In a recent post at the New York Times’ “The Upshot”, “Why U.S. Women Are Leaving Jobs Behind”, Claire Cain Miller and Liz Alderman explore why American free-market policies have led to American women leaving the workforce in order to care for their children. At the political heart of Mses. Miller and Alderman’s remarks about the place of American women in the workforce is the question of whether or not regulations should be written that make it easier for women to juggle life in the workplace and life at home. It’s certainly not the only question to be brought up, but it’s a question that shall always be on people’s minds whenever ‘women in the workforce’ is mentioned in a political question. As the authors note: “The free market leaves many families, particularly many women, struggling to find a solution that combines work and home life.”
Here, I must disagree with how Mses. Miller and Alderman frame the issue. If we may speak of the free market as existing for any final cause, it doesn’t exist to actualize people’s desires, it exists to actualize human cooperation. Sociability, not identity, is the principle of human nature that the free markets relate too. The free markets, along with the freedom of association that defines them, aren’t about people being able to make what they want of themselves, or being able to do what they want in life. Market forces care nothing for people’s identities. Instead, the free markets are about people being able to put themselves in a position to best serve one another and to profit from those good offices. In short, sociability, not identity, is the principle of human nature that political debate about working mothers should be concerned with.
The case of maternal care is then a question over whether governments will place people’s desired identities above other people’s freedom to associate with whomever they please. The “ long preferred flexible labor markets” mentioned by the author in American aren’t simply about “job growth”. There is a moral, as well as an economic, concern at play here. The liberty principle, that each may do as she pleases insofar as she does’t harm another, is also at stake as much as any GDP figure. Insofar as regulations require family-leave policies, they violate the employer’s freedom of association since they have no choice whether they would like to have family-leave policies in the contracts they negotiate.
It’s not the free market that “leaves many families, particularly many women, struggling to find a solution that combines work and home life.” Instead, it’s the fact that women can’t both spend a lot of their time at home, and still be competitive employees. The fact is that juggling both identities is a demanding task that everyone cannot do. The euphemism that it’s ‘the free market’ that does X conceals what’s really happening here. There’s a reason why the equilibrium condition for wages are an employee’s marginal productivity. To be hired one needs to be useful to one’s employer, and needing to spend time with childcare reduces that utility. It’s not a matter of the market as a whole, it’s individual human beings figuring out if they want to associate with each other.
Again, the question shouldn’t be a matter of identity — with what people want to do with their won lives — it should be a matter human sociability, and the constraints upon it. The demand that other people esteem one’s decision to take periods of extended leave to care for children and keep one in their employment, though, would violate the liberty principle. Whether that violation is worthwhile is a decision people can come to on their own, but they have to deal with the fact that regulating maternal care is restricting employer’s liberty.
After all, equality before the law does not require equality in hireability. Employment, after all, isn’t about identity and wanting to be employed; instead, it’s about being serviceable to other people, and any sober view of raising a child would realize that caring for a child is a task that makes one less apt to service others in the job market.