Poverty and caring - the absence of some basic questions

We are now reaching the end of Anti-Poverty Week in 2025.

It’s worth paying attention to for several reasons. One of them is the gap between the unemployment benefit and the poverty line.

Another is the narrow gap between the National Minimum Wage and the poverty line. It’s only been in the last year or so that the NMW has risen just a tiny bit above the poverty line.

And another is the rise of poverty among retired workers on the age pension. There are more than 2.6 million of them, and industry superannuation schemes are not solving that problem, despite recent tweaks.

Anti-Poverty Week is sponsored primarily by the western Christian organisations. That means something, but so far it’s not clear what.

The only union sponsor is the Australian Education Union, to its great credit.

As usual, Anti-Poverty Week provides some useful information and reminds us that so far, this Labor government has made no visible effort to develop an official poverty line. That work is left to unofficial efforts by academic researchers in a couple of our major universities that adopt different methods.

That, in turn, creates problems for organisations trying to build an analysis of what is going on and a campaign that might flow from that.

It should not be that way. Other comparable countries in the OECD do have official poverty lines and, guess what, their capitalist societies are not threatened by it.

A closer look shows that, somewhat strangely, Anti-Poverty Week coincides with Carers Week and that raises some basic questions.

Why and, does it have to be that way?

What might that mean? Does it deflect from the focus against poverty that is desperately needed for far too many?

Or, how could the coincidence have been used far more effectively, especially given the rise of misogynist and sexist voices that are trying to fix women in society as secondary to men, including as care-givers to men of all ages.

National Carers Week is run by Carers Australia and funded mainly by national and state governments. There is a neoliberal link between poverty being addressed through charitable kindness of caring best provided by women (because they are naturally better carers).

The main message aims to promote and consolidate voluntary caring. It’s a good news story.

A closer look at shows that for Carers Australia, the connection between voluntary caring, paid labour caring and poverty is irrelevant. It’s not on the radar.

The messaging, on the whole, leaves intact the gender dimension of voluntary caring - that caring falls “more naturally” to women.

And, more caring will cover more poverty across all age groups, but especially among children and retirees. More men will need to step up to join and, that will mean they will learn the joy and satisfaction of being a volunteer carer.

Yet, for those who do it, the honest reality is much stress - mental, physical and material - goes with voluntary caring.

That takes us to the status and interaction of paid care work with poverty and voluntary caring

What is the most effective form(s) of care - both voluntary and paid - to lift everyone comfortably above the poverty line?

Should carers in paid work be paid at poverty line levels?

Should “dependents” be defined beyond children to other dependents or part-dependents?

How should volunteer carers be properly compensated for the drain on their incomes that goes with generous caring? Yes, the young unemployed worker living at home does push their parent(s) closer to their own poverty line. And, as happens to a wage earner(s) committed to increased care for a pensioner parent now living in poverty or drifting closer to it, and drifting into the shame of being more dependent than they wish on younger family and others.

Unions exist, in the first instance, as workers’ solutions to problems in their material existence, starting with adequate wages for themselves and their dependents. The purpose of wages is to purchase adequate necessities and desirables for both material existence and dignified recreation.

Those wages, in effect, reproduce the potential of existing wage earners to return to the job the next day and the next generation of workers required to reproduce the society in paid work.

How should any union, not just the small group of carers’ unions, define the link between wages, poverty and caring?

In effect, voluntary caring carried out by an industrial wage worker extends their working day. Wrongly, they tend to be quite starkly more women than men. Women tend to have a longer working day - paid working time plus volunteer caring time. Both are productive-reproductive in an interdependent mesh.

What does that mean for the real rate of exploitation, the wages paid relative to the profits taken?

I am not aware that any of these questions have been properly pushed forward and argued about in both Anti-Poverty Week and Carers Week. If that is the case, they remain somewhat sad dead ends, failing to meet their humanist potential.

There remain 2 even bigger questions that Anti-Poverty Week does not address very well, if at all: “What is the root cause of poverty in all of its forms? Then, what does that mean for policy - like the issues raised above and more - and strategy?”

These 2 questions are the essential big ones for all union and anti-poverty groups.