The global care crisis is rooted in the systematic undervaluation of paid and unpaid care and support work as well as social reproduction, the exploitation of women’s labour to subsidise the market economy and the chronic underfunding of care infrastructure. It constitutes one of the most pervasive drivers of gender inequality, poverty and ecological breakdown worldwide. The political and social stakes are high: in low- and middle-income countries, regressive fiscal policies promoted by international financial institutions impose austerity and debt measures that strip governments of the fiscal space needed to invest in care and support systems. Indeed, much of the accumulation of wealth was generated and sustained by the invisible labour of unpaid and underpaid carers. Care inequalities fall hardest on low-income, Indigenous, racialised, and migrant women, with effects that are both lifelong and intergenerational. The proposal advances a comprehensive set of interconnected policy instruments to rebuild care as a public good and human right. Such measures include: establishing universal and equitable care and support infrastructure (childcare, eldercare, disability support, healthcare); enshrining care workers’ rights through ratification of ILO Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and living wage guarantees; reforming fiscal and macroeconomic policies (e.g. progressive taxation of the super-rich and debt cancellation) to expand fiscal space for care investment; and replacing GDP-centred metrics with multidimensional indicators that capture unpaid care work. These approaches are not purely speculative. Uruguay’s National Integrated Care System (SNIC), established through the Care Act, provides a legally binding framework for universal care provision integrating public services with community participation. This proposal would redistribute care work so that individual women and families are not shouldering this responsibility alone but can count on the support of the State and communities. It would unlock women’s power to say what support they need and want, as well as their time for political participation, civic action, and economic engagement, while potentially generating up to 299 million decent, low-carbon jobs by 2035. This proposal connects directly to the project of eradicating poverty beyond growth by challenging regressive taxation and IFI-imposed austerity that strips governments; while reorienting economies away from extractive, profit-maximising growth models towards care-centred, low-carbon provisioning.
