, Gilbert Rist, Rosanne Rutten and Bernard Schlemmer. I also benefited from seminar presentations at the National Labour Institute, New Delhi; Institute of Social Studies, The Hague; Insti-tut de Récherche sur le Développement, Paris; Advanced Study Center, Interna-tional Institute, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; Gustav Stresemann Institute Bonn; Norwegian Centre for Child Research, NTNU, Trondheim; TU Berlin; Uni-versity Institute Kurt Bösch, Sion; DRC, UniUni-versity of Sussex; Dept of Anthropol-ogy, Johns Hopkins University at Baltimore; School of Social and Political Studies, University of Edinburgh. A French translation of parts of an earlier version of this paper has been published in Bonnet et al. (forthcoming).

2. Wealth includes the resources, assets, knowledge and relationships that guarantee a life experienced as fulfilled in a given social and historical context. The term includes the products of non-monetized subsistence and the services resulting from unpaid care work and seeks to avoid reductionist approaches that see well-being as merely resulting from the consumption of tangible objects or of goods and services bought from the market.

3. I am grateful to Yuko Kitada, Australian National University, for the inspiring dis-cussions that helped me formulate these final thoughts.

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