Something for the weekend: Everyone knows that parents can bring an abundance of new skills into the workplace when they return from leave, but what if their childcare and home-keeping responsibilities were able to earn them a wage?
According to a new tool from greeting card organisation Funky Pigeon, released in time for Mother's Day on 31 March 2019, London-based parents could be worth a whopping £263,587 a year for completing their day-to-day tasks around the home, while mums and dads living in Bristol perform roles that could earn £185,607 a year.
The tool is based on eight tasks that parents perform while raising children; matched with the closest professional equivalent.
For example, time spent cooking can be compared to those working as a chef, hours cleaning could equate to a cleaner’s pay, while driving chores relate to the role of a taxi driver. Helping children learn puts parents on a par with teachers, organising the family and household is similar to a professional personal assistant and tackling mountains of washing fits with the responsibilities of working in a launderette. Tending to their child’s physical health, for example, could be comparable to being a nurse, and looking after the family’s mental wellbeing is linked to a psychologist’s job role.
Funky Pigeon then collated the wage and salary data for these comparable job roles across 1,000 UK towns and cities.
To use the tool, parents can input the number of hours a week they spend completing the eight different task categories. This data is then converted into a yearly salary for each job role, which is then added together to create a total parent salary.
For example, if a parent spends seven hours a week cooking for their family, over the year that would equate to 364 hours of cooking. If the average wage for a chef living in the same area is £15 an hour, then the estimated salary for this one job would be £5,460.
Here at Employee Benefits, we took a stab at using the tool for ourselves and managed to achieve a parent salary of £70,505 a year, as we are London-based. For working parents, we are sure this extra income would be very much appreciated after all their hard work…
