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Comment by ineedasername | Hacker News Reader

To say they're not compensated is a fundamental misunderstanding of such a relationship, when it's really very simple: there is a pool of tasks that need to get done, and between the two partners there is a division of labor on who performs which tasks, often with at least a little overlap. If the person who works for pay happens to mop the floor at home, is that "uncompensated"?

Take a relationship where both people work, mine: My spouse does laundry. I go food shopping and cook. To say that either of us is uncompensated for those tasks is a complete misapplication of the term, and a gross oversimplification that attempts to reduce the rewards of effort to solely lie in the monetary realm.

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You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, women are required by their society to stay at home, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

given the context of the article, I'm not sure why you're being downvoted.

If your entire social and economic network is built around the totalizing influence of (the conservative end of a) religious institution, and if that institution says that women should stay at home, then there's a de facto barrier to full participation in the labor force. So, the stay-at-home parent will be the woman.

Fortunately, there's a "way out" that there wasn't in previous generations: "just" leave the church. Unfortunately, saying that's far easier said than done is the under-statement of a century.

Apologies in advance for the snark, but I find this statement equally valid:

> You write as if there is a division of work between the couple. That would be true if men and women could decide who would stay at home and who would work at a company. In fact, men are required by their society to go to work, so this is in fact a relation of oppression.

So I reject your assertion that this is a relation of oppression, unless you are conceding that both members of the relation are equally oppressed (in which case, I would argue that nobody is).

This inversion is a bit misleading: being able to work is how people achieve financial independence, and if society discourages women from seeking financial independence the result is obviously an imbalance of power between men and women.

No, I don't write like that. I'm fully aware of lack of choice and societal pressure. It is not strictly relevant to the "compensation" question. The imposition of the social order doesn't mean there isn't still just a set pool of tasks that have to get done, and each person does some of them. My partner can't cook and go food shopping to plan out meals. Not in their skill set. I have little choice in bearing that responsibility for my household. That still doesn't make me "uncompensated" for the task. The situations you speak of are just a matter of degree in that way, not a difference in kind.

You appear to be conflating value with compensation. Unfortunately society often seems to value the work done by the at-homeartner less. That is a different issue than compensation. The issue of compensation is personal to the relationship. To say one person is uncompensated completely ignores the fact that it is a partnership with a pool of resources and a pool of responsibilities. Sometimes there's more or less choice in involved in how those responsibilities are distributed, but dividing things into one person does this and gets this etc., acts as if there were two separate systems. There aren't. It's a relationship, a single system.

I think it’s fair to say that, generally speaking, individuals conflate value and compensation, especially when it’s related to a job being done.

That feeling of performing uncompensated work is what OP is claiming MLMs are taking advantage of.

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