Economic and Social Classes in Theorizing Unpaid Household Activities Under Capitalism (original) (raw)
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This essay looks at the problems surrounding the organisation of resistance amongst home-based workers. It investigates a variety of home-based worker movements and activist groups that are developing resistance through multiple different logics. The major problem for organisation currently emanates from the amount of control held over home-based workers by a combination of patriarchal household control and corporate centralisation which contracts and subcontracts out to households, integrating them as flexible production units in wider neo-Fordist forms of production and exchange. From this reality many discursive narratives are produced that legitimate the position of home-based workers in global supply chains. They are seen as micro-entrepreneurs or as a form of Westernised worker, who are in need of legal representation and regulatory apparatuses that provide stability while maintaining degrees of risk and flexibility. This masks the degrees of precariatisation these labour forces face. Thus resistance that overly focuses on the identity of home-based workers as ‘workers’ is problematic as such identities are still integrable to globalised production processes and corporate control. Instead, looking toward new ethical/value systems that develop a wider household political economy, like certain movements are already beginning to do, can develop new infrastructures and means of resistance against these centralised forms of control.
The Dividing Power of the Wage: Housework as Social Subversion
In this article, I revisit the Wages for Housework (WfH) perspective and movement in order to recover Marxist-feminist analyses of social reproduction. Social reproduction remains an important site of contestation, especially as women continue to bear the brunt of an increasingly neo-liberalized economy. WfH's nuanced view of wages and housework, I argue, should be reconsidered as a point of departure in responding to new forms of oppression in a reorganized economy. Résumé: Dans cet article, je revisite la perspective et le mouvement « salaire au travail ménager » afin de retrouver les analyses marxistes féministes de la reproduction sociale. La reproduction sociale demeure un champ important de contestation, d'autant que les femmes continuent à faire les frais d'une économie de plus en plus néo-libérale. La vision nuancée du mouvement « salaire au travail ménager » au sujet des salaires et des tâches ménagères, devrait à mon avis être reconsidérée comme point de départ pour répondre aux nouvelles formes d'oppression dans une économie réorganisée.
Gender, unpaid labour and economics
Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Oeconomica
Unpaid labour, including care labour is mostly performed by women. Economic theories explain differences in allocation of time between women and men in various ways – neoclassical theories point to the rational choice associated with the varying efficiency of women and men both in the labour market and in the household, while heterodox theories point to the influence of norms, social values and traditions, according to which the man is the breadwinner and the woman the caregiver. Unpaid labour is often called home duties or responsibilities, and even though it is very difficult, tiring and demanding, it is not valued and respected. The main objective of this paper is to present the importance of unpaid care work in the economy and propose the reconsideration of economic policies.
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Focusing on market based income sources, standard definitions of economic well-being usually neglect the contribution of non-market domain of economic activities on the total economic welfare. The result is an underestimation of overall economic well-being, but also income based measures put aside the inequalities in distribution of the benefits and burdens of the non-market activities and potential interactions of non-market and market spheres. In fact, the social and economic inclusion/exclusion of individuals, how people participate and share benefits of economic growth are not only influenced by individual endowments valued in the market, but also by peoples’ capabilities as well as commitments to others in the unpaid sphere. Without a thorough analysis of the non-market work activities that complements the market through social reproduction, it would be hard to fully comprehend the inclusiveness of economic growth and development. Wider collection efforts and use of time-use data in analyzing the patterns and potential inequalities in allocation of time across market (paid) and non-market (unpaid) activities is one of the ways in which there is improvement in this regard. In this paper, we try to understand the nature of non-market production and inequalities observed in Turkey, using time use data with a particular focus on gendered patterns of unpaid care work.
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The contentious issue of the division of labour in relation to household chores has been the focal point of a plethora of academic critique by feminist scholars since the onset of second wave feminism in the 1970's. Whilst strong motifs point to inequalities based on biological essentialism, reproduced and reinforced by popular culture and the media, the underlying values integral in perpetuating this phenomenon and their wider implications have at times lacked scrutiny. It will be the purpose of this paper to expand upon the chosen article to critically examine inequalities in paid and unpaid work and the forces, both latent and manifest, that facilitate the power based dichotomy of gendered behaviour as an entrenched status quo.
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 1986
Cross‐class affiliation and unpaid work in and around the home are important in affecting the propensity of an individual to vote Conservative, as are elements of patterns of domestic interaction. Regardless of whether occupational status is a relatively transitory phenomenon in a woman's life it seems to influence her voting behaviour and that of her husband. Political consciousness as evidenced by the propensity to vote Conservative in the 1979 election is explored as to how women's occupational class “makes a difference”. Elements for determining political consciousness include the production relation of both men and women in the household, the relations to the means of consumption of household members and the social interaction of men and women engaged in a variety of other forms of work in and around the house. A very complex set of data is required to study these three spheres. The Sheppey survey explores the relative significance of households' relationships to pr...
"Labor, Lifestyle, and the 'Ladies who Lunch': Work and Worth among Elite Stay-at-Home Mothers"
Professional Work: Knowledge, Power and Social Inequalities Research in the Sociology of Work, 2020
In the 1970s and 1980s, studies of the unpaid household and family labor of upper-class women linked this labor to class reproduction. In recent years, however, the topic of class has dropped out of analyses of unpaid labor, and such labor has been ignored in recent studies of elites. In this chapter, drawing primarily on 18 in-depth interviews with wealthy New York stay-at-home mothers, we look at what elite women's unpaid labor consists of, highlighting previously untheorized consumption and lifestyle work; ask what it reproduces; and analyze how women themselves interpret and represent it. In the current historical moment, elite women face not only the cultural expectation that they will work for pay, but also the prominence of meritocracy as a mechanism of class legitimation in a diversified upper class. In this context, we argue, elite women's unpaid labor serves to reproduce "meritocratic" dispositions of children rather than closed, homogenous elite communities, as identified in previous studies. Our respondents struggle to frame their activities as legitimate and productive work. In doing so, they not only resist longstanding stereotypes of "ladies who lunch" but also seek to justify and normalize their own class privileges, thus reproducing the same hegemonic discourses of work and worth that stigmatize their unpaid work.