Who Pays for Care? Austerity, Unpaid Labor & the Care Crisis | Luiza Nassif Pires & Anamary Linares

Unpaid care work, social reproduction, and the care economy hold up every economy on earth and receive almost none of the funding. Clara Mattei introduces this session of the Series in Advanced Political Economy (SAPE), moderated by Shristi Yadav, where economists Luiza Nassif Pires and Anamary Maqueira Linares examine who actually pays for care in Brazil, Cuba, and across the Global South, and what austerity costs the people doing the work. 376 million women live in extreme poverty today, close to one in ten women worldwide. That number is the surface of something structural. Care work gets performed for free inside households, then gets paid badly when it enters the market, and the entire arrangement functions as a permanent subsidy to capital and to the state. Luiza Nassif Pires maps care policy across Latin America and explains why the aging population is a symptom of the care crisis rather than its cause. She walks through the case of Brazil, where the right to care was written into law in 2024 and an expenditure cut on social spending followed two days later, leaving a national care plan spread across 21 ministries with almost no budget of its own. She makes the case for care as investment: high employment multipliers, redistributive wage effects, and a direct route into the labor force for women currently locked out of it. Anamary Maqueira Linares brings the Cuban case through the concept of the reparative bargain, the arrangement between a state and its people over who bears the cost of keeping life going. Her research with Katherine Moos found that household production covered roughly 31 percent of Cuba's total cost of social reproduction in 2016, with remittances covering another 27 percent. Cuba has lost around 13 percent of its population since 2020, eight in ten migrants of working age and 57 percent of them women, and care arrangements on the island now run through the diaspora. The conversation covers the care diamond of family, market, community, and state; why commodification offers no clean exit; global care chains and who cares for the families migrant care workers leave behind; Uruguay's care system and what made it durable against a change of government; the 18 percent of employed Black and brown women in Brazil working as domestic workers with informality above 70 percent; and why time use surveys turn out to be the precondition for almost every successful care policy. Srishti Yadav is Assistant Professor of Economics at Azim Premji University in India, where she teaches political economy and the history of economic thought. She holds a PhD in Economics from The New School for Social Research. Luiza Nassif Pires is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Economics at Unicamp and co-director of MADE-USP, the Research Center on Macroeconomics of Inequalities. She is a research associate in the Gender Equality and Economics program at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and sits on the board of the International Association for Feminist Economics. Anamary Maqueira Linares is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba, a feminist political economist working on social reproduction in Global South contexts, particularly Latin America and Cuba. The Series in Advanced Political Economy (SAPE) is a collaboration between the Department of Economics at SOAS University of London, the New School for Social Research in New York, and FREE, the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. Chapters: 01:45:00 - Introduction 01:45:27 - Care as Social Infrastructure 01:46:26 - Care as a Productivity Booster 01:48:08 - Care as a Multiplier Effect 01:49:32 - Conclusion and Thanks 🔔 Subscribe to FREE (Forum for Real Economic Emancipation) @FreeFreeForum⁩ ❤️ Watch, learn more, and join the FREE Forum: https://freefreeforum.org 🌱 Support FREE & Help Us Grow: https://www.freefreeforum.org/donate 🎧 Listen as a Podcast Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5m5xbrP... ▶ Connect with FREE Linktree: https://linktr.ee/FreeFreeForum Substack: https://freefreeforum.substack.com/ X: https://x.com/freefreeforum Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/freefreeforu... Instagram:   / freefreeforum   TikTok:   / freefreeforum   Facebook:   / freefreeforum   #SocialReproduction #CareEconomy #FeministEconomics #UnpaidLabor #PoliticalEconomy #Austerity #GlobalSouth #ClaraMattei