For a task to move out of the domestic (home) economy, the hourly wage earned by the lowest paid family member must be enough to purchase goods or services that could otherwise have been done within the household in one hour. Thus, if a family has one child under school age, they can only afford to buy child care if one hour of child care costs less than the lowest paid person in the house, usually a woman, earns in an hour. But the child care, if provided by a profit-making business, will sell at the full value of the service. That is, the child care fee will include wages, profits, rent on the building, heating, etc. Suppose that the salary of the child care worker is $16 an hour, that a further $12 goes in profit and rent, and $4 in other overheads. Then if each child care worker can look after three children, the overall cost per hour will be on the order of $11. At this level it would not be worthwhile for a worker, who was herself on $16 an hour, to put a child into care service- allowing for tax deductions, travel costs, she would have almost nothing left over. If two children had to be put into care it would be impossible. It is no surprise then that private child care has initially been only affordable by households on higher wage rates. But this is clearly irrational from the standpoint of economizing on social labor. A single child at home ties up one adult, a single child in a kindergarten ties up only 1/3 of an adult, but since workers only get part of the value they create back in wages, something that would be socially efficient becomes privately unaffordable. There is a feedback mechanism here. So long as women are disproportionately tied to child care at home, their participation in the labor force is lower, and we have seen that this results in lower average wages for women. But this lower pay rate makes child care unaffordable and ensures that it is women, not men, who are likely to stay at home. The elimination of a gender pay gap thus depends, at a minimum, on the socialization of child care. The socialization of infant care, its move out of the household, is thus dependent on the provision of either free state nurseries or highly subsidized private ones.
