This is the bedrock of family policy, for 'affording' equals choice, and no family can function well without adequate income and housing stability. Labour market and employment policies are crucial to the future of children and families and we have to change our perceptions of work if that future is to be assured. The latter option is 'economic humanism' as I mean it, a system which does not merely distribute income while some work and others idle, but where everyone has a positive stake in the culture of productive work. Of course, to achieve such a state would require rethinking the narrow view of work outside the home as 'productive' and that within the household as insignificant and invisible. A restructured work system To achieve full employment as above, many things would have to change.
Work done in the home needs some sensible form of recognition in the national accounts.
A new approach to youth Part of this new definition of work must involve a reincorporation of youth into mainstream civil society. Staying on at school is only a second best option, jobs lost by young people are unlikely to reappear and both youth and family income supplements are woefully inadequate. The debate bogs down in a silly dichotomy between youth versus adult wages rather than payment for skills and productivity, and an equally silly knee-jerk reaction against 'working for the dole'. Recognition of school as work, of voluntary work as job experience, of skills wider than formal qualifications would also help reincorporate youth in society. Participation, not exclusion, must be the aim and imaginative solutions must be found.