Uncompensated care work is not a service that happens to be performed for free, but the most fundamental of economic utilities. Unpaid care workers provide the infrastructure that lets formal labor exist. Given that women perform most of this work, as Iceland’s women tried to demonstrate in the fall of 1975, there is no global economy without them, any more than there would be a global economy without men. As feminists have long argued, citing Marx and Engels, there is no “productive labor” without “reproductive labor.”
