Hawai’i’s feminist economic recovery
by Rosanna Harvey-Crawford
The Covid-19 crisis has upended any normal assumptions of what governments and countries can and can’t do. Aviation has stopped almost overnight, factories have pivoted from producing car parts to producing PPE and numbers of people walking and cycling (and baking) have skyrocketed. While governments across the world scramble to articulate a vision for what life after lockdown might look like, Hawaii has become the first state ever to propose a ‘feminist economic recovery’ plan.
Designed by the Hawaii State Commission on the Status of Women the plan aims to build a system that is capable of delivering gender equality. In doing so it emphasises the need to look after the marginalised or overlooked in society: elderly women, immigrant women, native women, who are disproportionately affected by the gender pay gap and other structural inequalities. The Commission confronts the institutional racism that leads to a maternal mortality rate that is three times higher for black women than for white women, as well as gendered work that sees women dominating the service industries: social care, healthcare and domestic services.
Economies across the world are able to function and grow thanks to the unpaid labour of women: domestic and care work, from housekeeping to raising children and taking care of elderly relatives and although men have increasingly taken on some of this work, the majority falls on women. In developed countries, women work on average 30 minutes more than men when you account for unpaid work, and in developing countries they work for 50 minutes longer. While this may not seem like a lot, when counted over the course of a year, or more, a very significant number of women’s working hours are unpaid.
Hawaii’s plan puts this ‘invisible labour’ front and centre of their plan which is essential as the state has some of the highest costs for child and elder care, as well as the largest shortage of care services in the US. However, the plan is also remarkable as it explicitly incorporates the needs of indigenous and immigrant women, elderly women, femme-identifying and non-binary women, incarcerated women, unsheltered women, domestic abuse & sex trafficking survivors and women with disabilities alongside caregivers. In short, this is a plan for ‘deep cultural change’.
Some of the measures recommended in the plan include:
Adopt Universal Basic Income
Raise the minimum wage to a living wage - $24.80 per hour for single mothers
A 20% pro rata share of Covid-19 response funds in trusts to Native Hawaiians for their express recovery needs
Special funds & infrastructure for high risk groups: undocumented immigrant women, sex workers, domestic workers, women with disabilities and elderly women.
In an interview, the Commission’s executive director, Khara Jabola-Carolus, confirmed that other US states could adopt and adapt the plan as it was based on key questions such as how to stimulate jobs, how should funding be spent, and what does a better, more resilient economy look like? As countries begin to plan for life post-Covid, it will be interesting to see if other governments chose to follow Hawaii's example.
You can read the recovery plan here, and the interview with Khara Jabola-Carolus here.
