As scholars like Nancy Full Bray and Julie Nelson suggests, it turns out that both liberals and conservatives make some highly questionable assumptions about the nature of money and care. First, both assumed that when care is exchanged on the market, it can have no meaning because money is a cold and personal thing. However, we know of many examples of how money can take on meaning. It could be interpreted as a bribe, bonus, tip, reparation, honorarium, ransom, gift, an allowance, or an expression of appreciation. Money, in fact, is rarely devoid of meaning. It all depends on the social context in which it is moved from one individual to another. To better understand how being paid to care can be a meaningful act, it's helpful to draw a distinction between labor and work. Laborers are individuals who sell their talents to others solely for the purpose of making money. They experience the activities they are paid to perform as completely separate from their real selves. Workers, on the other hand, also make money, but that is not their sole motivation. They are partly interested in giving some service to others and view the activity they are paid to perform as an extension or expression of their real selves. Hence, being paid to care for others can be a meaningful experience, depending on whether one views it as work or labor. Second, those who worry that money will take the care out of care work assume that individuals are forced to choose between being self interested or altruistic, self centered or self less. Again, we can think of examples that challenge this logic. At some point in time, most people, even those who originally work for greedy purposes, will want more money in order to pay for their children's clothes and food or their parents medical expenses or to give to a favorite charity. We wouldn't think of these once as purely self interested or selfish. Likewise, for years, male workers demanded what was called a family wage, that is a wage large enough to support themselves and their family. Employers usually accepted such demands as legitimate. Unfortunately, when women argued for a large wage, it was often dismissed as stemming from a self interested desire to buy expensive luxury items. Third, those who worry that money will take the care out of care work often assume that people are either intrinsically motivated or extrinsically motivated. That is, you agree to do care work, either because you are deeply concerned about the welfare of others or because you simply want the money. However, as scholars like Bruno Frey suggests, whether care workers are intrinsically or extrinsically motivated depends on the context. Specifically, external motivators like pay "crowd-out internal motivation if they are perceived to be controlling and they crowd-in internal motivation if they are perceived as being acknowledging." What does he mean? He's suggesting that if workers perceive that they are being paid directly for each individual service they render, like an assembly line worker being paid for each widget he or she produces, they will feel that the care activities they are engaging in are entirely dictated by someone else, so that their activities are no longer work in the positive sense of expressing one's self and building a real relationship. Rather, they will experience they're paid care as labor, motivated by pay alone or trying to meet a quota. Fourth, those who are leery of paying others to care assume that individuals either act on the basis of their skills or their concern, that is, one cannot be a good nurturer and a highly skilled person, you must choose which one to cultivate or specialize in. The implication is that if you raise the salaries of care workers, you will attract more skilled applicants, but who are also less effective as care providers, people who are book smart, but not heart smart. As with some of the assumptions mentioned earlier, if we consider how care is always carried out within a relational context, one can think of numerous examples that contradict this idea. For instance, we know that it is possible to be goal oriented without being cold, caring without being a doormat. Indeed, if we really believe that one must choose between being skilled and nurturing, then it would follow that to be the most caring worker possible one must also be the most ignorant. Those who believe that money takes the care out of care work also assume that the sexes are equipped to work or care, but not both. That is, some argue that men are better suited for work and women for caring, because men have traditionally defined themselves in terms of their independence from others, which is required to succeed in a free and competitive market, whereas women have defined themselves in terms of their connections with others, which is required to create a family. One problem with this assumption is that it makes men out to be more autonomous than they really are by ignoring how dependent they are on the care of others, Simply put, there are no self made men or women. Finally, many assumed that intrinsic motivations are necessarily purer and healthier than extrinsic motivations. However, one can think of several types of intrinsically motivated people who work in care professions for the wrong reasons. What are some wrong reasons? For instance, we know of some who enter teaching because it gives them an opportunity to control or prey on innocent children. Likewise, there are people who need to be needed and develop undesirable co dependency relationships with their clients. So it is by no means clear that intrinsically motivated people necessarily make better caregivers.
