People have come to expect their clothing fabrics to be sweat-wicking, breathable, high stretch, or even anti-bacterial. Protective against STDs can now be added to that list, too.

The FDA has cleared underwear made by the brand Lorals as protection against sexual diseases during oral sex, the first approval of its kind for underwear.

The single-use stretchy panties are made of latex and provide a physical protective barrier for users. The brand says its wearers enjoy full sensation, making it superior to existing options on the market, like dental dams. One Lorals wearer told The New York Times that the texture did indeed mimic skin and the product’s vanilla-flavoring tasted “like you’re eating a cookie”.

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The American economy isn’t looking great right now. U.S. GDP shrank last quarter, despite a hearty showing from American consumers. Inflation is high; markets are down; both wages and personal-savings rates show some troubling statistical signals. Is the U.S. destined to have a recession in 2022? I don’t know for sure. But here are nine signs that worry me.

1. Everybody’s stock portfolio is disgusting right now. The Nasdaq is down 30 percent. Growth stocks and pandemic darlings such as Peloton and Zoom have crashed more than twice that amount. Hedge funds that backed these growth stocks, including Ark and Tiger Global, have been crushed. If you look at your 401(k), you’ll see that … no, scratch that, you should under no circumstances look at your 401(k).

“The stock market is not the economy” is a thing that some people like to say. But it’s not a very useful mode of analysis. Health care isn’t the economy either, and neither is the gross metropolitan product of Los Angeles. But if either of those things crashed by 30 percent in a quarter, we would all agree that was important. Sharp declines in equity values can trickle down through the economy in all sorts of ways, discouraging investment and spending, or leading to a contagion of layoffs.

2. The crypto bubble has popped. Crypto fans had a fun ride, powered by exuberant risk taking in an era of low interest rates. But now the car is coming down the other side of the roller coaster. As fear and interest rates spike, investors are selling off their positions and billions of dollars of value are being erased from the industry. By one estimate, more than $200 billion of stock-market wealth has been destroyed within crypto alone, in just a matter of days. The bursting of the crypto bubble seems quite reminiscent of the dot-com bubble of 2000, when the Nasdaq crashed and the effects reverberated throughout the economy, wiping out retail investors and pulling down business investment until we ended up in a brief recession. If the crypto bubble popping were the only thing happening right now, I don’t think a recession would be likely. Except it’s not even close to the only (or even the most important) thing happening right now.

3. Inflation is very high and broad-based, and that’s bad. This week’s inflation headlines were a bit confusing. The Wall Street Journal reported that inflation had “eased.” The New York Times reported that prices are “rising rapidly,” at a pace close to a 40-year record. Who’s right? They both are. The rate of price increases is declining, but the level of price increases is still extremely high and frustratingly broad-based. Several months ago, some economists offered succor to worried consumers by pointing out that inflation was overwhelmingly about a handful of weird categories, such as used cars. Well, that’s no longer true. Today used-car prices are actually declining as inflation has moved on to service industries, such as restaurants and tourism. This week, gas prices hit their highest average nominal price ever. Inflation is bad for all sorts of reasons. People really hate it: The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment is near its 60-year low.

4. A lot of people feel poorer than they did one year ago. Unemployment is very low, and the labor market is tight, which means workers can easily quit jobs and take new positions to make more money. (This trend is sometimes confusingly referred to as the “Great Resignation.”) That’s a nice situation. But inflation is rising every month, and raises rarely come more than once a year. That means “real,” or inflation-adjusted, wages are actually declining. Worse, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, wage growth is starting to level off, even as inflation continues to march on. This isn’t a tenable situation.

5. Savings are falling, and debt is rising. From 2020 to 2021, the U.S. government sent most American households several thousand dollars in checks to get them through the pandemic. With much of the economy shut down, many Americans held on to that stimulus cash, and the personal-savings rate soared to a 60-year record. But now Americans have spent just about all that cash, and the personal-savings rate has fallen to below its 2010s average. During an unstable moment for the economy—with markets collapsing, and inflation rising, and the Federal Reserve slamming the brakes on the economy—the typical household doesn’t have much in the way of protection. Instead consumer debt is breaking new record highs.

6. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes are already causing mayhem. One of the Federal Reserve’s mandates is to keep inflation around 2 percent. Well, so much for that one. Inflation has skyrocketed past 8 percent, leading the Fed to announce a spree of rate hikes designed to slow down economic activity. In theory, the plan works like this: The Federal Reserve raises interest rates, which makes it more expensive to borrow money for mortgages, cars, and business investments. As a result, investment in all those categories and more declines, and the economy cools off. But here’s the problem. Modern history has very few examples of unemployment this low and inflation this high where rate increases haven’t caused a recession. On the path to crushing inflation, the Fed may destroy trillions of dollars of wealth and economic activity.

7. China is a mess. The world’s second-largest economy has had a strange 2022. China’s zero-COVID policies have led to shocking lockdowns in major cities such as Shanghai, freezing economic activity. China is also dealing with a real-estate-investment implosion, falling business confidence, and startling declines in economic activity. Why is this troubling for the U.S.? Because China was projected to account for about one-quarter of global economic growth in the next few years. When China sneezes—or, more apt, when Chinese officials forcibly quarantine anybody who sneezes—the world could catch a cold. The U.S. might have been in a strong position to deal with a Chinese slowdown if its other trading partners were all doing well. But they’re not.

8. A recession is coming for Europe. The U.K. economy is shrinking, and the central bank says inflation will exceed 10 percent this year. War in Ukraine has sent energy prices skyrocketing throughout Europe, and most economists believe that the continent’s economy will contract this year. Europe seems very likely headed toward both stagnation and inflation—the dreaded combination that, 50 years ago, gave birth to the awful term stagflation. If Europe shrinks while Chinese growth decelerates, American exporters will have a hard time contributing to growing GDP.

9. Oh yeah, it’s still a pandemic. Restaurant activity and airline travel are nearly back to their pre-pandemic highs as most Americans return to something like “normal.” But we don’t know what else the virus and its variants are going to throw at us. Could the next variant be more transmissible and more deadly, and also get around our immunity? I hope not. But these are the 2020s. Anything is possible.

About a year into the pandemic, at an emotional low, I entered the hours I spent caring for my family and our home into the online Invisible Labor Calculator to see how much my work might be worth. It was created by the journalist Amy Westervelt, who used Bureau of Labor Statistics data to assign an hourly wage to different tasks—cleaning, considering the emotional needs of family members, doing yard work, cooking, etc. I was floored when the calculator told me that my annual wage should be more than $300,000, which would make being a domestic worker the highest-paying job I’ve ever had. By far.  

According to Oxfam, if women around the world made minimum wage for all the unpaid hours of care work they performed in 2019, they would have earned $10.8 trillion. In America alone, they would have earned $1.5 trillion, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

[Read: Becoming a parent during the pandemic was the hardest thing I’ve ever done]

Even care work that is paid is hardly ever paid enough. For many domestic workers, providing quality care means forging intimate, familial relationships and acquiring professional knowledge that is sensual and personal.

This article was adapted from Angela Garbes’s new book Essential Labor

This expertise lives in the bodies of women of color throughout America. Ninety-two percent of domestic workers are women, and 57 percent of them are Black, Hispanic, Asian American, or Pacific Islander. We entrust the safety and cleanliness of our homes to Latin American workers, who make up 62 percent of house cleaners. Whether they maintain our house, care for our elders, or watch our children, there is a wide and long-standing gap between the wages of domestic workers and all other workers in America. Whereas the median wage for workers in this country is nearly $20 an hour, it is barely $12 for domestic workers. The gap is widest for nannies—97 percent of whom are women—who earn a median of just $11.60 an hour. And although the cost of living has steadily risen, domestic workers’ wages have remained mostly stagnant for decades.                                                                   

“White class-privileged women in the United States have historically freed themselves of reproductive labor by purchasing the low-wage services of women of color,” Rhacel Salazar Parreñas writes in her study of Filipina immigration and international reproductive labor.

[Read: How domestic workers enable well-off women to prosper]

How did we get to this place where essential work is so devalued? We are entrusting what we say is most precious—our children, our future—to other people, yet we are not willing to pay them a living wage? This is by design. American capitalism relies on free and cheap domestic labor. Our economic systems cannot be truly equitable and just unless we compensate care work fairly.

Associations of caregiving with women and the domestic sphere and of “real work” with the money and activities outside the home run deep. But they are actually fairly recent concepts, historically speaking. “The division between ‘home’ and ‘workplace’ didn’t exist in feudal Europe [where] women worked as doctors, butchers, teachers, retailers, and smiths,” the labor journalist Sarah Jaffe writes. But the home was excluded from the idea of the “market” under capitalism.

Placing reproductive labor outside of market relations is what upholds the professional world that relies on domestic laborers. If those who do “professional” work had to commensurately pay the care workers who made their jobs possible, less profit would be made. Without care workers, the system falls apart.                

The work of mothering remains out of sight and out of mind to many because it occurs in the home. The scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore call this confinement of women, which began in the 17th century, the “Great Domestication.”

Domestication moved people away from a more communal way of living. Men ventured out and worked for employers, in fields and factories, and earned an individual wage. Women stayed in and oversaw the home, where they kept men fed and comfortable, and gave birth to the next generation of workers. This paved the way for the promotion of the nuclear family as the primary framework for organizing our lives: a single household unit with private property (a wife was property), where the children she raised became the means to protect and pass down wealth. This arrangement cemented the notion that domestic work is women’s work, natural and good, done with no expectation of compensation: a labor of love. That ethos—of each household going it alone—prevails today.

[Read: My husband paid me to do housework]

After the Great Depression, which left so many Americans destitute, the federal government stepped in to help families. The concept of a “family wage,” a guaranteed minimum wage that would be enough to support a working husband, a housewife, and a couple of children, became popular. While New Deal programs came closer to providing a family wage, that grand idea was doomed in predictably American ways: Lawmakers from the South didn’t believe that Black men and women should be entitled to the same wages and opportunities as white people. So the protections excluded two types of laborers: agricultural workers and domestic workers. These jobs were commonly held by Black people.   

Little progress has been made toward fair pay for domestic work. The division between home and work remains paramount. Since the 1960s, women’s participation in the waged workforce has steadily risen. But as Jaffe notes, in the current age, when many women work both outside and inside the home, “we hear a lot about ‘work-life’ balance, but not enough about how, for everyone ‘life’ (code for ‘family’) means ‘unpaid work.’”                                                            

In the 20th century, one of the most notable efforts to improve the lives of care workers and mothers was the welfare-rights movement. Established in 1966, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), led by Black women such as Johnnie Tillmon, organized for expanded access and entitlements for women eligible for welfare, which at the time was called Aid to Families With Dependent Children (AFDC). The NWRO used direct action—holding sit-ins and disrupting welfare offices—as well as marches and rallies to lobby for greater benefits and the elimination of punitive policies. Eventually, the NWRO started a campaign to benefit all people in America, not just AFDC mothers and families.

In a 1972 article for Ms. magazine titled “Welfare Is a Women’s Issue,” Tillmon laid out the organization’s vision for a guaranteed adequate income:

There would be no “categories”—men, women, children, single, married, kids, no kids— just poor people who need aid. You’d get paid according to need and family size only and that would be upped as the cost of living goes up …

In other words, I’d start paying women a living wage for doing the work we are already doing—child-raising and house-keeping. And the welfare crisis would be over, just like that.

The NWRO came very close to winning a guaranteed income. President Richard Nixon put forth a Family Assistance Plan that, as Jaffe writes, “would have given a basic income to more than ten million people.” Ultimately, Nixon’s plan did not pass, and instead America got Ronald Reagan and the racist narrative of the “welfare queen.” But that the NWRO came as close as it did to enacting a guaranteed income for caregivers suggests that this is possible. Though they did not succeed in everything they fought for, the NWRO and its allies did improve conditions for thousands of families, helping them access all the benefits they were legally entitled to. As Tillmon wrote, “Maybe we poor welfare women will really liberate women in this country.”

When most of us imagine economies, domestic or international, we picture workers toiling in factories or offices, money being wire transferred, stocks and bonds traded: all activities that play out in public, highly visible. But the global economy is also driven by domestic labor—happening in laundry rooms and nurseries, performed on hands and knees, sponge or toilet brush in hand.                    

I’m Pinay, my husband is white, and we have relied on my mother’s unpaid labor, as well as the paid labor of immigrants and Latina, Black, and Chinese women, to care for our children. I continue to navigate my place as an American woman of color who is financially privileged. I’ve been mistaken by strangers for my light-skinned daughters’ caretaker, which has angered me and also forced me to question why it makes me angry. This tension has made me bold, willing to speak out in solidarity with caregivers in some instances. At other times, it’s made me quiet and embarrassed. I can claim otherness, I know it intimately, but I have always understood that, if things fell apart, I could ask for help, that I would never be left destitute or totally alone.

Women who can easily work outside the home are still not free or unburdened from other people. We are dependent on our nannies, cleaners, personal Instacart shoppers, DoorDash delivery drivers, parents, co-parents, and in-laws. The domestic load is as heavy as ever, but those who have means often spread it out among multiple people. This is not real progress.

Care is expected to be cheap the world over, in part because the global economy doesn’t have the ability to properly value care work; conventional economic measures—concepts such as supply, demand, and markets—fall woefully short. But the failures of imagination that have led to this moment don’t have to dictate that care work not be assigned monetary value going forward, or that we shouldn’t try.

We have gotten glimpses of what is possible when women insist on being fully visible and valued.  On October 24, 1975, when women in Iceland staged the Women’s Strike. An estimated 90 percent of women did not show up for work that day—in and outside the home—and it brought Iceland’s economy to its knees. Factories, schools, and nurseries were closed, and men either called in to stay home from work or took their children with them. In the decades that have followed, some of the strike’s agenda has taken hold. In 2018, Iceland became the first country in the world to require employers with more than 25 employees to give women and men equal pay for equal work. Part of the strike’s legacy is showing that organizing on a mass scale is possible, and that such a demonstration of solidarity made lasting impressions.

If we reframe domestic work as essential labor and insist upon its centrality in a global labor movement, we create opportunities for solidarity among caregivers, mothers, and all workers. Unity can exist across gender identities, international borders, and disparate industries, rooted in any work that exploits an invisible labor force. Because caregivers are no different from ride-share drivers, sanitation workers, welders, teachers, physicians, and nurses. Those of us who outsource care work are no different from our nannies and child-care workers and the people cleaning our homes. Our issues are the same as those of the women we have paid to take care of our children—for me, that means I stand with Maria, Josephine, Huang Ping, Belen, Ceci, Mari, Marta, Sandra, and Titi.            

We have been trained to view our houses and apartments as private refuges, but they must also be seen for what they are: sites of work and monetary exchange that are part of the global economy. Redefining the workplace, as so many of us have during the COVID-19 pandemic, is a step toward this vision. Work, we now all know, has never been confined to the office or the field or the factory. It was always happening in the kitchen, garage, and backyard.

The pandemic has been an unprecedented opportunity to see the reality of modern American life: We are all workers, and all of our work is valuable. But it’s not enough to see that; the next step is to actually value it, with fair pay.

This article was adapted from Angela Garbes’s new book Essential Labor.