Today on Sojourner Truth, we continue our ongoing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, focusing on how this crisis has revealed the importance of caregiving to life and survival. We will take a look at how much caregivers are relied on for important services that governments are not providing. The U.S. government is considering distributing checks to people in order to stop the economy from collapsing, but it still refuses to consider providing an income for family caregivers, whose work is generally depended on and has increased as a result of the pandemic. Family unwaged caregivers " most of whom are women, including mothers and grandmothers, and the most impoverished women on welfare " provide care for relatives, children, the elderly and persons with disabilities.
Amid this crisis, they are expected to pick up the slack without any acknowledgement of the value or resources for their work. The International Labor Office has estimated that women do two-thirds of the worlds work for five percent of the income. And according to a report released by Oxfam in January 2020, women around the world perform 12.5 billion hours of unpaid labor every day. Overall, the work of unwaged caregivers has been estimated to contribute at least $11 trillion to the global economy, according to a Human Development Report.
During todays program, you will hear exclusive audio from a webinar hosted on Friday, March 20, titled, From Coronavirus to Beyond: Valuing Caregiving, the Unwaged Work that Protects People & Environment. The webinar was originally planned as a workshop for the 64th UN Commission on the Status of Women scheduled for March 9-20 in New York on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the 1995 UN World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China. However, the workshop was cancelled because of the coronavirus.
Instead, a worldwide webinar was hosted. The organizers of the webinar had been in Beijing, where they gathered the support of over 1,200 NGOs worldwide, representing millions of women, to win a key decision that governments measure and value unwaged work and include that value in economic statistics and gross domestic product. The organizers of the webinar were also active throughout the UN Womens Decade, participating in conferences in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi Kenya in 1985. The webinar was facilitated by Phoebe Jones from Women in Dialogue in Philadelphia.
