Wages for housework

The International Wages for Housework Campaign was a global social movement founded in 1972 in Padua, Italy. The Campaign was formed to raise awareness of how housework and childcare are the base of all industrial work and to stake the claim that these unavoidable tasks should be compensated as paid wage labor. The demands for the Wages for Housework formally called for economic compensation for domestic work but also used these demands to call attention to the affective labors of women, the reliance of capitalist economies on exploitative labor practices against women, and leisure inequality.

The International Wages for Housework Campaign grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy, founded by Selma James, Brigitte Galtier, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and Silvia Federici. The group published a autonomist Marxism autonomist journal, Matériaux pour l’intervention. Dalla Costa, one of the members of the group in Padua came from the intellectual movement operaismo, which developed around factory strikes in Northern Italy in the 1970s. The Wages for Housework Campaign took the idea from operaismo of the wage as central to the struggle for worker control and rights of industry. Operaismo encouraged workers to act in their direct interests when it comes to demanding compensation for their labor and exploitation in the factory. The Wages for Housework campaign applied that to the social factory, a conception of society whereby "the whole of society lives as a function of the factory and the factory extends its exclusive domination to the whole of society".

The campaign included aspects of student protest, feminism, civil rights, community workshops, and direct action protest. Several publications grew out of its ideas, which expanded on the claims of the original group and of more general topics in labor and exploitation. In Italy, Quaderni rossi, published by Raniero Panzieri, and Mario Tronti, dealt with a variety of topics relating to the class struggle.

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