Does It Matter How Hard the Work Is?

Promotion of labour intensive work raises the demand for the endowment that the poor have, and may be a cost-effective means to raising entitlements to the commodities required to meet basic needs. Raising women's income through employment may be especially beneficial, given greater propensity to spend their income on health, nutrition and education for their children. Social welfare services targeted on women enhance these synergies and may be empowering in both tactical and strategic ways. Participation in wage employment and home-based productive work can raise the perceived contribution and social valuation and inclusion of women. Like labour-intensive employment, self-targeting through the labour test also works through the labour endowment of the poor, since it should screen out those who are better off. Similarly, technologies such as the treadle pump in Bangladesh, which uses human labour to pump irrigation water, can be expected to be attractive to people willing to work physically hard for relativel y low returns, either on land they cultivate themselves or as wage labourers for others. They may also be environmentally-friendly, in that the use of fossil fuel is reduced. This consensus gives rise to concerns about additional burdens that women may consequently face.

Employment and participation in social welfare and targeted safety net programmes will make additional demands on the time of already burdened women; time-use studies typically show the long (and longer than male) working hours of women. It is also often argued that poor women are relatively deprived of food and other basic needs by gendered inequalities in intra-household allocations of consumption, expenditure on health, work burden and so on. We suggest that "effort" may well be the more appropriate concept to assess the burden of work than time, and its productivity, especially for nutritionally challenged persons. Employment and safety nets, which are effort-intensive, may not contribute so much to the reduction of poverty as similar activities that are less effort-intensive; after all, the main objective must be interventions that are entitlement- or capability-intensive The poor may be more burdened by the effort to reward ratio of livelihood activities (their low productivity), given their capabiliti es, than they are by time constraints. The two accounts are not incompatible, perhaps, if it is their low capability to exert effort that forces the poor to adopt a slow work pace which then makes time the limiting factor.

Time is a metric that is common to everyone, and "time famine" is reflected in longer working hours of women and their concentration in household and reproductive activities. Problems in commensuration occur if it is claimed that the productivity of time differs by category of person, or the nature of the work or the capacity to endure it differs. One common, often casual, observation is that poor people's work is effort-intensive.

Effort is a rather more controversial concept than time and is not easy to assess. Field studies among the poor in the third world revealed that effort and its converse, the ability to accomplish tasks more easily and with less bodily stress, were acknowledged characteristics of task/person combinations. Women in northern Bangladesh commented that working the treadle pump was more burdensome for women and that earthworks were "men's s work".

Nutrition, physiology and ergonomic models of energy expenditure, effort and burden fail to capture the important characteristics of effort-intensive work that it can only be accomplished in short bursts, followed by longer or shorter rest periods. Modern research on the epidemiology of disease and its association with poverty and social exclusion shows it is more reasonable to use the concept of stress in the explanation of health outcomes. Stress may also be the appropriate concept to assess the burdens of work and their balance with consumption, expenditure, time allocation and so on. It allows integration of psychosocial, energetic expenditure, musculo-skeletal and immunological impairment characteristics of work burden, and understands the social construction of deprivation and its burdens. While our prime concern has been with the physical character of work, its social circumstances--the social relations of work and its social valuation--are also important.

Livelihoods of the poor require persons who can do various things, including hard physical work requiring both physical capacities such as strength and/or endurance, speed, repetitiveness, child bearing and rearing, and psychological dispositions and decision-making abilities. This opens up ways to think about men's gendered vulnerabilities and contributions, as well as those of women and children in gendered theoretical, empirical and policy analysis of the poor.

The authors co-wrote a Discussion Paper on "Work Intensity, Gender and Well-being", published by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) as part of its multidisciplinary studies programme.