On care, compensation, and the invisible scaffolding of everything

At the beginning of that first council meeting I attended, before the zoning debates and procedural votes, there was a conversation about salary. About whether councillors are paid enough. About if their work is part-time. About optics. About public perception. About whether asking for more feels self-serving.

Sitting there, I thought about a Tuesday. Not any particular Tuesday. Just the texture of one. The kind where I had already managed a household, held space for a child’s hard moment, checked in on a parent, made sure everyone else had what they needed, all this before most people had finished their morning coffee.

Work that didn’t appear on any ledger. Work that, if I’d stopped doing it, would have been noticed only in its absence, in the slow unravelling that would follow. I thought about how many hours of my day are spent doing that work without a title, without a salary, without anyone calling it expertise.

And then I listened to a room debate whether the people stabilizing our city deserve to be paid for it. If it’s a part-time job.

I thought about caregivers. Parents. Homemakers. Church congregations.

About the long lineage of work that keeps systems stable but is dismissed precisely because it prevents crisis instead of producing visible profit. Meals cooked before hunger turns into irritability. Calendars managed before chaos sets in. Conflicts smoothed before they fracture relationships. The labour that makes other people’s productivity possible.

Care work has always been economically inconvenient. It does not scale cleanly. It does not compound like capital. It resists metrics. And because it is relational, because it is preventative, because it is often done quietly, it is chronically undervalued.

Municipal governance is closer to care giving than one might realize upon closer inspection.

Councillors are not CEOs. They are stewards of friction. They absorb complaint. They sit through late-night meetings where the work is less about glory and more about listening, really listening, to residents who are worried about traffic, or taxes, or trains, or the shape of their neighbourhood changing. They read the reports. They return the emails. They seek out experts to fill the gaps. They try to hold competing needs in the same set of hands.

It is slow work. Emotional work. Maintenance work.

And maintenance work has never commanded prestige.

Economically, we reward expansion. We celebrate growth curves and quarterly gains. But the work that keeps the floor from collapsing, the work that stabilizes, is treated as auxiliary. Optional. A calling rather than a profession.

We say public service shouldn’t be about money. We say care giving is its own reward. We say if you really care, you’ll do it regardless of pay.

But here is the economic truth: when we underpay essential work, we narrow who can afford to do it.

A council seat that honestly requires 40–60 hours a week but pays like a part-time job is only accessible to the independently secure, the retired, the partnered with a higher earner, or the financially stretched. A homemaker without income is financially dependent. A caregiver without compensation is vulnerable.

This is not accidental. It is structural.

Societies routinely underpay the very labour that keeps them stable because stability is invisible when it works. We notice collapse. We do not notice prevention.

We do not tally the arguments that didn’t escalate. The infrastructure that didn’t fail. The child who felt secure enough to learn because someone, unnamed and unpaid, made sure she did.

I know what it is to be that someone. To hold a family’s logistics in your head like a second nervous system. To smooth things before they fracture, to notice the need before it becomes a crisis. To do it so consistently that it becomes invisible, not just to others, but even to yourself.

That invisibility is not a personal failure. It is a design feature of how we value certain kinds of work.

When we treat governance and care giving as morally noble but financially secondary, we send a quiet message about what we value: not steadiness, not maintenance, not relational labour, but scale and spectacle.

And then we wonder why systems feel brittle.

If democracy depends on representation, then compensation is not a selfish question. It is a design question. Who can afford to stabilize the system? Who has the margin to care publicly?

Care work is infrastructure. It is the invisible scaffolding that keeps everything upright.

I have been part of that scaffolding. So have most of the people I know, quietly, without compensation, often without recognition. We did it because it needed doing, and because we loved the people who needed it.

But love is not a substitute for structure. And gratitude is not a salary.

If we continue to underpay the people holding it together; in our homes, in our councils, in all the unspectacular rooms where stability is made, we should not be surprised when the structure begins to strain, and quietly crumble.