Domestic Services

In recent decades, there has emerged an assumption that in commercial consumer cultures, domestic services have become increasingly commodified. Domestic services refers to household work tasks that allow the social reproduction of members of the household. Routine domestic services range from everyday housework tasks (e.g., housecleaning, laundry, ironing, cooking, and washing up) through household administration and gardening to caring activities (e.g., child care, elder care, and pet care). Nonroutine domestic services, meanwhile, range from house-maintenance tasks (e.g., outdoor painting, plastering, decorating, and mending broken windows and appliances) to home improvement activities (e.g., installing double glazing, insulation, putting in a bathroom suite, building an extension or loft conversion, putting in central heating, and carpentry).

Each and every one of these domestic services can be conducted using various sources of labor. For example, it cannot be asserted that cooking is always conducted as unpaid domestic work, and window [Page 474]cleaning by formal employees. Cooking, for instance, can be conducted as unpaid domestic work (e.g., where one cooks for oneself or one's family), unpaid community work (e.g., where one cooks for neighbors or friends on an unpaid basis), paid informal work (e.g., where one cooks in a restaurant on an off-the-books basis for “informal” payments that are not declared to the government for tax, benefit, or labor-law purposes), or formal employment (e.g., where one is a formally employed chef either registered self-employed or paid on a pay-as-you-earn basis). Different domestic services, therefore, do not belong to different types of work. Instead, all domestic services can be undertaken using each and every form of work.

Four basic types of work, therefore, can be used to provide domestic services. They are

• self-provisioning, which is unpaid work undertaken by household members for themselves and other members of their household;
• unpaid community work, which is work provided on an unpaid basis by and for the extended family, social or neighborhood networks, and more formal voluntary and community groups, and ranges from kinship exchange through friendship/neighborly reciprocal exchanges to one-way volunteering for voluntary organizations;
• paid informal work, where legal goods and services are exchanged for money, but these exchanges are unregistered by, or hidden from, the state for tax, social security, or labor-law purposes; and
• paid formal employment, which is paid work that is declared to the state for tax, social security and labor law purposes.