Beyond the Spirit of Brotherhood. An Open Letter to Antonio Guterres

Dear Mr. Guterres,

In July 2020, when I listened to your Nelson Mandela Lecture, I felt directly addressed by the following statement:

“COVID-19 has been likened to an X-ray, revealing fractures in the fragile skeleton of the societies we have built. It is exposing fallacies and falsehoods everywhere: The lie that free markets can deliver healthcare for all; The fiction that unpaid care work is not work; The delusion that we live in a post-racist world; The myth that we are all in the same boat. Because while we are all floating on the same sea, it’s clear that some of us are in superyachts while others are clinging to the floating debris.”

For the first time I realized that what I’ve been urging be recognized for decades, that unpaid care-work is work and is the fundament of the global economy, has reached the highest level of the United Nations. What’s more, crucial insights regarding deep rooted causes of the social and ecological imbalances we face in this time of multiple crises are apparently well acknowledged by UN officials. 

Recently, more progress seems to have been made in this regard: The United Nations Economist Network has outlined a Path towards New Economies for Sustainable Development (NESD) consisting of eight separate, but synergizing approaches one of which is the purple economy (care economy+). In 2021, the Global Alliance for Care that seems to be closely linked to UN Women was founded in Mexico City. It presents itself as “the first multi-stakeholder community that facilitates and fosters spaces for dialogue, analysis, exchange of experiences and learning about care, its recognition as a need, as work, and as a right.” The toolkit on paid and unpaid care work compiled by UN Women in 2022 shows that much research has been done in other units of the UN universe, too: in ECLAC, ILO, ITUC, WHO etc. Moreover, in 2023, the general Assembly decided to proclaim October 29^th as International Day of Care and Support.

I want to thank you and all the people who have campaigned to generate global awareness for the value added by unpaid care work. Certainly, it has been a major effort to finally try to make all the work mainly done by women* visible, to organize all the funds, statistics, theory and institutional frames necessary to fulfill the task of recognizing, reducing, redistributing, rewarding and representing un- and underpaid care-work and, last but not least, to highlight its crucial role in peacebuilding.

In this letter I would like to propose three additional measures that could and should be taken by the UN to foster the transition from the still dominating profit-centered economy to a care-centered political economy which humanity needs for its survival on this precious vulnerable planet Earth:

First: The Care-centered Economy of the Future cannot be a “women’s issue”

While it is historically reasonable to color the care-economy in purple, the color of the women’s movement, the care-centered economy of the future cannot be conceived as a “women’s issue” anymore. Indeed, patriarchy has ascribed all the work dealing with human natality, dependency, vulnerability and mortality to women and other subdued members of the human species. However, this hierarchical constellation is not a tradition to be upheld but a problem to be solved as all humans are natal, dependent, vulnerable, mortal und responsible for the reasonable handling of the unalterable human condition. To conceive care as a women’s issue colored in purple, mapped and advocated mainly by women* whereas “the economy” and “economics as such” continue to be operated mainly by men and a male-dominated community in a more or less unmodified  androcentric way is neither compatible with the human right not to be “held in slavery or servitude” (Art. 4 UDHR) nor with the urgency of the socio-economic transformation humanity is in desperate need of.    

Second: Article 23 paragraph 3 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must be implemented – or deleted

From your assertion that it is a “fallacy” and a “fiction that unpaid care work is not work” I infer that unpaid care work should, from now on, be conceived as work. This must have consequences for the interpretation and implementation of article 23 paragraph 3 of the UDHR which reads:

“Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”

This paragraph must either be implemented – or else deleted. Its implementation would result in a huge redistribution of finance which, for its part, would set in motion the desirable revolution of the existing economic systems as they all structurally rely on the externalizing definition of unpaid care-work as non-work. For example, according to the official statistics of my home country Switzerland, in 2020 the gross value added of private households “accounted for 41.4% of the overall economy plus household production.” To adequately reward this big share or, in other words, the 12.5 billion hours of unpaid care-work done, according to Oxfam, by women and girls worldwide every day, would amount to a genuine economic turnaround  In view of such facts, it is inappropriate and dishonest to leave article 23 paragraph 3 UDHR unrevised.

Third: The “Spirit of Brotherhood” in Article 1 UDHR must be replaced by a “Spirit of Mutual Care” 

With the “spirit of brotherhood” invoked in its first article the UDHR contains a notion that can be seen as the explanatory background for all the fallacies you mentioned in your Nelson Mandela Lecture, especially the “fiction that unpaid work is not work.” Indeed, the moral concept of brotherhood is often understood by well-intentioned people as a synonym for general solidarity. This, however, is a fallacy, too, as linguistic research has long since given evidence that concepts formulated in generic masculine do not always include all humans or humanity as a whole but, as the case may be, males or certain male elites only. So, the naïve belief that the spirit of brotherhood encompasses the interests of all human beings can easily be betrayed by the patriarchal – or fratriarchal – original meaning of the term. In fact, the term brotherhood implies the explicit or implicit exclusion of all the individuals, groups and spheres that patriarchy considered as inferior, for example as servants for the good of the masters. To avoid this ambiguity, I propose to replace the term with a spirit of mutual care:

“All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of mutual care.“

Dear Mr. Guterres, 

In our time, in which the recognition of human rights and other seemingly enduring general agreements of humanity are seriously threatened, the UN must honestly strive to ensure the greatest possible consistency in precious fundamental texts. This requires more than the constant repetition that the norms and values humanity has developed to the present day must be observed always and everywhere. There needs to be more, namely a continuous discussion about whether these texts are formulated so consistently that they deserve this general recognition. It takes the courage to revise them when they prove to be inconsistent.

I thank you for your attention!
Yours respectfully
Ina Praetorius

(I wrote this open letter in April 2024, shortly after the European Court of Human Rights’ epochal descision on the Climate Seniors’ lawsuit. At the beginning of May I put it up for discussion in the GrossmütterRevolution (GMR, Grandmothers’ Revolution) which is closely linked to the Climate Seniors. The Grandmothers’ Revolution supports the concerns presented in this open letter to the UN Secretary-General.)

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