Carol Wolkowitz

Homeworking : myths and realities

Introduction - Approaches to Homeworking - The Incidence and Range of Homeworking - Who Does Homeworking and Why? - Homeworking as a Method of Production - The Mechanisms of Control: The Myth of Autonomy - Organising for Change - Restructuring and the Casualisation of Work - The Way Forward - Appendices - References - Index

The Working Body as Sign: Historical Snapshots

This chapter brings together two case studies in which the representation of labouring bodies in class-, race- and gender-specific terms is particularly pronounced.1 The first case study concerns images of female manual workers which circulated in Victorian Britain and the second examines the photographs of men and women at work produced by the American social reformer Lewis Hine. While I hesitate to generalize from these few examples from still photography — especially since counter-instances come to mind — they do remind us that the construction of masculine and female bodies takes place in relation to work as much as other areas of social life. I want to demonstrate not only that bodies are inscribed by ideas about the work which people do, but also that particular constructions of labouring bodies then come to signify anxieties about the changing nature of work and employment. Images of men’s and women’s bodies have come to play important rhetorical functions in debates about the meaning of work and the adequacy of its rewards at particular historical conjunctures.

Flesh and stone revisited : the body work landscape of South Florida

This article seeks to demonstrate the value of producing still photographs as a way of comprehending the growth of the ‘body work economy’. It documents the body work landscape of contemporary capitalism through exploring the ubiquity, appearance and scale of body work enterprises and employment in two localities of south Florida. It focuses on health, social care and other services for the ageing population of retirees in southeast Florida, as well as on tattooing and other body work services for younger, fashionable residents of and visitors to South Beach, Miami. The article sees the photographs of body work enterprises it deploys as a kind of ethnographic evidence, similar in status to quotations from a fieldwork diary or interviews, and suggests that they may help to pinpoint issues that require further analytical exploration, in this case the role of body work as a component of economic development and patterns of employment. The article goes on to explore the reasons for the growth of the body work economy in south Florida.

Embodying labor, then and now

In her introduction to the new edition of Women on the Line, first published in 1982, Miriam Glucksmann notes that it had been written well before the body and embodiment had become an explicit focus of studies of work and employment. However, rereading Women on the Line reminds us that ethnographers have long paid attention to the embodied aspects of work, although few of them have written about them as eloquently as Glucksmann. In the original volume she was able to articulate how it felt to experience herself in relation to her environment, a phenomenological perspective made possible by her adoption of an autoethnographic writing style (a strategy linked to her rejection both of a narrowly academic approach and, in consequence, of the disembodied authorial voice that tended to go with it). Perhaps another reason why Glucksmann was able to write about her working on the line with such sensitivity to the embodiment of the experience is that she was new to assembly line work, so the embodied routines of factory life had not yet been submerged below the level of conscious articulation. It is useful therefore to summarize what she had to say and to think about how we can build on it.

Organising for change

The 1970s saw a mounting campaign to recognise the existence of homeworking and to press for reforms for what was seen as a vulnerable and exploited work force. Many arguments were put forward to support legal changes which would enable homeworkers to enjoy the same rights and benefits as employees in factories or offices. In the 1980s the existence of homeworking was not only acknowledged more widely, but its growth predicted.

Who does homeworking and why

Images of homeworkers and homeworking are constantly shifting. No sooner is evidence produced to discredit one stereotype than it is succeeded by another, often a revised version of those popular at an earlier date. The creation of apparently contradictory images of homeworkers is one way in which the issues raised by homeworking are evaded. Because so many accounts of homeworking portray homeworkers as having characteristics unusual or atypical of those considered to be real workers, it is presented as a minor problem, confined to the periphery of labour force activity — whereas, in fact, it involves major questions about the sexual division of labour.

Book review symposium: Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby, Clinical Labor: Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy

I have almost entirely good things to say about this thought-provoking book. I already use the published articles on which some of the chapters are based for teaching on gender, work and employment, but the book presents a fuller, more integrated argument for seeing participation as the subjects of clinical activities as labour. Biolabour puts life itself to work, and Clinical Labor provides a remarkable account of the historical and contemporary conditions that make this possible: on the one hand, the marketization of biological vitality, and, on the other, the construction of a labour force which, lacking alternative employment, is willing to ‘provide the in vivo platforms for clinical experimentation and tissue provision’ (p. xii). The current expansion of biomedicine depends not only on scientific developments, but also on the externalization of clinical labour, thereby requiring neither employees nor the members or inmates of institutions (army, prison, household, hospital) on whom reproductive labour and clinical trials previously relied. Biomedicine has also developed new legal arrangements and business models that remove obligations to recompense research subjects when things go wrong. The book succeeds in showing that concepts for understanding labour and comparing types of production have become relevant to the profitability of biomedicine, including the centrality of transnational sexual and racial divisions of labour among subjects, while the analyses of the organization of production and markets in the bioeconomy suggest ways these concepts can be extended. The book’s relevance therefore goes far beyond biomedicine. It is also extraordinarily well written, with quotable passages on nearly every page. Cooper and Waldby’s analysis of the organization of reproductive, regenerative and experimental labour identifies parallels with women’s unpaid reproductive labour of the past. But whereas reproductive labour was previously located in the household, outside the boundaries of the male, mass manufacturing characteristic of Fordist industrial capitalism, clinical labour, the authors argue, is now paradigmatic of the post-Fordist integration of formerly separate spheres: production and reproduction, the working day and the rest of life, the workplace and the social body. So the book should be of value not only to those interested in the particular forms of visceral labour it analyses – assisted reproduction, stem cell tissue ‘donation’ and participation in clinical trials – but also to those looking for ways to conceptualize other kinds of ‘selved labour’ that blur the distinction 656127WES0010.1177/0950017016656127Work, employment and societyBook reviews research-article2016

The mechanisms of control: the myth of autonomy

One of the attractions of homeworking is thought to be the autonomy the homeworker has in deciding when and for how long she will work and at what pace. The time and effort control exercised over the assembly line worker and all those who clock in and out of work is contrasted with a person working in her own home, with no supervisor or timekeeper. In the abstract such a contrast appears to give the homeworker a freedom and flexibility denied the factory or office worker. It is a critical component of positive evaluations of remunerated work at home, and a major reason why homeworking is assumed to be a boon for women who need to adjust their paid work around family responsibilities. But this picture is quite misleading.

Restructuring and the casualisation of work

In much of this book we have concentrated on analysing the experience of homeworking and on exploring the reasons why firms in a variety of circumstances adopt homeworking for all or part of their production. In this chapter we want to consider similarities between homeworking and certain other forms of employment, so far as conditions of work are concerned. We argue that the restructuring of the British economy is leading to the casualisation of employment for many people, whose terms and conditions of employment are beginning to resemble homeworkers in important ways. Hence it is necessary to broaden the discussion to incorporate a fuller exploration of some of the features of the process of restructuring in Britain and of the rationales which are used to support it.

The incidence and range of homeworking

How many people do homework, what kind of work they do and whether it is increasing are the first questions people ask about homeworking in Britain. They also want to know who supplies homework, and how many suppliers there are. None of these questions have a simple answer, for each gives rise to yet another: how would we know? Comparatively little is known about these aspects of homeworking in quantitative terms, and this makes it all the more necessary to examine how existing estimates of the extent of homeworking have been calculated. Otherwise there is, in our experience, a marked tendency to assume certain kinds of answers to these questions, and to rely on them in making arguments about the scale and nature of homeworking in Britain.