Care work is the labor of tending bodies, relationships, and communities. It encompasses childcare, eldercare, disability support, emotional labor, feeding, cleaning, healing, teaching, and the maintenance of the social bonds that make collective life possible. Care work is disproportionately performed by women, people of color, migrants, and undocumented workers. It is often unwaged, and when waged, it is among the lowest-paid work in any economy.
Feminist economists and social reproduction theorists argue that care work is not peripheral to capitalism but foundational: it produces and maintains the labor power that capital requires. Without the daily and generational work of feeding, housing, educating, and sustaining workers, there is no workforce. Capital depends on this labor while systematically devaluing it — treating it as a natural emanation of femininity rather than as work that requires skill, time, and energy.
Care work also points beyond capitalist social relations. Mutual aid networks, kinship systems, and community care practices organize care through reciprocity rather than through the market or the state. In many Indigenous and diasporic communities, care circulates through kin networks that resist the nuclear family’s privatization of reproductive labor. Disability justice movements insist that care is not charity but a collective obligation and a form of political practice.
The devaluation of care work is not incidental. It is structural, and any political project that does not reorganize care reproduces the hierarchies it claims to oppose.