THE GUARDIAN

COMMENT

Society is more efficient than ever, yet our needs for leisure and relationships never feature on the balance sheet

A dozen people sat down in a Nottingham hotel last week to work out what the government should be doing to ease the strain between working and caring. Over three days, experts from the TUC, CBI, Small Business Association and Working Families presented evidence to them. The format - known as a citizens' jury - has become popular with Labour as a way to thrash out policy with ordinary people outside the wonkish brains of Whitehall and thinktanks. It was curiously inspiring in its quiet way, as a coherent voice emerged from an enormously disparate group - in age, ethnicity, life experience - which was sensible and yet vibrant with ideals of compassion and justice.

After listening to the experts, the jury members unanimously (albeit with the odd grumble) agreed they would be prepared to pay more in taxes to fund the formidable shopping list they wanted in the next Labour manifesto. More childcare, more paid maternity and paternity leave, and the right to request flexible work extended to all parents of under 16s (it currently covers only those with children under six). But the issue that dominated all their deliberations was the pitiful, neglected plight of carers. They were horrified at the story of Tim, one of their number, who'd had to give up his nursing career to care for his elderly mother. Because she wasn't classified as disabled, he wasn't eligible for the meagre £43-a-week carer's allowance - the lowest state benefit. He, along with the rest of the 6 million who care for the elderly and disabled in this country, is saving the state £57bn a year - the cost of another NHS.

Add up the jury's shopping list and the total cost heads into dizzying numbers. This is the care economy - the nurturing of life from cradle to grave - and because, historically, it's been unpaid and almost entirely the responsibility of women, it's been taken for granted. The Office of National Statistics has recently worked out a price on this unpaid care of a staggering £929bn a year, 104% of GDP. But as women transfer their labour from the care economy to the waged economy, a care deficit is emerging, exacerbated by a state that is reluctant to step in.

At every point of the life course, this deficit is apparent. Who cares for small children as maternal employment rates soar? Who cares for the convalescent as they are turfed out of the needed hospital bed indecently early? Who cares for the growing number of elderly? Increasingly we will have to face two related issues: who's going to pay, and who's actually going to do the caring? The cost to the state of providing or subsidising the new needs for care will be astronomical, and the government is flinching from spelling out the implications to the taxpayer. And finding people prepared to do these chronically low-paid jobs is a headache. Importing carers is a short-term solution as they, in turn, age and need care. Technology offers a bleak prospect of CCTV on the elderly and webcams in nurseries. Even the professions of caring such as nursing predict shortages, let alone the infamous recruitment problems for childcare.

Two factors are fuelling the care deficit. The first is Britain's punishing overwork culture. We work the longest hours in Europe and have the shortest holidays. This means British full-time workers put in eight weeks more a year than those in France or Germany. More than a third of British workers say they are so exhausted when they get home that they can only slump on a sofa. Work-related stress is soaring. We urgently need a debate about the quality of our working lives - the time it exacts, the energy it monopolises and the stress it engenders. But an embattled trade union movement struggles to get these issues on to the public agenda. There's no reason that we can't organise a working culture in which it is possible to combine both work and care.

The second factor fuelling the care deficit has been the triumph of the work ethic - the ultimate misogyny in its total disregard for the value and dignity of care. The Victorians may have invented the work ethic, but they always acknowledged that it was possible to lead useful, meaningful lives that did not include paid work. Not so New Labour: it took the work ethic to new heights. The rhetoric around welfare-to-work elevated it into the criterion of citizenship, the source of self-respect, dignity and the means of social integration. In 1998, Tony Blair spelled it out: "Anyone of working age who can work, should work." Harriet Harman was enlisted in the terrible debacle over benefit cuts for lone parents in 1997 to promote the redemptive vision of work.

What was absent from this rhetoric was an ethic of care. It is just as crucial an element of citizenship, just as much a source of self-respect, dignity and social integration as work. But there was a loud and shocking silence from a Labour party with the greatest number of women MPs ever. Only recently has Patricia Hewitt begun to row back from New Labour's inflated claims for work with some acknowledgement of the huge labour of unpaid care in families and communities.

But New Labour's mistake only reflects a wider cultural phenomenon, as care is devalued and belittled. A historic coincidence of the rise of neo-liberal capitalism with a feminism articulated in terms of professional success has helped to promote a concept of the self only available through high-status paid work. The way in which care combines the most mundane and practi cal of chores with the most sensitive emotional skills of attentiveness and nurturing, means that it is often dismissed as "drudgery". Care is seen as passive and ineffectual, while our culture is intoxicated with independence and self-expression. More recognition is needed urgently for the care ethic that many millions (particularly women) have built their lives around; an ethic that holds transformative, redemptive possibilities in relationships of dependence. From that would come a reappraisal of the status of those who care, the value of their work - and better pay.

The care ethic is not just about children and the elderly; it underpins the myriad relationships that support human wellbeing - friends, neighbours - but also, crucially, care of the self. Research shows that the overworked cut back on care for themselves while protecting their children from the impact of their jobs. They give up on the three things most likely to promote their own emotional health and resilience: friends, leisure and exercise.

The cost of turbo-capitalism, with its relentless demands on people to work harder, longer and more flexibly in a bid to achieve greater competitiveness and efficiency, is in human sustainability. Just as we slowly developed an understanding in the 60s and 70s of the concept of environmental sustainability, so we are now beginning to grasp the human equivalent. The quality of our lives is an externality to the market - it doesn't appear in the balance sheet - and we are just beginning to glimpse that this is where we pay the cost of the overwork culture.

· Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling our Lives is published by HarperCollins today. To order a copy for £10.99 plus p&p, call the Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004