Family Wage
가족 임금
The wage norm that one man’s pay should be enough to support a wife and children. Spread as a demand of male trade unionists in nineteenth-century Britain, it became the norm for stable working-class families around 1900 and a basis of wage-setting, as in Australia’s Harvester judgment of 1907. Heidi Hartmann read it as the resolution of a conflict between patriarchal and capitalist interests over women’s labour and as the device that cemented the partnership of patriarchy and capital; later critics charged it with institutionalising women’s economic dependence.
In depth
A family wage is a wage sufficient to raise a family, as distinct from a living wage, sufficient for a single individual. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain the wage form shifted from joint to individual payment, and the subsistence norm moved from a family group’s income to the ideal of an adult male-breadwinner wage: the husband’s pay ought to support his family without his wife and young children working for pay. Before this, low-income families received a subsistence wage based on individual output, and every member was expected to contribute.
The demand was carried by male trade unionists. According to Hartmann, male workers resisted the wholesale entry of women and children into the labour force and sought to exclude them from unions and jobs; in 1846 the Ten-Hours’ Advocate wrote that the condition of female factory workers could not improve unless their hours were materially reduced, and that married women would be better occupied in domestic duties at home. Men sought to keep high-wage jobs for themselves and argued for wages sufficient for their labour alone to support their families, and this “family wage” system became the norm for stable working-class families at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The Catholic Church, too, recognised in Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (1891) that wages should be sufficient to support a family.
The family wage entered state wage-setting. In the Harvester judgment of 1907 in Australia’s Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, Justice H. B. Higgins held that a “fair and reasonable” wage for an unskilled male worker must let “a human being in a civilised community” support a wife and three children in “frugal comfort”. A woman’s minimum wage, by contrast, was set to cover her own food, shelter and clothing but not a family, and until the Second World War the female basic wage was roughly 54 per cent of the male. In Mandatory Palestine the Histadrut adopted a family wage with a supplement by family size in 1923; it remained policy for a decade, though implementation was limited.
In “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” (1979) Hartmann argued that instead of fighting for equal wages for men and women, male workers sought the family wage because they wanted to retain their wives’ services at home. In the absence of patriarchy a unified working class might have confronted capitalism, but patriarchal relations divided it, allowing men to be bought off at the expense of women. Family wages, she wrote, may be understood as a resolution of the conflict over women’s labour power between patriarchal and capitalist interests. Enforcing women’s lower pay through job segregation, the family wage ensured women’s economic dependence on men and left them doing housework and childcare that benefit men directly, securing the material base of male domination in two ways. Hartmann held that the resolution also suited capitalists who wanted healthier workers and better-educated children, that the family wage cemented the partnership between patriarchy and capital, and that it remained the cornerstone of the sexual division of labour even after women’s labour-force participation rose.
The family wage and the breadwinner model drew criticism from several sides. The Harvester judgment’s assumption of a male breadwinner and a female domestic carer has been criticised as a deliberate policy of discouraging women from paid work, resting on a flawed notion of the normative worker as someone without care responsibilities. Breadwinner regimes have been said to make women with young children dependent within marriage, with broken careers, lower lifetime earnings, and greater exposure to poverty and domestic violence if the relationship ends. Within the living-wage movement, defining the living wage as a family wage was criticised for emphasising men as breadwinners. In The Disinherited Family (1924) the Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone argued that mothers needed an independent income to end their and their children’s dependency on a male wage, and won Family Allowance; her campaign influenced the later Wages for Housework movement. Nancy Fraser asked in 1994 what women want in social welfare “after the family wage”.