Ursula Huws
In the tidy world of the statistics that inform public policy, the topic of work sits neatly within binary variables. Is it involved in the production of goods or services? Does it take place in the formal or the informal economy? Does it involve employment or self-employment? Is it permanent or temporary, full-time or part-time? Viewed through a more theoretical lens, the questions are different, though still binary. For Marxists, for example, is any particular form of labor “productive” (producing surplus value for capitalists) or “unproductive” (producing only use values)? Feminists might ask is it paid or unpaid? Coerced or voluntary? Combining the Marxist and feminist approaches, one is led along a different path, a path which, at an abstract level, crosses the boundary between the sphere of work and the sphere of the home and leads us into a broader sphere–that of social reproduction.
This book looks at work differently. Ignoring the clear demarcations in the formally-mapped landscape it shines a spotlight on where the boundaries are unclear—the messy spaces between the paving where colorful, hard-to-identify weeds flourish and distinctions seem to dissolve—the “gray” areas.
Trying to make the lofty idea of the sphere of social reproduction concrete, to enable research, we find ourselves in a space that is more than usually “gray”: that of the household. But the more forensically we try to anatomize what work is actually going on in households, the more confusing the picture becomes.
The household is a space where people are both producers and consumers, managing their daily lives in complex interactions with a cast of internal and external characters including members of the extended family and community, public institutions and the market. It is the space where bodies are fed, maintained, clothed and kept fit for work, where children are raised and readied for school and employment and where the sick, incapable and elderly are cared for. It also requires its own physical and financial maintenance and is the site where legal residence is rooted. Just about any activity carried out in the home carries multiple resonances.
Take preparing a meal, for example. At one extreme we might find it being carried out almost entirely outside the market—using home-grown ingredients, prepared by a family member. Or it might be cooked by someone who is paid to do so: a domestic servant, for example, or a care worker, or a nanny. In other cases, it might be prepared wholly or partially outside the home—by workers in a factory producing ready meals to supply a supermarket, in a “dark kitchen” to be delivered by an online platform, by a catering company that supplies “meals on wheels” to the social care system or even the staff of a food bank. If it is carried out as unpaid work by a household member, that person might experience this as creative self-expression, a labor of love or an unwelcome chore. Tasks shift unstably between those that are paid and those that are not. For example, children’s school meals may be provided by parents or by public authorities, depending on accidents of geography, political decisions about spending cuts or a child’s dietary requirements.
Similar tales can be told about most other activities that take place in the home, such as cleaning, gardening, social care, sex: sometimes coerced, sometimes voluntarily gifted, sometimes claimed from the state as a right, sometimes purchased in the market. The more closely you examine it, the less gray this zone appears to be. Indeed, it starts to look more like an evanescent rainbow with colors kaleidoscopically swirling between categories. Unproductive labor morphs into productive labor and back again. Goods replace services, which in turn generate a need for new kinds of goods, which then necessitate more unforeseen services. The provision of state facilities advances and retreats, stretching to the limits people’s capacities to substitute for them as they simultaneously face growing pressures to take on paid work. Individuals carries out multiple roles. Paid workers also do unpaid work and may also employ others. Simultaneously, they are consumers, parents, carers and citizens.
New tensions and internalized contradictions may arise as the labor of social reproduction within the home slides unstably between these overlapping categories. Take, for example, the not untypical situation in which a household that relies on work for an online platform for supplementary income also depends on such platforms to provide it with goods and services. As consumers, household members may be forced to seek the lowest possible price, checking out global brands and taking advantages of any “special offers” that are available, even while as workers they may be aware that platforms’ aggressive marketing strategies and offers to lower prices are instrumental in driving down their wages—with paralyzing implications for solidarity.
The arrival of online platforms has given rise to a vicious cycle in which time poverty chases money poverty. As the household needs extra income, its members look for extra work to gain it, either working longer hours in their existing jobs or taking on new kinds of work. This leaves less time for their domestic work. This time squeeze may lead to side effects such as neglect of children, quarrels over money or the division of labor, psychological distress or the risk of relationship breakdown. To address such problems, the household turns to the market. For example, a carer might be hired to look after an elderly relative, a babysitter booked to cover a period when parents are working or a cleaner employed. Such strategies, multiplied across many households, lead to a growth in the online platforms that offer such services. The expansion of platforms in turn leads to the availability of new work opportunities (low-paid and precarious though these might be by comparison with the household members’ previous employment). Familiarity with these platforms, and the ever-growing need to pay for the market services on which the household is becoming increasingly dependent, make platforms a natural source to turn to for further income. So, the wheel comes full circle, ratcheting up both time and money poverty at every turn and, in an economic context of low growth and rising prices and a political context of increasing xenophobia, exacerbating existing social divisions and accelerating at a rate that risks leading to social breakdown. Because platform work is most usually carried out by the financially desperate, those who have the greatest need for these services are also those least able to afford them. The realities of the time crunch came to a head during the 2020–2021 pandemic, when public facilities were closed, leaving many workers obliged to work from home while still having to care for children and other dependents. Since then, it has become increasingly obvious that a full-blown crisis of social reproduction is in progress.
We have arrived at a moment when the relationship between capital and labor is undergoing profound change. A new kind of capitalism is emerging, its birth rendered largely invisible to those whose analytical lenses focus on traditional economic statistics and conceptual approaches. Housework, so long ignored, turns out to sit at the epicenter of this new capitalism, and the household has, unbeknownst to blinkered observers, been the cauldron in which a new kind of capitalist future has been brewing. The sphere of social reproduction turns out to be not just the place where new commodities and new markets are forged, not just the place where surplus value is created, not just the place where workers and their labor power are produced and reproduced, not just the place where the individual encounters the full force of traditional forms of expropriation, but also a site where entirely new kinds of dispossession are occurring, using new forms of rent—forms of dispossession that national states in their present forms have no powers to control.
The political implications of this are profound. To find ways to address them, it is necessary to understand the “gray zone” not as an anomaly in the field of employment but as the central arena of struggle. The worker, the consumer, the parent, the carer may be all the same person and these people’s struggles with employers for decent wages and working conditions and their struggles to pay the ever-rising costs of daily subsistence and keep a roof over their heads are part of the same struggles, with the same capitalists. A recognition of this reality opens up the possibility for making new connections, identifying new solidarities, imagining new alternatives and forging new forms of action from the bottom up that can achieve new solutions, for ourselves and for the planet.
This book gives us important tools to start this process.
2026
