Abstract
This chapter focuses on the labour of social reproduction. Once carried out mainly as subsistence labour in the household, this has been progressively transformed into other forms of labour as a result of a number of historical trends. These include the development of an internal division of labour within the household involving the paid labour of servants for many household tasks, the external supply of household services in the market, the decommodification of social reproduction through public service work is and the use of new technologies to develop in the market new forms of household services and new forms of commodity production.
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Notes
- 1.
Marx, Karl (1845) ‘Division of Labour and Forms of Property—Tribal, Ancient, Feudal’ in Part 1, A, German Ideology. Accessed on February 1, 2012 from: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm#5a3.
- 2.
Engels, Friedrich (1877) On Marx’s Capital, Moscow: Progress Publishers (English edition, 1956): 89.
- 3.
I have discussed this elsewhere, for example in Huws (2013) ‘The Reproduction of Difference: Gender and the Global Division of Labour’, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 6 (1): 1–10.
- 4.
See Fernand Braudel’s magisterial three-volume Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century (1967–1979) for a rich historical overview of this.
- 5.
See E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963). See also Ellen Meiksins Wood’s (1999) The Origin of Capitalism.
- 6.
I discuss this in greater depth in Ursula Huws (2014) Labor in the Global Digital Economy: The Cybertariat Comes of Age, New York: Monthly Review Press.
- 7.
For evidence on this, see: Hondagneu-Soteko, P. (2001) Doméstica: Immigrant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the Shadows of Affluence, Berkeley: University of California Press; Parreñas, R. S. (2001) Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration and Domestic Work, Stanford: Stanford University Press; Ehrenreich, B. & A. R. Hochschild (2004) Global Woman: Nannies, Maids and Sex Workers in the New Economy, New York: Henry Holt; and Bettio, F., Simonazzi, A., & Villa, P. (2006) ‘Change in Care Regimes and Female Migration: The “Care Drain” in the Mediterranean’, Journal of European Social Policy, 16 (3): 271–285.
- 8.
See ILO (2018) Who Are Domestic Workers?, Geneva: International Labour Organization. Accessed on November 3, 2018 from: https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/domestic-workers/who/lang--en/index.htm; Fudge, J. & Hobden, C. (2018) Conceptualizing the Role of Intermediaries in Formalizing Domestic Work, Conditions of Work and Employment Series No. 95, Geneva: International Labour Organization.
- 9.
Wallop, H. (2011) ‘Million More People Employ a Cleaner Than a Decade Ago’, The Telegraph, July 1. Accessed on April 15, 2018 from: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/8608855/Million-more-people-employ-a-cleaner-than-a-decade-ago.html.
- 10.
Poulter, S. (2016) ‘Return of the Cleaner: One If Three Families Now Pays for Domestic Help’ Daily Mail, March 31. Accessed on April 15, 2018 from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3516617/One-three-families-pay-cleaner-35s-drive-trend-hiring-domestic-help.html.
- 11.
See Huws, U. (2017) ‘Where Did Online Platforms Come from? The Virtualization of Work Organization and the New Policy Challenges It Raises’ in P. Meil & V. Kirov (eds.) The Policy Implications of Virtual Work, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 29–48.
- 12.
See, Huws, U., Spencer, N. H., Syrdal, D. S., & Holts, K. (2017) Work in the European Gig Economy: Research Results from the UK, Sweden, Germany, Austria, The Netherlands, Switzerland and Italy, Brussels: Foundation for European Progressive Studies.
- 13.
The implications of this development for the gender division of labour, both in unpaid and paid work, are complex and require further investigation. In terms of service consumption, it seems likely that it may lead to a continuation of the trend towards greater equality between men and women in the household division of labour. The gender division of labour among paid platform workers, while exhibiting some diversity, appears to follow traditional gendered patterns in several respects, with women, for example, more likely to be care workers and cleaners and men more likely to be taxi drivers, delivery workers or providers of skilled home maintenance services (reference suppressed).
- 14.
For a fuller discussion of these trends see Huws, U. (2016) ‘Logged Labour: A New Paradigm of Work Organisation?’, Work Organisation, Labour and Globalisation, 10 (1): 7–26.
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Huws, U. (2019). Commodification of Housework. In: Labour in Contemporary Capitalism. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52042-5_7
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