Census surveys for instance often ask in a household how many people work. This is an offensive question since it implies that anyone not earning pay is therefore not useful to society and is lazy.  Retired people often feel uncomfortable being slotted into the category of ‘not working’ when in fact they may be very busy doing volunteer service, carpentry, child-tending. Homemakers feel awkward or even angry when their 18 hour days with small children, without any holiday, are still designated in the category of ‘not working’.

Other terms have been made which expand on the word’ work’ but which continue its illogic.

The term  ‘working mother’ is illogical in two ways. First of all a doctor currently practising medicine is a ‘working doctor’ and an engineer currently doing engineering is a ‘working engineer’.  Even if a doctor is retired and doing volunteer work giving medical care to people in a Third World, we don’t say that he is not working. We say he is doing volunteer work, or working as a doctor.  By that logic then a ‘working mother’ would be someone who is spending most of her day doing mothering  tasks but that is precisely the role that government excludes from the definition. Government considers a ‘working mother’ to be someone doing anything else but mothering along with being a mother.

A working couple or a family where both spouses’ work’ are both expressions with the same logic problems.  If the intention is to say that both spouses earn money, that would be more clearly expressed by saying’ dual income couple’.

What difference does all this make? You might well ask this.  Words make no difference except when they affect behavior. The problem is that when we tell women that when they raise children or care for the sick or the elderly or maintain a safe healthy home they are not working, then they will feel degraded and they may well stop doing those tasks with enthusiasm or even stop doing them.  When we deny recognition to those roles we also make those roles financially impossible and people, forced to earn money to be perceived as ‘working’ are no longer available to do what we always took for granted they would do. So when we send people home from hospitals to save medical care money, we are sending them home assuming someone is there to take care of them – but the house may be empty. When the elderly need care and when the handicapped need care we are assuming that someone nice will just waltz in and save the day for free but what if no one is there?

What will happen – in fact what is happening – is that the state will be asked to foot the bill to hire professionals to do these tasks – and that bill will be very high. The bill to have a national home-care system would be huge. The bill to have a national elder care program in the home would be huge. The bill for a national daycare system for every child in Canada at all hours of the day or night would also be massive.

So in the end if we deny recognition to our unpaid labor force, that force will dwindle and we’ll have to pay a lot to replace them, more than we ever paid to have them.

When a family can deduct expenses for having to ‘work’ one might look again at the misuse of the term. “Work’related expenses probably are ‘income-earning related expenses” and these obviously exist. They should be ones required for the earning of income and required by anyone for the earning of that income.  A child is not a work-related expense because no job requires you to have a child.  However a child is an expense, but all people raising children have it.

It does become a problem though in the crossover between private and public because the state assumes again that anyone who ‘teaches’ or ‘nurses’ a child does it for free in the home, but that a stranger doing the exact same task is doing vital work worthy of pay.

Here the leap is based on blood relationship. The state again assumes no work is involved if you love the person you are helping, and yet surely that is a naïve assumption.  Some have suggested that the argument you want pay to ‘nurse’ or ‘teach’ your  young is cold and crass. And yet what is colder than considering children obstacles to ‘working’ and their care a burden on the way to doing something useful with your life, which is what the tax plan assumes?

Another expression which is clearly debatable is ‘early childhood education”.  In popular parlance a person can say that an experience was a real eye-opener for him and a real education. Others consider education to be only what is learned in formal institutions.  However teaching a child to eat with a fork or to use a toilet is clearly a type of instruction that has been done for centuries outside of formal institutions so ‘early childhood education’ logically should include all teaching of children  in early childhood – in the home, in daycares, at grandmas, anywhere.  An ‘early childhood educator’ would be the person doing this so that would be the parent, sitter, grandmother or the daycare worker.  In other words the expressions applied to daycare only clearly miss a lot of the population also doing such education tasks.

The term ‘support’ is also potentially confusing. Governments often argue that children need our support and yet the divorce court tends to restrict the definition of support to financial.  In reality children need emotional and psychological support as much as they need financial support so divorce courts err if they forget that being with a child is also crucial.  Yet oddly enough governments often argue for ‘parental support’ also, suggesting the state owes parents some encouragement and backing as they raise the next generation. Yet the ‘parental support’ offered, at least in Canada, is rarely financial but more often in terms of advice/counseling or in replacing the parent by a daycare provider so the parent can go out and earn money. It is an ironic shift to define support these two ways when a fair system would provide both financial and emotional components of child and parental support.

Another expression which is misleading is the term’ professional’. The state is willing to pay for health care ‘professionals’ to come into your home or to pay an early childhood’professional’ to take care of your kids, but not to pay you.  The magic ‘ticket’ to qualifying as a professional is a certificate apparently, something valued in the male paradigm which is quantifiable and visible.  Yet the professions of law and medicine clearly recognize that a certificate, diploma or degree alone are not qualifiers and hands-on experience is required in order to have any clue at all how to perform. So lawyers article and doctors have clerkship and residency, teachers intern and even accountants have to practice under a mentor to qualify.  What the state has not recognized however in the tax plan is that experience is a qualifier to expertise – because it discounts the idea ironically that a mother of three children is by definition an expert about her children, due to her experience with them.   The traditional professions have the requirement of detachment and lack of emotional involvement, an unbiased pursuit of a high standard, even an ethical motto.  The tax department apparently assumes that mothers do not have such a detachment because they love the child, and yet the high standard of care mothers provide is precisely because they love the child and are willing to go the extra mile for the child.  In this way then the tax principle penalizes women for loving their children by using the ‘blood relationship’ bond as a disqualifier.

The issue of whether or not to pay a person to take care of her own child is sometimes clouded by the idea that she chose the role so she chose poverty.  This is a circular argument however. It is true that if you choose to live near an airport you chose to live near airplane noise and yet if the situation changes and the airport moves closer to you or starts using supersonic jets over your head, you may have reason to complain.  In the same way women who chose to take care of their children at home chose to be with their children, but they did not necessarily choose whatever tax regime is forced upon them by changing governments. We do not penalize men for choosing to be doctors or carpenters by forcing them to live with the original pay scale all their lives.  They are allowed to ask for more.  We assume they chose the profession, the role, the way to serve society but we do not assume they chose the pay scale.  The same argument is not applied, oddly enough, to women in the home, yet it should be.  We chose to care for our children at home but we did not choose to be poor for it.  It could even be argued that ‘choice’ is only free choice is all options are equally weighted and the only determiner is personal conviction. You can choose to attend A movie or B movie. They cost the same money. Right now however when a mother has a new baby she can choose to be in the home or work outside the home but the choice is far from equally weighted because of state policy. The decision to work outside the home is richly rewarded, not only because it is permitted salary but also because the state allows EI, pensions for it and will pay for much of the childcare.  The decision to be in the home to care for the child involves no salary, higher tax on the household, no EI, no pension and no help from the state for costs of raising the child. Given this weighting, the state has made it a far from ‘free choice’ and this lack of freedom is in fact unbeffiting a democracy. The Supreme Court in a parallel judgment about gay rights in M vs. H ruled that a democracy does not take sides in personal lifestyle decisions – and yet here it does.

The expressions’ single parent’ and ‘lone parent household’ are also misleading. The terms suggest that the parent is raising the children without the presence of financial help of the spouse and yet this is often not the case. Separation and divorce agreements often provide for access to the child from the other spouse, if not outright joint custody and very often there is also provision for financial support, if not of the custodial spouse, at least of the child. That being the case, the ‘lone parent’ is far from alone in raising the child and the term is misleading.  Many noncustodial spouses, often men, have expressed their dismay at census terminology that assumes that just because they live apart from the children sometimes, they are no longer active in the children’s lives. They feel very much that they are not ‘single’ as the census would indicate, but that they are fathers raising children.  The census oddity of counting the children only one place does tend to degrade the role of such spouses, and sympathetically elevate the role of the parent with whom the children are counted. We may want to consider using expressions like ‘joint-custody parent’ or ‘shared custody parent’ to more accurately reflect the real situation.