Holding the baby (1953)

From the June 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

The capitalist class own the means and instruments for producing society’s needs. The working class must sell their ability to work to the capitalist class for wages which are often not sufficient to keep them according to the conventional standard of living. Many working-class women—unmarried mothers, widowed and deserted mothers, mothers whose husbands are disabled or whose husbands haven’t a large enough wage to support the family, are forced to take a job to augment their income and send their children to day nurseries.

Remarking on such cases, the “Economist” (April 4th, 1953), wrote :—

"The cost per head of keeping a child in a day nursery varies from thirty-five shillings a week to five pounds, according to staffing ratios and amenities. The average wage of adult working women is just under four pounds ten shillings a week. As a matter of plain arithmetic, this means that full cost of the productive services of a working woman who sends her children to a day nursery may easily be both her actual wage, paid by the employer, and an equal amount paid through the local authority that looks after her children. Where several children must be cared for, the full cost may be several times the value of the product—a wildly uneconomical transaction. Where nursery costs are highest it would pay, hands down, to give the mother of two or more children, her full market wage, plus a substantial bonus, simply to mind her babies at home. That normally gratuitous job turns out, when actually priced on the market, to be more valuable than most other occupations open to those doing it."

"This hard headed arithmetical conclusion does not translate easily into practical policy. Not even the wildest speculations of welfare Utopians have included a universal payment to mothers of the market value of their work as child-minders. There might be a case for making such payments, as an alternative to the provision of day nurseries, only to those women who would suffer special hardships if they could not go out to work—to widowed or deserted or unmarried mothers, or to wives of disabled husbands. But an economic payment to such people would make them better off than many normal wives dependent on a breadwinner’s earnings.

"The problem must in fact continue to be fudged rather than solved."

No doubt this appears a very ridiculous situation to the “Economist,” the capitalist class and those who think like them—in terms of exchange value and profit and loss. But the capitalist class are not likely to endorse the obvious solution. Free the working class from the need to sell their labour power to live—a job that can only be done by the workers themselves—by making the means and instrument of production the common property of all.

J.T.